Flintlock: The Siege of Dawn
Open World Action RPG, and a tale of conflict between ancient magic and emerging gunpowder technology.
Launch trailer with plot summary
My Contributions
March 2023: A game in need of a story
With release imminent, Flintlock had characters, locations, enemies… but not the emotional stakes to bind them together.
May 2023: Story Reimagining Pitch
To propose significant story changes at this late stage it was vital that the entire team believed in them. I dedicated a month to cross-disciplinary brainstorming, working alongside the team to gain their insight. The consensus of our ideas became a wishlist of requirements the story needed to accomplish.
A wishlist was a step in the right direction, but not exactly something we could put in the game.
“Inaya’s Temple” main story beat from the pitch
My response was a pitch deck, proposing story changes scene by scene across the entire length of the game. Each slide included an intent in the bottom left corner that linked back to our wishlist, explaining how plot changes per individual scene linked back to the overall story we believed in.
As with the example above, many of these intents related to creating richer, more dynamic relationships between our main characters.
September 2023: A script in 3 months
The story changes were approved… but our deadlines didn’t budge.
With little time to deliver essentially a full rewrite of the game, I joined our writer in daily sessions to convert our conceptual ideas into a proper script that could be evaluated within the context of the game.
The script not only translated the scenes directly from the pitch into dialogue, but provided the connective tissue between them, bringing the personality of our characters into “moment to moment” gameplay.
Working iteratively, we re-wrote Flintlock’s entire script, including the main quest, 13 branching side quests, and every ambient scene consisting of only a line or two. By September, Flintlock’s new story was ready for implementation.
“Inaya’s Temple” extract from the script
January 2024: From page to gameplay
As Lead Narrative Designer my responsibilities didn’t end with the delivering the script. I was equally responsible for the gameplay matching the intent of the words on the page.
Playthrough video of “Inaya’s Temple”
For example, to deliver a scene such as Inaya’s Temple, I:
Extended our narrative system to make it possible for Inaya Shrines to trigger dialogue
Worked with level design to ensure the space was large enough to contain the script
Worked with combat design to space out encounters, leaving dialogue a safe space to play
Ensured the scene played out correctly even if approached in the unexpected order open world games allow
Throughout my time on Flintlock, I either personally implemented or mentored other developers through the implementation of every quest in the game in a similar fashion.