In the first week we were assigned our roles, and I was chosen as a Narrative Designer for this project. On Thursday, we looked more closely at our roles and started working on the vertical slice.

As a Narrative Designer, I am in charge of everything related to the narrative, story and character interaction. It’s my responsibility to make sure the plot makes sense not only to the player, but also to the development group as well, because the game we are working on relies heavily on intertwining interactions between NPCs, items and locations.

After doing more research on the role, here are some things I pointed out for myself:

• Narrative designers take on a role of projects coordinators, to some extent. It is their responsibility to work closely with everyone, as well as taking part in prototyping and ideas development.

• They should be good communicators to ensure that the game storyline stays on track when other team members provide alterations in the project.

• A good narrative designer knows how to combine both characters’ inner worlds and the plot of the game.

• Writing skills are as important as technical knowledge. Creativity shouldn’t be a second thought when it comes to developing a functioning game with good plot and characters.

Important: the game writer is responsible for the world’s story and plot and the narrative designer is responsible for the player’s experience of the story. In my case, I took on both of those roles due to the fact that I was the closest one to the development of the plot, role-wise.

Looking at previous years’ projects, we haven’t really gotten a grasp of what the words “vertical slice” meant as it kept being referred in different terms on different occasions. figuring it out wasn’t the most fun, but naturally we realised that vertical slice is the game prototype itself, while the description of it can also be referred as a vertical slice. With that knowledge, it was easier to think of our own vertical slice.

This is what we came up with:

Our vertical slice includes one of the possibilities the game could develop in. The player, in a role of a child who was looking through their grandmother’s old belongings, would follow an already established set of events after completing a mini-game at the start, setting the photos in the right order before submerging into the dream world. There, the player becomes a little girl called Mabel, who looks for the missing parts of her camera around the amusement park. On her adventure, she meets people who work at the park, and with their help (or by tricking them) she assembles her camera, which returns the player to the real world. Unfortunately, the photos get stained with ink, but with grandmother’s comforting and guidance, the child learns how to develop new photos by completely a mini-game at the end of the game.

We have also set up a website for the project, and have added the definition of the vertical slice as well as the paragraph above it on there.

Sources:

https://gamedesignskills.com/game-design/narrative-designer

https://www.cgspectrum.com/career-pathways/narrative-designer