Game Writer & Narrative Designer
Lex Fézler
Narrative Designer/Project Manager
TEEKO
Role
Narrative Designer
Team
9 People
Time
In Development
Tools Used
Unity, Google Docs, Miro
Genre
Mobile 2D Platformer/Tower Defense Hybrid
Teeko is a part-time project with a team of 9 people that is currently in development. It is a story-rich 2D platformer/tower defense game for mobile.
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The game is set in Costa Rica and centers around a family living in La Fortuna. One day, during the annual Día de Las Mascaradas festival, the spirits of masks made for the event possess 7 siblings. It is up to their grandmother Tita and her pet sloth Teeko to save them from themselves and protect the towns in which they're wreaking havoc.
My Contributions
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Working closely with Project Lead to craft the world, story, and characters​
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Working closely with the Level Designer to create levels cohesive with the narrative
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Integrating dialogue into Unity using a dialogue node tool created by the programmer ​
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Animated text using the Text Animator for Unity plugin to add dramatic accents to dialogues in a uniquely creative way
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Implementing characters and story events in-engine
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Researching Costa Rican culture and folklore​
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Writing the personalities, backstory, function, and barks of in-game characters
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Writing and updating Narrative Design documentation
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Creating narrative-related game mechanics
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Collaborating with a second Narrative Designer
Process
Each boss in the game is a Mask character. For each of these, documents were created detailing the backstory, context, themes, goals, story arc, and narrative devices that will be used in-game to convey said character's story.
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Here is a sample story arc document of one of the characters I'd written - La Llorona.
Each Mask character has a World Dialogue document that is sectioned based on levels in that particular boss's world. This document contains tables with character and interactable object descriptions, trigger events, as well as the barks played whenever the player interacts with NPCs, objects, or the boss Mask.
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Here is a sample of the dialogue document for the Devil.
The NPC residents of the town acting as the game's hub-world. The table includes general descriptions and relationships to each other as well as the Masks.
The NPCs are distributed between the different Masks' levels based on their relation to the mask wearers, as their purpose is to give context to each Mask character and their level's story.
Task Description for writing NPCs and populating the hub-world town with buildings relevant to the in-game characters.
The NPC residents of the town acting as the game's hub-world. The table includes general descriptions and relationships to each other as well as the Masks.