Elora VanderWal - Narrative - Jan25

As the team’s narrative designer, I have been working on creating characters and story beats for our game, as well as fleshing out the player’s role in the game world. I have created 6 characters that will reoccur throughout the game and begun writing scripted events. 

In our game, you play as a content creator in space who has recently been signed onto a content house – or rather, a content fleet – of other space influencers called the Star Fleet. You must keep up your engagement and continue to make profits for your agency. The other characters in this game are your talent manager and five other content creators who are a part of your content fleet. They haven’t been given names yet, so they have placeholder names that mostly refer to their general personality. Currently, the characters are: 

• Your Manager 

• Nice CoStar 

• Aloof CoStar 

• Outgoing CoStar 

• Prankster CoStar 

• Bro CoStar 

I have written an opening scene that gives the player some context for the game and the first scripted event. I have also begun making reference boards for the characters so our artist can begin creating art for them. 

On my reference boards, I include photos containing elements I want to be replicated in the character. I also make sure to highlight the key takeaways of the reference photos so the artist understands what I'm looking for in each image. The bolded point indicates that this is one of the key aspects of the character. The other points are things that I think add to the character but can be added or removed as the artist sees fit.

Our artist has worked off this and created some incredible concept art for this character. 

As you can see in this concept art, our artist did a brilliant job of giving him an air of confidence and bravado. The deep necklines of the shirts, flashy suit jackets, and tacky chains add to the scummy appearance.

The following image shows the script I wrote for the opening scene. (Note: I have bolded things to indicate that they need to be changed later when more character development and balancing has occurred. This is so I don't accidentally implement an outdated script and confuse the player). I made sure to note which character is speaking and when this scene takes place so it doesn't get confused down the line when we have more scenes. I also number the files along with the scene titles so my teammates know at a glance what the intended order is. For example, this file is titled "Welcome Aboard - Event 0".

My next steps are developing the characters, writing more scripted events, and putting together more reference boards for our artist.