NOT QUITE IMMORTAL
Team:
Cole Gagnon - Lead Designer/Level Designer
Andrew Kerwood - Narrative Designer
Evan Thaxter - Systems Designer
Roland Richardson - Artist/Animator
Ben Davies - Environment Artist
Adel Talhouk - AI Programmer
Jonathan DeLeon - Systems Programmer
Rory Beebout - VFX Programmer
Bradley Chamberlain - Programmer
Howard de Paiva - Producer
Paul Criscione - Producer/QA lead
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Made in Unity
This was our team's senior capstone project which I am the narrative designer on.
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The game is a narrative-heavy puzzle platformer set on the island of Creepy Hollow, a supernatural place where the spirits of the dead don't pass on and instead linger in Thandoshe, a town of ghosts. You play as Mortia, a shy ghost looking for Tharel, her lost necromancy mentor whose spirit went missing after her death.
As narrative designer, I wrote the dialogue and did some of the planning for the plot and characters. A challenge that I had to overcome early on was writing for a world and characters our lead had envisioned for years, and making sure to keep everything in line with his vision, but by the end of the first semester I became a lot more comfortable in this role. The lead and team are also very open to allowing me to add my own personal touches and changes, such as altering some parts of the main villain's personality and motivations to fall more in line with how I like to write villains as perfect foils to the protagonist.
Download the game here!
After our project was greenlit to continue to the 2nd semester of the year, we decided to make two major changes in regards to the narrative. First, we wanted to increase the focus on the narrative and make it the primary motivator for the player. Second, in order to deliver the full game in the time frame we had, we significantly shortened the original planned story down to just the most important plot beats. This worked out well since we ended up with the perfect amount of levels and content for the resources we had, but a lot of work was put on me as the writer to plan out the altered narrative and get everything in.
Overall I think I did a very good job, not just with the plot, but with making the dialogue engaging and giving each character a simple but serviceable arc that plays out through your interactions with them. In order to make sure everything was in line, I often ran ideas through our lead designer and other team members to make sure that certain scenes were feasible, and made quick changes if they weren't.
Our team was commended by players for our narrative and I was given the opportunity to speak about it during our senior show presentation in front of hundreds of guests and industry recruiters. I'm very proud of my work on this project and I can't wait for when it releases on Steam and more people are able to experience it.
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