x 5
Gamebook
The Kirknell Records
Project Manager
Narrative Designer
Writer
Completed
January 2022 - February 2023
Summer project of 2022, The Kirknell Records is a 10 episodes Audio drama set in the Foxhole MMO Universe using in-game location as the stage for a military scenario. Taking the form of a logbook this series was a good testing field in terms of narration, storytelling as well as audio and video montage.
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Follow the Veteran As unleash upon
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Arena
Before starting the writing or the coding what we needed was an arena where the player would evolve in and offer the best decisions to the player.
So all of us got together and tried to come up with a compelling storyline to follow. Not only that but we also tried to imagine it from a mechanical potential standpoint. So each of us came up with an idea of its own and we then confronted them in order to sort out the best option.
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Our final choice was to take our players in Space, as a Stranded on an unexplored planet populated by tribal aliens. We thought that this setting would offer the widest variety of choices and paths to take.
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An uncharted world would allow us to immerse the player into an environment of our choosing, an unexplored, wild and possibly hostile one.
Branches
Once the arena was established, the writing could began. As Project Manager my task was thus to coordinate the efforts of those strong individualities and act as the link between them, trying to get the best out of each member.
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To do so it was decided to divide the story in 3 main branches, each associated with 1 Game Designer (1 was missing at the beginning of the project).
This way we would decide together on the main story outlines but let each member express themselves through their respective branch rather than going through a potential tedious process of deciding "each and every sentence together".
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Although in retrospect this approach resulted in a quite heterogeneous overall writing style, this downside was compensated by the sheer volume and scale of content we were able to produce - myself taking care of one of the branches.
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But if additional time was provided than a process of standardization would have probably take place for a more coherent style and standards.
Play the rules
"Only text allowed"
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Our dedicated programmer, Axel Lavigne, found a clever way to bypass this last rule. By developping a specific tool through Python that allowed for the convertion of PNG images into a series of colored characters, he allowed us to add a another layer of immersion while still remaining within the guidelines of the project.
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Although this represented an additional workload the trade off was more than worth it and allowed for ExO to stand out among its counterparts.
