Narrative Design & Game Writing

You’re a new ensign serving aboard the U.S.S. Enterprise, which has been tasked with beginning trade relations with a reptilian species known as the Lacerteans.* As you fix the ship, conduct experiments, and explore the planet, you discover all the ways a light-producing resource called luebels can benefit the Federation. But you also discover that these trade negotiations might not be as beneficial to the average Lacertean as their government would have you believe.

WIP narrative design created for my final thesis at SCAD. This projects seeks to explore how designers can apply video games’ interactive, cinematic storytelling techniques to location-based experiences.

*Please note that, as a student, I am allowed to use IP for educational purposes. I do not claim to own the rights to Star Trek.

In this text-based, choose-your-own-adventure game, players attend a ball as Mrs. Emmeline Lovett, a busybody who is desperate to ensure her two daughters marry, lest the family become destitute.

Created in Twine and for DWRI 720: Writing for Immersive Experiences, this game utilizes a branching-and-bottleneck narrative structure and variable-point system, resulting in 13 different endings.

Players embody a 1907 Chicago detective who is investigating an absurd, locked-room crime in this VR script, written using the Evette Vargas system for DWRI 720: Writing for Immersive Experiences.

The Most
Cherished Treasure of Dolgrin Tinkermeier

In this home-brewed Dungeons & Dragons’ campaign, Dolgrin Tinkermeier—a famous yet elusive toymaker—invited the players to his countryside mansion. Though the night began with dancing and drinking, it soon devolved into a series of traps and puzzles.

Unbeknownst to the players, Dolgrin had made a deal with a devil to save his chronically ill daughter from death, but that deal left them both stuck in a time loop. Dolgrin hoped this party would help him filter out Copperforge’s most clever citizens; once the players proved their cunning by solving his riddles, he begged them to help him and his daughter outsmart the devil.

In addition to designing the puzzles and encounters for this campaign, I created an initial invitation for the players, wrote the backstories for three antagonistic NPCs, and scripted and storyboarded the climatic puzzle.