Narrative Design
Published projects
ASSASSIN’S CREED: VALHALLA
In Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla, Ollie wrote the main storyline of the Grantebridgeshire territory. Players ally with a local Jarl to reclaim her home, and discover who amongst her inner circle betrayed her by giving up Grantebridge’s secrets. Using branching gameplay and dialogue systems that track the player’s investigation, players will bond with their fellow vikings, discover their motives, and have a first taste of what it means to lead and live with vikings and Danes.
Ollie also recorded placeholder dialogue for the main character Eivor during production
gameplay
Spoilers ahead :)
FAR CRY: NEW DAWN
A direct sequel to Far Cry 5, Far Cry: New Dawn is set in the colourful irradiated ruins of Hope County, Montana. Players find themselves in need of a team to help them survive the harsh inhabitants of this changed world. Enter Nana, one of the game’s charismatic Guns For Hire (GFHs) created and written by Ollie. A wizened former extreme tourism guide, Nana gladly takes on a nurturing maternal role, while at the same time catching people off-guard with the most delightfully filthy jokes you can imagine. Ollie also wrote some main missions for New Dawn and the in-game barks for the Highwaymen, giving the game’s antagonists a unique and chaotic voice only fitting for the setting.
Ollie also went on press tour to Sao Paulo, New York, and San Francisco to promote the game and speak to games journalists from around the world.
mission and dialogue
press tour
FAR CRY 5
In Far Cry 5, the player enters the secluded community of Hope County that has been taken over by a deadly cult. Ollie populated the vast and acclaimed open world by writing the dialogue for open world NPCs, comedic descriptions for items, vehicles, and characters, as well as dialogue for Easter eggs, specifically all the ringing phones in Faith’s region. She also recorded placeholder dialogue for NPCs.
open world dialogue and item descriptions
ASSASSIN’S CREED: ODYSSEY
In Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey, Ollie wrote for content in the Corinth region and created narrative design prototypes for the Symposium drunken singing mechanic, which eventually evolved to become the prototype for the flytings (otherwise known as viking rap battles) in Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla. She also recorded all of the main character Kassandra’s dialogue as placeholder during pre-production and part of production.
Unpublished Work
Sometimes, some of our best work gets put on ice by the powers that be. That’s the way the cookie crumbles, but that doesn’t mean I can’t share some NDA-safe narrative design prototypes once they’re scrubbed of all semblance of license or corporate ownership! ;)
Non-binary consequential game design
In a project designed to have no spoken dialogue, I was challenged to help make a system that could track the decisions of players that were not based on dialogue choices, but rather the choices the player makes in the “physical” world of the game. This could be as broad as the player choosing to go left instead of right at a crossroads, or as specific as the player choosing, without prompting and with the already button-mapped ability to do so, to physically comfort a distressed NPC.
We also wanted to make sure that after tracking all of those decisions, the narrative feedback would be both telegraphed to the player during gameplay, as well as with multiple endings based on their overall behaviour during the game (while paying respect to the production’s budget for programming, technical art, and game design.)
The nuance of the non-verbal NPC’s physical/body language, in addition to plot and mission-based setpieces, was important to communicate the player’s narrative progress during gameplay - that same system used to track the NPC’s mood would be used to track which ending the player would experience. It was important to evolve this kind of non-linear storytelling ststem to afford more than 2 outcomes.
“Carpool Gossip”
In a prototype originally concieved for Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla which was ultimately trimmed down for scope, I had to design a system that could record which characters, and in what order, the player “picked up” some NPCs - depending on the order the player “picks up” the NPCs, characters will feel differently about sharing different information in front of their companions.