Content Warning: Fantasy Violence & Monsters
Gloomhaven Digital is a digital adaptation of the smash-hit, high-fantasy table-top roleplaying game, where you take control of a band of mercenaries, and explore the dangers and riches within the lands of Gloomhaven through a lightly-branching narrative.
The board game is one of the most successful of all time, and this adaptation produced for Asmodee is also highly regarded.
From August 2020 to September 2021, I was contracted as an Assitant Writer with Flaming Fowl Studios, on their development of this game.
On this project, I:
- Proofed and managed all the writing of new (and copying in existing) text for the game in all areas, including both narrative and GUI text.
- Wrote/co-wrote dialogue, world-building and story for the majority of the “Guildmaster Mode” missions, a new campaign taking place in the newly-created sister region to Gloomhaven ‘Demonsgate’, alongside Flaming Fowl’s Creative Director (and with direction from Asmodee).
- This totalled 43 missions from Chapter 2 through Chapter 7 of the Guildmaster story, and required me to develop lore that meshed with Gloomhaven‘s existing lore around each new location visited with only a map location and a name for a prompt.
- Re-designed 8 original Campaign scenarios to various degrees for various reasons during development, and redesigned the ‘Town Records’ side story to allow it to function through voice-over rather than as a physical book.
- Additionally assisted level building/QA, using Unity and the in-game Level Editor to digitally re-create map tiles and campaign scenarios from the original board game, then playtest them extensively. I had to get creative with the existing Level Editor tools to replicate special rules and the like, because development time on new ones was little, precious, and expensive.
The writing itself involved discussing story arcs and ideas with the creative team, drafting and editing raw text in a live word processor with the creative team, and then moving this text into a spreadsheet for implementation into the build via YML tags.
For text-only samples of my writing from this project, you can look at my writing samples, and contact me for more. A video playthrough of two of my missions by fans in the community are available below: