Eggsile
Four Weeks
Time Period
14 Developers
Team
Narrative Designer,
QA
Areas
Unity
Engine
Concept
"Eggsile" is the second game project for me at Futuregames.
It's an isometric co-op adventure platformer where you play as two penguins who are on a journey to reunite with their colony. But they have to work together in order to keep their egg safe along the way.
In this project, I was responsible for narrative design and by the side helped with QA, sound and onboarding.
My main focus was to have a story with a silly foreground that the player discovers through the gameplay, and a deep background which is through the scenery and environment.
In game level
Narrative Design
For this project we had the theme "Fragility and Growth", and we found an aligned theme on top of that, climate change. Here we found that penguins in Antarctica are a good setting to place the game and story in.
We wanted the gameplay to be very silly and fun, so I prioritized implicit storytelling to tell the rest.
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Worked closely together with the team and iterated the narrative based on input and feedback
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Worked with animators through direction to create fitting cinematics to give a good grasp of beginning, objective and end.
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Made thorough research about penguins lives, oil rigs and Antarctica's geographical environment.
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Split up the journey into three chapters to give a sense of progression.
The story begins with the penguin family being separated from their colony after a nearby oil rig explosion falls over their island.
As stated the story is split into three chapters:
1: Penguins get separated from their colony and drift away on an ice block, it stops all the way on the other side of the island.
2: As they they progress, they reach the area closest to the oil rig explosion where it's filled scatterings and pollution.
3. Scatterings lessen and Arctic natural life is returning, but there are still signs of cracks and destruction hinting at where the players came from.
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Worked together with artists to implement fitting assets for each chapter
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Through further collaboration with artists and dressing, I setup smooth transitions between chapters to not break immersion.
Above that, I also did a lot of QA since the timeframe for this project caused pressure on the others, so they didn’t have time to test or failsafe the game.
Through constant testing I worked closely with the team and efficiently communicated the problems found.
I also focused on sound, which I tied heavily to the narrative to create sparks of emotion depending on the chapter as well as fitting our silliness in the gameplay.
Lastly, I worked on prototyping the onboarding for the players to learn the basics. Due to other parts needing more focus from me, I didn’t get the chance to refine and implement it into the game sadly. Here I got a good taste of level design and how fun it is, which from then on made me very interested in level design.
Reflection
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Implicit Storytelling
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Due to the project’s short time and having gameplay as the top priority, the game had mainly implicit storytelling. Every detail matters and it really affects the immersion even though everything is in the background. I learned that the story happening behind the gameplay can instill a sense of progression throughout the game, and how small additions and changes can add immense value to the game.
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Team Vision
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Because of some colliding visions of the story and how to present it, the project’s narrative got delayed during production. This was mostly because of miscommunication and misunderstandings created due to that, which taught me the value of teamwork and communicating.
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Portraying the narrative
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When it came to portraying the story within the game, I had to iterate a lot, testing players’ pathing, testing the angles they might view the scenery from, and leaving breadcrumbs for curiosity. Through this I got to learn several ways of telling a story all in the background and how fun it can be.
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