Marie Rouzié - Portfolio

Unannounced Project - Evil Empire

Narrative Direction:
- Create the narrative direction of the game by taking into account:
o The IP core elements
o The game vision from the Creative Director and the publisher which includes an ambitious narrative
o The budget and team size
The narrative direction includes the setting of the game, the tone, the core themes, the player fantasy and the narrative philosophy (pushed vs pulled) to provide an ambitious narrative.
- Proposal and feedbacks to the Level Art teams and Character Art teams to create levels and characters coherent with the IP, the setting, the tone, the character sheets and the world building.

Narrative Design:
- Crafting the plot of the game through Word documents (core flow) and flow charts (core flow with its branches and optional contents) in order to help visualize the story within a non-linear game.
- Create a wide cast of 25 characters, including the main character, along with their personality, their backstory, their relationship to one another, the symbolism they represent within the game and their way of speaking.
- Design narrative systems to make the narration not only interactable but interesting and responding to the player actions: dialogue systems, conditions systems, quest systems.
- Quest design, including main quest and sub-quests, all fueling the player fantasy.
- Implement all narrative content within Unity and Yarn Spinner (a scripting system designed for narrative designers).

Redacted work document

Writing:
- Write cinematics, in-game cutscenes (boss introduction and end, characters introduction, key narrative points) and dialogues for all 25 characters. Keep the writing quality consistent throughout the game and make the characters evolve as the player progresses.
- Write gameplay barks, item descriptions and Codex descriptions.
Modified writing samples upon request.

Reference letters

Redacted work documents

Click to widen

Yarn Spinner example

Proposal of narrative justifications of the game systems and rogue-lite structure.
Proposition of plots and non-linear story structures within a rogue-lite game.
Prototype of the story proposal on Articy:Draft to test the understanding of the story and the condition system (a path unlocks only after a certain decision, a new biome is only accessible through having accessed another biome in a previous run, etc).

Co-managing of the narrative design team. Anticipate and solve problems, communicate with other leads and the director to ensure the narrative work follows both vision and schedule.
Design of the narrative events (game sequences with a strong narrative, dialogues, cutscenes). Pitch them to the writing and animation teams.
Review of the levels and proposition of ways to improve the narrative (narrative sections, environmental storytelling, dialog content and pacing, ...)
Implementation of the narration within the game’s levels. Implement dialogues, animations and helpers through scripting (light code akin to Javascript) and within an in-house engine.

Vision: Create and promote the narrative vision for Anno 117 new opus to the creative director and leads.
World building: Create a documented proposal for different settings and features based on historical research. Extensive research and world design work done on the Roman setting as well as on another discarded setting.
Design: Design new narrative features and systems and proposal of improvements of existing ones based on the new setting.
Character creation: Create a cast of new characters based on the new setting, including the player character.

Feature owner of expeditions (a choose your own adventure feature):

System: Design and improvement of the system, share improvement proposal with the team and ensure they are followed through.
Content: Research for events ideas, design and implement events.

Feature owner of quests:

System: Propose quest system improvements to game design and programming and follow through on their development.
Content: Design, implement and polish all characters quests (about 600 quests in game).

Supervise the French language audio recording

World building: research and make a documented proposal for DLCs settings. Work with level art for environment storytelling. Support all departments, and especially game design, for them to remain consistent with the setting and the narrative vision.
Character creation: propose new sets of characters for each DLC, in line with the setting, the time period, the gameplay needs and the emotional connection we want to create with the player.
Campaign: Research, design and implement the campaign of each of Anno 1800 DLCs (Sunken Treasures, The Northwest Passage and Land of Lions). Each campaign is 30 to 50 quests long and includes in-game cutscenes.
Continuation of the expeditions and quests feature-owning and design.

See bellow for a sample of my work on two of the DLCs.

Land of Lions - Story sum up

The Passage - Arrival in the session

For Anno 1800, I have given a talk at Devcom about narration in systemic games: