Blaze Masters
Educational Forest Management Simulator developed in collaboration with Utah Department of Forestry, Fire, and State Lands
Contributions
-
Served as Scrum Master and utilized Trello to keep the 5 person team on pace
-
Led project pitch and One-Sheet design, coordinated with forest management agencies for consultation, led research for educational aspects of the game
-
Mediated an intense conflict within the team and persuaded all parties to commit to a unified team effort
-
Co-designed and iterated on Survey, Cut, Plant, and Extinguish mechanics
-
Pitched in with QA, Audio, and Writing efforts
-
Tools: Unity, Github, Trello
-
Platforms: PC, iOS
-
Team: 5 people
Cody Cottrell
Game Designer
"What are the stakes? Give us reason to root for the character.
What happens if they don’t succeed? Stack the odds against."
~ Emma Coats, Pixar's 22 rules of storytelling
Narrative Process
1.) World-building
-
You can't write characters without first knowing what kind of time, place, and culture they inhabit. I believe that the best settings are characters unto themselves that serve to immerse players and facilitate core mechanics. Here are some examples of mood boards and high-level scenarios I've used to build the scaffolding for engaging video game stories:
2.) Character development
-
Characters that players connect with can buoy mediocre games and elevate great games to legendary status. The best characters magnify our own virtues and vices and relentlessly drive action toward inevitable conclusions that tell us something about what it means to be human. It's also nice if they can tell a joke. Here's an overview of the character that I wrote for Sword of Atlas, as well as pitches for several other characters in that same world:
Nef
Defining Traits: Manic, duty-bound, "spiritual OCD."
He’s utterly obsessed with ordering the universe around him and sees all beings and things as being inherently connected to each other, though their threads are usually knotted in a chaotic ball that he must unravel and weave into an ordered existence. He believes that the universe is made up of perfect pairs and that it is his mission to find the disparate threads of that perfect connection and weave them together to make a more harmonious world. Beings can be connected to each other, objects, or places; it’s different for everyone. The one thing that is common is that this soulmate-like connection strengthens each half of the pair. Each braided bracelet on his arm represents a perfect pair he has brought together in his travels. He senses that the player will lead him to his own divine pairing.
Physical Description: Middle Eastern in appearance and well-kempt, as evidenced by his neatly bunned hair and curated beard. One arm is bound from wrist to bicep in hand-braided leather bracelets, some of which jingle with trinkets and some which rest bare. His imposing frame and tiger hide coat give him the look of a confident warrior, but his furled posture and distant, frosty eyes betray his unhinged psyche. He is handsome and ordered in appearance, regal even, but his salt and pepper hair and haunted countenance show age beyond his years.
*obviously our artists deviated from this initial description a bit.
Personal Premise: Divine unity leads to harmony in the soul and vice versa. Nef can sense the connective energy between all beings (organic and otherwise) and believes that everything has an ordained pairing; it is his ambition to unravel misguided connections and bring the ordained ones together.
Dialogue Barks:
Successful attack
-
"By needle or by flame, you'll unravel just the same."
-
"Had you listened to my yarn, I'd have not pulled yours to mortal harm."
Missed attack
-
"Knots! Knots! Knots!"
-
"By the eye of the needle!"
Takes damage
-
"You pull a thread from the den of a lion."
-
"You braid our souls together in this dance of death."
Incapacitation/death
-
"My soul frays..."
-
"And now I close my eyes, doubting the pattern of how a man lives and how a man dies."
Other Pitched Characters
3.) Scenes
-
Ideally, a "unity of opposites" locks protagonist and antagonist in a conflict that does not allow for compromise. The stakes don't necessarily have to be life or death, but the resolution of the conflict should leave both characters fundamentally transformed. Each and every scene along the way should either advance the plot or tell us something we didn't know about the characters. Here's a video peek at some dialogue I wrote for Sword of Atlas, a story board of potential plot structures, and three short script samples from various points in the story:
