Greenlight has come and gone. I’m definitely a little upset that we weren’t chosen to go forward, but such is life. No use in crying over spilled milk, as it were.
Now, I’m on Discarnate with Rats with Hats. I knew a good chunk of the team beforehand from previous projects, and it’s helped that they absorbed the majority of Bent Spoons. Just about everyone is a familiar face that I’m comfortable working with. They had a bit of a rough patch to start; being a VR Game, they’d just lost access to the Oculus platform they’d been building for, and they had to refactor for the HTC Vive, which pretty much put a full stop on prototype development.
I’ve been taken on as a narrative designer though, and I’m focusing in on what I love most; character development and relationships. I’m working on making all the members of Arete’s coven feel like people, and ensure the play-spaces reflect the personality of the player characters, considering each level is a retelling of events by that character. Already, even, I’m using personality traits to justify game mechanics: player death or failure is the storyteller embellishing or forgetting the actual course of events.
I’m also writing the dialogue for Discarnate, to be used with a yet-to-be-developed systems so that the lines I’m writing can be used dynamically throughout the level, creating what should feel like a narrative flow regardless of how the player chooses to tackle the objectives in a given level.
Thomas Rebeck 