♦ Was hired as a “crisis manager” for the ongoing project and the team.

♦ Inherited the project on the “first-demo” stage (first 8 of 27 locations) in critical state from previous Game Designer and managed to fix multiple problems with new design decisions without losing most of the content done.

♦ Rebuilt weak story to something completely new, offered new mechanics and negotiated with the publisher to bring the game back to the roadmap.

♦ Negotiated with producers from USA via e-mail, skype, organized meetings in Kiev.

♦ 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.

♦ Trained new game design team for the company on this project.

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

♦ Re-worked 5 existing NPCs and created the narrative concept for 2 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, has 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.

♦ Made the full GDD with all supporting documents, as the project didn’t have any from the beginning.

♦ Designed and wrote down all quest chains, objects, puzzles, mini-games, locations descriptions, dialogues, narrative information, sound specifics, game atmosphere.

♦ Designed 30 fullscreen locations with 4-5 interactive zoom-zones in each, created basic schematic wireframes for them.

♦ Designed mechanics for 13 puzzle mini-games, created schemes for artists and flowcharts for developers.

♦ Designed 14 hidden object fullscreen scenes with lists of interactions and items to be found.

♦ Provided location maps with all possible player interactions and sequences for developers and testers.

♦ Concepted the game features mechanics.

♦ Designed the map for the game, concepted “map teleportation” feature, locations unlocks and hint marks on the map.

♦ Concepted game UI.

♦ Made periodical gameplay test sessions.

♦ Processed publisher’s feedbacks and also alpha players’ surveys to improve the game on all stages of development.