Game Writer & Narrative Designer
Subservience
Roles
Designer (Mechanics and Narrative),
Writer, Project Manager
Team
6 People
Time
6 months
Tools Used
Unity, Twine,
Spreadsheets, Google Docs, Jira
Genre:
3D Environmental Puzzle-Adventure
Subservience was a university project with a team of 6 people. It is a story-driven first-person environmental puzzle game revolving around the themes of toxic attachment, obsession, and ultimately, the art of letting go. The story is conveyed through symbolism and the use of mythical deities of various beliefs around the globe.
The player finds themselves in a mysterious dark forest, always carrying a candle they endlessly cling to. As they explore, they encounter different gods whom they help by solving specific puzzles and uncovering their stories. The more the player progresses, the more they look inwards and learn something important from all the beings they've met.
My Contributions
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Wrote all the voice lines
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Contributed to the design of mechanics
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Worked on organically weaving together the narrative, themes, and mythological backgrounds with puzzle designs and gameplay mechanics
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Wrote all of the game design documents, pitch presentations, concepting and character sheet documents
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Character personality and backstory design
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Research into traditions and mythologies of different cultures worldwide, as well as psychological phenomena (e.g., addiction, PTSD)
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Project organization and management using Scrum/Agile
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Voice actor directing
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Voice acting
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Collaborated closely with both programmers and artists to make the gameworld and characters coherent
Process
One of the biggest learning experiences of this project was closely collaborating with one of our programmers on developing an adaptive character monologue system for our game. Essentially, I would write passages in Twine, connect them sequentially, and name them by using specific codes indicating which character would be speaking/thinking and when. My writing served as the script for the voice actors and in-game subtitles simultaneously. After sending the file to the programmer, he would implement what events would trigger the voice lines and subtitles to be played, as well as what the time intervals between each would be.
For organization and voice acting notes, we used a color-coded excel sheet that contained the lines with VA notes and respective codes.
Since the game was primarily narrative-driven, there was a large emphasis on using puzzles and character narration as tools to interactively convey the story. All the puzzles were based on a mix of each deity's mythological and cultural backgrounds with the narrative we wanted to tell in our game specifically.
Here is a sample of how I wrote puzzle beats and summaries of character story progression.
Another brand-new experience was voice directing and acting. As I was the writer and knew the characters best, I was closely involved in this process.
Though these did not end up being included in the final version of our game due to time constraints, I'd written some barks for each character. These would've accompanied the player and guided them as they progressed through puzzles.
Here you can see a sample of barks by Anansi, the Ashanti trickster god of wisdom.
In order to understand my characters better and be able to write from their perspective, I took a personality test for each of them and broke down each character's unique identity (both their real-world origins and portrayal in Subservience) in this character profile document.
Early concept art is also included.
In Subservience, the player is often followed by creeping shadow people with whispy voices. Though not obvious at first glance, they try to give the player warnings and guide them toward the right path.
These are some of the lines that they obsessively repeat with various deliveries.
