Malediction
Malediction is an action-adventure game developed by Desert Beagle. Players take control of an eccentric wizard as he works to recover a formidable array of spells… As well as clean up the mess left by a magic ritual gone awry.
Contributions
Documentation
Character Design
Character Dialogue
Event & Situational Dialogue
Pre-Development
I was brought on to the Desert Beagle team at the end of pre-production to, essentially, write the entire script for Malediction. However, at this early stage, there was still some confusion about Morgan, the main character. Some team members thought he should be a rude, cruel, and cynical misanthrope. Others envisioned him as more of the awkward and quiet type rather than outwardly malicious.
The first thing I had to do was find a way to synthesize these concepts into something that would make everyone happy. More importantly, I wanted to make sure the final version of Morgan was coherent, consistent, and likable to a broad audience of people.
This culminated in a lot of character sheets of Morgan as we went through a lot of different iterations. Some suggested traits were heightened, others were downplayed, and more still were simply combined outright. You can view the end result of that process here.
Once that was done, I could finally focus on the business of writing the game.
Development - Part I
When it came to writing the minute-to-minute dialogue of the game, I had to spend a lot of time consulting with level and technical designers. I was looking at overhead maps and design documents that described how puzzles would work, obstacles the player would face, and so on.
Some parts of the game could just include random banter between Morgan and Grim. Other parts had to be directly related to a puzzle and provide direction for the player to look in. And this, of course, had its own problems.
Development - Part II
Once the first pass of the game had been completed and all the dialogue was implemented, a lot of the playtesting feedback indicated frustration with the amount of information being spoon-fed to the player.
Large swaths of the game had to be re-written almost entirely from scratch. This sounded more than a little daunting at first, but I can say that spending the time to do so was greatly rewarding, allowing me to do a deep dive into everything I had written. Unnecessary tutorial dialogue was replaced, and the parts that stayed had the benefit of being further polished.
Release Details
If you’re interested in viewing some of the materials I made while working on this project, you can view them here.
Malediction is available on Steam.