Narrative Design
CONSTRAINTS
1. Based on a Mannequin Head
2. Important narrative
3. 15-week production
4. Puzzle game
5. 3 members in the Narrative design team
6. Must be in French
RESPONSIBILITIES
1. Writing the Narrative Bible
2. Organize the Narrative Structure for each level.
3. Take the narrative related decisions.
4. Work with other departments to ensure the feasibility of the narrative features.
5. Writing and adapting the main Script.
6. Writing the Decals Content (thoughts of the protagonist).
DEVELOPMENT TIME
15 weeks
ROLE
Assistant-Lead Level Designer
Narrative Designer
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TEAM
8 Level Designers
7 Animators
2 Character Artists
6 Level Artists
1 Fx Artist
EDITOR
Blank is a metaphoric story about finding its identity, where people are headless and mindlessly work in the Metropole. Blank decides to escape the city to find out who he was before, but ultimately realizes he's not the same after his recent adventures and meetings.
Symbolism inspiration
Since the story and the gameplay needed to be based on a mannequin head, we were mostly inspired by the symbolism of this very particular object: The lack of identity, the hopes of becoming someone. We could somehow all relate to this identity pursuit and we decided to fully explore this idea, which led to Blank. The identity became one of the main pillars of the game and we decided to incorporate it not only into the protagonist but into the world itself, the enemies and the NPCs. With that concern kept in mind, the game felt unified through its story, world, and gameplay.
Designing the Narrative Structure
Since we knew the game would be nine levels long, we devised and organized the narrative structure around that fact from the very start. It allowed us to fully control the flow of the storylines of the player throughout the game.
When the structure was approved, we dove deeper into the narrative event of each level.
We created a document to help the level designers to visualize the narrative events they needed to include in their level.
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It also allowed us to have a clear idea of the scope of the narrative features. We then prioritized each of them, so that it was easy to cut some of the elements to meet the deadlines without risking the structure of the story.
Writing an efficient Script for Game Development.
A classical script is easy to read, but often too complicated to work in a video game production team. Each member of the team needs specific information for his or her department, but not the rest, which makes the classic form of the script impractical. We decided to create a technical script, where the information is divided by types and moments (levels).
So Level Designers can easily go to their levels, animators can find all they need about the character’s movements in the Image Description column, the Type of Event column quickly identifies the scenes needed from the cinematic designers, etc.
