Driftlight
Driftlight is a platforming adventure game developed by Big Duck Energy. Players are given the ability to shift their gravity in a direction of their choosing, which they must then use to navigate a series of dangerous caverns in search of an eccentric adventurer.
Contributions
Writing
Pre-Development
DriftLight was never intended to be a narrative-heavy game. What story elements the game did possess would be conveyed through a series of journal entries that the player would collect throughout their journey.
I was brought on by the Big Duck Energy team to write those journal entries.
Development - Part I
To start, I had the team outline what the journal entries needed to contain.
In addition to worldbuilding and the development of the character who wrote them, they wanted the journals to contain details and clues about game mechanics, and the enemies the player encountered.
They expected each journal entry to be around 600–700 words long. This was overkill, to put it mildly – that many words usually takes around three minutes to read, and the target audience for DriftLight didn’t line up with the kind of person who enjoyed frequently pausing the game to read for that amount of time.
I talked them down to approximately 400 words per journal, with 500 as the soft max. There was a lot of information to cover, after all.
Development - Part II
Since this was towards the end of DriftLight’s development, everything had to be produced and edited rapidly. There couldn’t be long pauses to gather feedback, so I had to do everything I could to meet all expectations for content and voice as early as possible.
Before I did anything, I had to outline everything that needed to be included in each journal. And that was information I gathered after some conversations with designers – things like enemy behaviors, obstacle types, gameplay mechanics, and so on. This was also important in helping me figure out what order the journals needed to be in.
I was also given an outline of the more emotional beats the journals had to cover, which I promptly lined up with my understanding of the order that things would be encountered in.
Writing up the content for each journal wasn’t the difficult part, but keeping it organic certainly was.
These were handwritten journal entries, after all, so it made little sense to have their author wax on in too great detail, the poor guy’s hand would cramp up eventually.
It was one of the things that can only be fixed gradually with each iteration. And after a few rounds of feedback with the project lead, these issues were gradually ironed out, and we had a set of journals that were both helpful and flavorful.
Release Details
If you’re interested in viewing some of the materials I made while working on this project, you can view them here.
Driftlight is currently pending release on Steam.