Research

♦ Made a wide research of the chosen period for Victorian England, setting elements, theme and historical specifics. Researched the asylums theme, both historical and creative, prepared list of references from literature, movies and games for the team.

♦ Created representative mood- and reference boards on Pinterest to help the team with general understanding.

♦ Assisted Art Director with creating palette and style board for Art Guide.

♦ Conducted research into motivation and engagement mechanics fitting our target audience.

Text and narrative elements

♦ Wrote the whole scenario, including the main plot, global quests, side quests, characters, their nature, motivations and relation to the PC, dramatic moments and cinematic descriptions.

♦ Wrote all in-game texts including player character’s sentences (in response to any interaction), dialogues, item descriptions, puzzle games instructions, songs, player character’s notebook, quests, tasks and objectives.

♦ Made huge work in building narrative connections between all game elements, so that all interactions, puzzles and hooks appear in the perfect moment, empower the story and lead player from one objective to another in a natural way.

Characters

♦ Created the narrative concept for 1 Player character and 6 NPCs with their background, behavior patterns, motivation and visual references.

♦ Visualized “relations map” for the characters.

♦ Created tasks for concept artists, character artists and animators to bring the characters to life.

♦ Created tasks for voice overs for outsource company, had chosen voice actors from provided candidates, made feedbacks on results.

♦ Was casting the actors for photoshoot to provide artists with appropriate material for matte painters.

♦ Wrote detailed posing map for each character and actor through the whole game in advance.

♦ Performed several photo shoots on my own (as photographer and designer) to get correct poses, foreshortening, compositions and close-ups for the artists.

♦ Prepared basic storyboard for all in-game cinematics and animations, performed stage direction for artists and animators to get correct frames and solid cinematics.

♦ Designed core innovative game mechanics and described the ways how to visualize and implement them in a clear and pragmatic way.

♦ Designed 6 first demo  fullscreen locations with 4-5 interactive zoom-zones in each, created basic schematic wireframes for them.

♦ Created the GDD template for the Game Designer

♦ Designed first “golden hour” gameplay with all quests, objectives, puzzles, mini-games

♦ Concepted game UI

♦ Made periodical gameplay test sessions

♦ Organized feedback sessions and team brainstorming sessions weekly

♦ Created the story concept, made presentation and pitched it to the stakeholders and publishers

♦ Negotiated with producers from USA via e-mail, skype

♦ Created tasks for artists, animators, programmers, composers, QA team, controlled all the production cycle, made play test of the game during all the development stages.

♦ Consulted Game Designer of the project on mechanics, balance, narrative and mechanics decisions.

♦ Reviewed the documentation on all stages and gave feedbacks and tasks to the Game Designer.