narrative designer, scriptwriter and story counsellor
The constraint of this exercise was for each episode to be only 6 pages long. Below is the first episode of Shadowplay, our online comic.
After having validated a summary of the story for this episode with the creative team, I wrote the description and dialogue of each panel before sending it to the artist who would add his input (in red in brackets below) on how to depict them. We would iterate and agree on this document with our art director before starting the storyboard phase.
After I worked on the comic book and user research for this project, I took on more writing and narrative design tasks including character bios and an update of the main story arc. Later on, I developed missions and lore to fit the new art direction taken by the project.
Julia
“What in Suvarovs underpants is that? Is that..? It is! It’s a Mark II Arkwright Battlecruiser! I’ve only heard about them – rumored to have impenetrable IDF shields. Coincidentally – much like Suvarovs underpants I suspect.”
Motivations
Julia McIntyre is the player’s friend from the prologue. She’s a free-thinker, cheeky soldier who joined the Mandate corps because erm… free travel? She didn’t care for the cause, but her lust for adventure couldn’t be quelled, and this seemed like an exciting enough opportunity. She doesn’t particularly trust the Mandate or the Empress nor does she care for the chaos of the rebels or the greed of the pirates. The only one she is fiercely loyal to, is the player.
Words that describe Julia
Background
Julia has always had a problem with authority.
When she was young, she lived on Victoria, in one of the many cities that cover the planet. Her mother was always a bit of a wild one, and she ran off when Julia was five to join up with a band of space pirates, leaving Julia to be raised by her father, a quiet man who didn’t know what to do with his high-spirited daughter.
She joined a street gang, mostly out of boredom. Their leader grew nervous of her recklessness, saying she was going to get them all arrested. This came to a head when she arranged to steal the Blackstar Diamond during a speech given by the Europan delegation on how to minimise the environmental damage done to the planet. The Europan’s brought the diamond as a symbolic gift, meant to symbolise a clean start, a fresh approach to environmental affairs. Julia stole it. And dumped it in toxic waste as a message to what she saw as “empty promises and hot air aimed at distracting everyone from the terrible conditions under which we all live.”
The leader of the street gang wasn’t happy with any of this, but Julia challenged him and took over the gang, turning it into an infamous criminal enterprise.
Soon she realised she had done everything she could on this planet. She took after her mother, and her gaze was drawn to the stars. She wanted to see the galaxy. To explore. To meet new people and bask in the sunsets of a thousand different worlds.
Unfortunately for her, being the leader of a gang would never buy her a ticket out of Victoria. However, the Mandate corps would and that’s how she joined. “Free travel, eh!”
What Julia saw as her sense of adventure and lust for life soon earned her a reputation as a brave (or foolish, depending on whom you asked), risk-taker (or a danger to those around her, again, depending on whom you asked.) She worked her way up to a Captaincy and was put in charge of a fully-staffed ship.
During her first month as captain, she was involved in a battle with the rebels. Her ship had been hit by a focused EMP burst and it lost all power. Her crew was dying slowly as the oxygen pumps stopped working when the Player led a team into her crippled vessel and saved her crew, getting them to safety first (at her insistence).
Sadly, the rebels had boarded the ship by then. Julia told the player to leave her behind, but he refused. He went back on his own, and he and Julia fought their way through the ship, killing rebels as they went.
Since that time, she and the Player have been very good friends, (of the bickering/bantering kind) but don’t let that fool you. They would die for each other.
More on this character:
Julia was my very first character design before I started getting mentoring and taking writing crash courses. She is a character written with intuition and based on the needs of the team. What did we need to know when we started working with her? We needed her role and we needed to know how she would sound, what was her tone and personality like. We wanted a badass, unafraid rebel to incite our player into action and that’s exactly what Julia does. If you compare it to the later characters that I wrote you will see that she does not have the 2 parts bio, she does not have the archetype explicitly yet, although she is very clearly the outlaw. You find both her strengths and weaknesses in the descriptors.
So why changing the format of the character design over time and why putting inconsistent formats in the portfolio you ask? Ha-ah! Because, it’s good to be a writer and to think about consistency yes I promise I do that too, but when you’re a game writer your main goal is to be part of the team, especially if you work for indie companies, you need to adjust to what they need. You don’t need to compromise the quality of what you deliver, but if your document is so long that no one else in the team will read it, what are you compromising there when you do that.
Writers must show flexibility! We’re often seen as the romantic, imaginative loners of the team, we’re often introverts, we like to communicate with documents more than in big meetings and when we’re asked when it will be ready it seems to us like a crazy question but we’ll give them something. All this may very well be a stereotypes but even if you’re an extrovert, adapting so that your communication is spot on is key in game writing, so don’t stick to one character design format, work with what works for your team and create a collaborative document. It is the form, what matters is that you convey the content!
I defined with the creative team the themes and the controlling idea we wanted to develop in 50 AU, a space opera RPG. The goal was to identify a theme that would fit a gameplay focused on large space battles and an art style that mixed high-tech gear with the future of piracy.
The themes that emerged were around geopolitical conflict and the search of a new habitable planet. This goal was set by politicians years and years ago, before humanity developed its new space identity, and it was never updated. In the current day of our player, a single planet could never sustain the whole of humanity as it grew after generations of space exploration.
This provided us the setting for leading our players into massive space encounters and skirmishes alike.
2 quotes helped us build the themes for the game:
“Every organization rests upon a mountain of secrets” – Julian Assange
“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.” – F. Nietzsche
The controlling idea for our story was people federate in larger and larger group, power dynamics emerge and corrupts those systems, derailing them from their initial good intentions.
I used values from the table below to ensure consistency in our story.
| People can be trusted | Middle size organisations can sometimes be trusted but you’ll find out they had a personal interest in it that resembles one of the governments |
| Individuals who look like people but are part of governments look like they can be trusted but they cannot | Governments cannot be trusted |
The goal of this table was to help us ensure that no mission would contradict the controlling idea, while giving us a framework to develop a variety of characters and missions that would illustrate the concept in each cell.
Once this step was done, I went on to write the story arc with the main plot points, then I detailed each mission around its role in the main story arc.
Below is an example:
| Plot point | Location | Type | Mission steps | Key sentences |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Starting point | Deimos and the belt | Cinematic | PP1- Player works for Earth government. PP2- sent to a conflict PP3 – realizes his crew has been sacrificed and him betrayed PP4 – escapes with his crew to the belt PP5 – branded a traitor becomes a smuggler | Those ships… no those ships aren’t Martian… |
| Mission 1 | Belt | Exterminate | Because of resources issues some inner ships are mining the belt, The belt is a neutral area, nobody is supposed to exploit it. You are asked to find who is doing it Your main character recognizes inner markings and inner ships in an outer belt area. No pity, you have to burn them down, they just shouldn’t have come | Fucking inners! Like they haven’t screwed us enough, they think they can come and mine here, and nobody will fight them off. I say we teach them a lesson! |
| Mission 2 | Saturn | Delivery | A rumor from years ago says the rebellion on Deimos was staged, by a corp wanting to break free from the inner government. Player takes a contract for the corp after saving one of the scientists in the team. The ex-Martian corp is paying you to retrieve a package from the outer and deliver it to one of their new station in the belt. Player learn about Martian mentality Fight pirates to deliver package and head off to Saturn. | Martians! Land of queen bees, we could give them the best of the moons and it still wouldn’t be enough! |
| Mission 3 Inciting incident | Jupiter trojan | Boss | Delivery mission for Ceres. Taxi the scientist from one asteroid in the trojan back to Ceres. Meet Dust and learn about the fifth planet destruction and that Kuiper’s confederation tried to kill her. Pick her up, fight off Outer ships, intel about the Ancient civilization and the technology that destroyed the 5th planet. Kill the boss and go home. The boss here is a Kuiper sergeant that has managed to track her in the trojan which is Kuiper territory, he’s calling her a traitor and asking our player to deliver her to him. Because of your own history with the inner government you know what they mean by traitor, they threaten to attack your ship and won’t back down so you destroy them. | Long before us there was a fifth planet, a peaceful civilization, an ideal world, and someone came to blast it away leaving chaos behind them.I will find out why! |
Below is a sketch that summarizes the balance between missions where the player feels trusts or distrusts as this is the main sentiment we want to manipulate to build tension and emotion in the story.
This is one of the 3 propositions that I wrote for Metricminds after they explained what they wanted to do and it is the one they chose. After this initial draft we developed the main characters in the series, we drafted a very high level arc for the first season and wrote the full script for the first episode.
John lives in Amsterdam. He arrived here after spending an hour staring at the departure board at Chicago O’Hare airport where he let the airline schedule dictate his destination. Amsterdam was the first direct flight he could hop on, along with the 2 luggage he hastily put together as his wife’s lover and best friend attempted to burp an explanation. Well they were in love and they meant to tell him, but they failed, they were afraid he would take it the wrong way. The wrong way? That he sure did. They wanted to talk and he decided to leave.
John left the house with his spinner luggage, he took both swimming suits and jumpers. Now he was ready for anything! He hopped in a taxi, phoned his company HR to inform them that Ed Mitchell was fired, effective immediately and asked the driver to take him to the airport. There he phoned his accountant, sold part of his company shares and pocketed enough money to take a year sabbatical.
John hadn’t needed to sold shares to be rich enough he’d never have to really work, but it was the gesture. He never had to cook, or clean or wonder what would happen if… because he inherited a family fortune and a business. In Amsterdam he could date anyone he wanted because he was the rich american yet he could love no one because he knew the champagne was all they were interested in. As the weeks went by, he realized he had no idea what he wanted to do or who he wanted to do it with. His whole life had been decided for him by his parents, now dead, and his wife who had lived a double if not triple life for years and was just pumping him for money. He had never made a single decision for himself, even deciding where to live had been delegated to the flights schedule. John was a 35 years old lost boy with no idea where to start.
We see him tell that story to Adam, a young barista who -viewers and clients can tell- has heard it many times again as he serves John his decaf double macchiato, oat milk with extra foam – please.
So it is sitting here, at his usual corner café that John has an epiphany when someone on the other side of the window gets robbed. For no apparent reason, he suddenly feels like he could be a hero and he starts running after the vandal. They run through the city and at one turn he thinks he loses the guy but sees him again, same jacket, same size, same pair of jeans, it’s him with a black cap and a chilled gait to disguise himself. Haha! This will not fool our John!
He runs faster (and totally out of breath) towards the guy who is about to enter a black van in front of a bank, John tackles the thief and we hear sirens blaring. The man on the ground turns and John realizes it’s not at all the right person, he starts to apologize profusely but the man on the ground injects him with a serum, throws the needle into a manhole and tells him “Don’t trust anyone”.
The black van leaves and escapes the policemen. John is still laying flat on the poor guy with the black cap when policemen from all sides run towards them to cuff the guy.
A beautiful blond woman comes to John and helps him up, she asks his name. John Parker he answers haggard, looking around at all the activity. She’s a journalist and she will change his life.
At the café Adam watches a news flash: “Detective John Parker has just apprehended one of the most wanted hacker in Europe.” Interpol has been after him for months and he was about to escape again if John hadn’t caught him.
It is definitely not the thief who attacked the old lady, although he does wear the same jacket.
John is declared on national television as the American private detective who solved the case. Policemen come and shake his hand and thank him while they put the hacker in their car.
John is back at the café and everybody applauds including Adam who is the only one who knows what happened was a big clumsy mistake.
John gets drunk and sick and Adam who is a criminology student who works out a lot (and does all sorts of martial arts) takes care of him and walks the poor John back home. John has hallucinations of cases he read in the newspaper and knows instantly how they could be solved, as well as famous cases of history. He blabbers this to Adam who is first fascinated and then worried as he sees his friend literally overheat and shut down. He decides to watch over him for the night.
John’s phone rings, it goes to the answering machine and someone records their first case request.
In the next episodes, Adam whom we will get to know along with Amsterdam trans community, will develop as the muscle support to the naive yet extraordinary brain that John will be. He is still the same guy as he was when he arrived but he’s developing fascinating cognitive abilities, due to the serum he was injected with. This new power however has a funny underside, John can’t take too much stress or excitement or else he falls asleep instantly and that’s when Adam has to save him from impossible situations. Together they will solve cases as well as face a bigger enemy, the owners of the serum that was injected to John and that the hacker hid there. Both will come back as the overarching threat.
The game is a cyberpunk RTS where cinematics are key to delivering the story of the game along with lore pieces: short stories that the player can read in between his games. The intro cinematic given as an example below intends to help viewers grasp at the role and the huge reach that a single mega corp has in our world, and it sets a strong cyberpunk tone.
This is a promotional video of the game:
This is the brief for the game intro cinematic I wrote:
INTRO SCENE
EXT. METROPOLIS, SECTOR Z – DAY
Over a black screen.
Narrator
“On February 14th 2250, the NeuroNet launches. The Keeper AI guides hundreds of thousands of users through the largest knowledge library ever created.”
“Over 18 hours, the NeuroNet achieves its one millionth registered user. Over a week, Project NeuroNet has become humanity’s largest success in history.”
Bird’s eye view of a city filled with shiny skyscrapers, we go down to see the rooftop terraces and people in bright coloured bikinis relaxing on futuristic loungers. The camera turns to show the neck of a pink haired gorgeous woman and we recognize a Tesseract plug, zoom in as if we were going down the golden circuit.
EXT. TESSERACT DISTRICT – DAY
Narrator
“The power of its mother corporation, Tesseract, now extends far beyond biochemical engineering as it becomes a state corporation.”
Image of the Tesseract building with an immense screen changing from one logo to another, illustrating its status upgrade.
EXT. SECTOR X – DAY
Black screen. The music changes to something darker, ominous and accompanies the transition to a more limited colour palette of faded pink and purple.
Image of the devastated city with buildings crumbling and sirens blaring. It’s raining a polluted rain.
Narrator
“6 years later, an unknown entity leaks protected information, proving the security of the network had been compromised.”
View of Tesseract police cars racing through the dark alleys and bystanders continuing to walk, their hood drawn, looking at the cars only sideways.
EXT. THE CLOUD DISTRICT – DAY
Narrator
“The Keeper AI is now running autonomously and opens information contained in the private sectors to all.”
Image of people lounging in basement cheap chairs, smiling sick smiles. They look as if they were on acids, getting their brain fried over information that pours through their plug from the previously locked sectors.
EXT. THE UNDERGROUND SECTOR Z – DAY
Narrator
“No one is guiding you through the maze anymore. No one is regulating your access anymore. Everyone’s life, secret and memory is exposed; if you can find it.”
Big transition (strong music beat with a change in the lighting. We travel through the alleys at top speed and stop behind a hooded figure standing on top of the stairs in the pouring rain with a pink neon sign blinking behind them. They pull a small plug out of their sleeve and bring it to their head and before it plugs in, we end the video.
Amélie Beaudroit 