Blindsight: War of the Wardens

Narrative Lead

Team Size: 80

Apr 2022 - May 2023

Blindsight: War of the Wardens is a third-person action-adventure game following Iggy, a martial artist who is blind and uses echolocation to fight, and his quest to recover a stolen family relic that has the potential to change the world forever.

As the Narrative Lead, I led the narrative development of the game and was the primary liaison between the narrative team and other disciplines. The narrative team was comprised of two members, myself and Leopold Chen. I was the sole member of the narrative team for the first 5 months of development and established the groundwork for the game's narrative.

My primary responsibilities as Narrative Lead were:

Serving as the point person for all things narrative
Crafting the story, characters, and world of the game
Writing narrative content, including dialogue, barks, and cutscenes
Designing the systems through which narrative is delivered
Mentoring and collaborating with the other member of the narrative team
Implementing narrative (VO and cutscenes) in engine using tools created by the engineering team

Working on Blindsight: War of the Wardens was an incredibly challenging and rewarding experience. With a small narrative team and big ambitions for a game driven by its story, I got to interact with every discipline and collaborate with them to imbue narrative into every aspect of this game--working together to tell a cohesive story, one that was supported by every part of the game. Below are some examples of my work on the project.

Leo and I wrote character sheets for each of the major characters, detailing everything from their appearance to their personality to their history. These acted as reference materials for us as we wrote dialogue and the art team for character design. The VO team also used our character sheets to quickly and easily create casting sheets.

The sheet shown to the right is for Myla Mars, one of the main antagonists in the game, and the younger sister of the primary antagonist.

I wrote level breakdowns documenting the narrative and emotional shifts within and between levels for the design team.

The example shown to the right is the breakdown for the temple/marketplace, the second level in the game. These breakdowns divided the game into chunks that were a bit different than what the actual levels were. The marketplace level was split into two distinct chunks: the temple/marketplace, and the marketplace/spacial anomalies. The purpose of this was to ensure there was a clear narrative and emotional shift when spacial anomalies began cropping up in the marketplace.

I wrote cutscene scripts and iterated on them as the project scope was continually evaluated and changed. The script to the right is the epilogue, which plays at the very end of the game.

I wrote and maintained a narrative glossary defining the most common terms for Blindsight's narrative.

I wrote design specs for dialogue systems to enable implementation by engineers and audio designers.

I created an implementation pipeline and worked with engineering, design, and audio to ensure smooth implementation of VO and cutscenes.

I tracked the implementation of over 100 voice lines using custom spreadsheets, which you can see to the right.

Then, I implemented all VO and cutscenes in Unity using custom tools built by our engineering team.

In addition to the work above, I also did the following:

Created reference slides for the levels of the game breaking down environment layouts for art/design teams
Write and edit dialogue, both story and barks
Provided notes and feedback to art, design, and audio teams on various matters concerning narrative
Built a narrative prototype in Twine to test story comprehensibility and rapidly onboard teammates to the game's narrative
Organized and directed processes for temp VO recording and implementation
Attended VO recording sessions to provide narrative input
Worked with a disability consultant to ensure responsible representation of a character who is blind

I was lucky to work with an amazing team on this project, with great leadership, an incredibly fun team culture, and a fearless creative director at the helm. Though I have stepped away from the project, a small portion of the team has continued to do awesome work in the continued development of this game. Feel free to check it out on Steam using the link below!

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