Project Type
Full Game
Skills/Tools
- Unity
- Custom Engine
- Worldbuilding
- Narrative Design
- Writing (Barks/Grunts)
- Excel
- Vocal Direction
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Duration
September 2023 - August 2024
Project Overview
Dine n' Bash is an academic game project that I made with an interdisciplinary team during my sophomore year at DigiPen. It is a Diner Dash-style food-delivery game, with bullet-hell elements. Nine students worked on the project, five of them programmers, and four of them designers. I was the Narrative Designer and Producer on this project, as well as one of the System Designers.
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This page details the Narrative Design work that I did on the project. This includes worldbuilding, narrative mechanic design, writing, and vocal direction. A page detailing the System Design work that I did on this project can be found here.
Project Details
Constraints
Dine n' Bash certainly had its share of narrative constraints. The course it was made for required that it be made in a custom engine, built by the programmers on the team DURING development. This means very limited scope and even more limited development time to spend on narrative. So, I was challenged to find ways to inject narrative into the project that would:
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Take minimal development time
Selling narrative elements to a team working in a bare-bones custom engine is hard enough, so I had to ensure that any ideas would not demand too much bandwidth.
2. Not require any new mechanics to interact with
This further helps to limit scope, and also pushed me to come up with narrative elements that intertwine better with gameplay.
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Be un-obstructive to a Player with minimal interest in narrative
Not all Players will be interested in the game's few narrative elements, and their experience is just as important to cultivate.
The World Bible
Named Customers
The core gameplay loop of Dine n' Bash involves picking up dishes and delivering them to customers in a medieval tavern. In order to get any narrative elements actually made, I would need them to fit into this core gameplay loop. That way, all the Player would need to do to interact with the narrative would be to simply play the game.
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Keeping this in mind, I decided to start by creating Named Customers. These were customers with unique appearances, who would show up multiple times across the three levels of the game, and have similar patterns of behavior (similar orders, similar projectile-firing behavior, etc.). I also wrote up brief character bios for each of them, to help make decisions about their behavior and the world. These characters would, in theory, cause the Player to develop relationships with them over the three levels, even if they didn’t “do” anything differently. Sometimes “hey, I remember that guy” can go a long way.
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Unfortunately, due to the fast-paced nature of the game, these Named Customers were scarcely perceived by Players; the gameplay drew too much visual focus from the Player for them to notice something like a unique customer experience. They needed something more.
To get started with designing my narrative elements, I began with a World Bible to pin down the basics of the game's setting and the characters that would appear within it.
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While writing my World Bible, I focused on elements that were related to the areas and characters that the players would actually be interacting with during the game. Then, I branched out to the world details that would inform those narrative elements in order to give them more depth. Additionally, I included details for how characters could be expected to behave in-game.
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I also intentionally kept my World Bible short and succinct, containing the most crucial information for the setting and characters that other teammates may need to know during development.
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As I worked on the World Bible, I regularly updated it as we decided on the exact mechanisms through which the details of the world would come through in the game.
Sir Reginald
Qlunk
Archmage Barnabas
Siobhan
Review System
The Named Customers were not being perceived, and even if they were, they had no character. They were just sprite variations. So, I created The Review System. In this system, Named Customers generate Reviews based off of how well they are served in the tavern. At the end of a level, all Reviews generated in that level are displayed to the Player, along with the Named Customer’s name and portrait.
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I used Excel to write out 9 different brief reviews for each of the game’s 5 Named Customers, totaling 45 unique reviews. Each Named Customer had 3 variants on a “Good” review, a “Medium” review, and a “Bad” review. This allowed variation in reviews between levels.
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The Review System allowed Named Customers to have actual personality, and for the Players to get a feel for that personality. Play-testers would remember them between levels, and even notice them in the actual level more frequently.
Voice Acting
Even with The Review System, Players were not really perceiving Named Customers in the levels, or forming any kind of relationship with them. A large part of this probably was the scale of in-game visual stimuli. There are too many attention-grabbing things in this fast-paced game for the Player to perceive a Named Customer. So, we decided to utilize auditory stimuli, and add voice-acting to the project.
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I started by writing a bark/grunt sheet for each of the 5 Named Customers. These included 9 barks and 3 grunts for each character, most of them variations on one another to avoid repetition in-game. I used my previously written character bios to write out the lines.
When writing these lines, I had 2 main goals:
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Communicate personality in as few words as possible (the game is fast-paced, and the Player is busy)
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Provide gameplay feedback (the positive, negative, or neutral emotion of the line must be extremely clear to reinforce visual feedback of player performance)
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Once I had a full sheet of lines that hit these goals, I went out and casted the 5 Named Customers from among my peers. Then, I collaborated with DigiPen’s sound lab to record audio for all voice lines.
Vocal Direction
This was my first time doing vocal direction. I got all 5 actors together and explained to them the context of the game and of the voice lines. My general points of direction were:
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Over-enunciate your words. There are other sounds that the Player is hearing, and they won’t understand your words unless they are very articulate.
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Use a lot of emotion. Even if the Player doesn’t catch your exact words, they should be able to tell if you are happy, angry, or ambivalent just off of your tone of voice. This is not only narrative context, but gameplay feedback as well.
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Then we took it one at a time. Each actor got in the booth and messed with their lines, I would provide them with direction, and then we would record 5 takes and move on.
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Once we had all of the audio recorded, we hooked it up to gameplay logic and got it playing in the game. This resulted in Players responding more outwardly to Named Customers, and connecting the characters in the level to the reviews that they would leave.
Conclusion
This was a very successful project. Despite very tight constraints, I managed to develop a world and inject a bit of fun narrative into a very simple 15-minute-long game. The result of this was a game where Players would recognize recurring characters across levels, learn to like or dislike them, and eagerly read their reviews. The game was certainly more narratively engaging as a result.