Games

I have always loved games of all sorts. This portfolio section gathers together some of my work on and about video and tabletop games, from sample flavour text and lore entries to script samples and interactive fiction.

Untitled Tactical Shooter - Scene Script

In 2014, I worked on narrative design for a tactical shooter in the early stages of development. Specifically, I was put to work on a dream sequence set about midway through the game that would have elaborated on character backstory and motivation through the lens of the player having to fight their way through a PTSD-induced nightmare. Unfortunately, the game was cancelled early in the design process and the studio - a small indie affair consisting of industry rookies - folded, leaving me with nothing but a section of a script and a desire to find a way back into the industry after experiencing my first taste of collaborative narrative design. I attach the script section here to showcase my first attempt at contributing to a game narrative.

Fond Farewells

In 2021, I sat down to learn how to use Twine. The end result was Fond Farewells, a brief, interactive, choice-based narrative experience based on an unpublished poem of mine called Sunset Comedown. A branching narrative based on the player’s choices within a single conversation, starting from the same point each playthrough and blossoming out into a range of conversational paths before coming back together into a handful of endings, it was intended to showcase my skills in conveying an atmosphere through brief narrative text and writing branching dialogue paths that make the player consider - and feel - the consequences of their choices while still retaining a simple, limited set of outcomes at the end of the conversation.

Tabletop Assets

Since early 2020, I have been DMing a D&D 5e campaign with a homebrewed story and setting and many homebrewed items, locations and pieces of lore, a campaign which I have managed throughout the pandemic using Adventurer’s Codex, Roll20 and D&D Beyond to organise and share the assets I have created with the party. I have decided to showcase a very small amount of my work here in order to demonstrate some of my skills in writing flavour text and in designing small unique level-style areas such as a trap and a puzzle.

Tomb Raider (2013) - A Personal Review

Upon finally sitting down to play the 2013 Tomb Raider reboot for the first time, I was so taken with its ability to grip me and make me care about its stakes that I wrote a personal review - in which I even compared it positively to my favourite game franchise, FromSoftware’s ‘Soulsborne’ games. I am including the review in this section as I believe it offers some insight into what drives me to care about narrative in video games.