Content Warning: Fantasy Violence & Monsters
From August 2020 to September 2021, I was contracted as an Assitant Writer with Flaming Fowl Studios, on their development of Asmodee’s digitisation of Gloomhaven. Gloomhaven is a hit high-fantasy original-IP Table-Top Role-Playing Game, and our adaptation is also highly regarded.
My responsibilities during my time were proofing all of and writing new/copying in existing text for the game in all areas, including both narrative and GUI text. Under the supervision of Flaming Fowl’s Creative Director and Asmodee, I also wrote/co-wrote the dialogue and story for the majority of the “Guildmaster Mode” missions, a new campaign taking place in the newly-created sister region to Gloomhaven ‘Demonsgate’. 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. I also redesigned 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.
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.
Additionally, I also adopted a level building/QA role: I used Unity and the in-game Level Editor to digitally re-create map tiles and campaign scenarios as they appear in the original board game, then playtested them extensively. I often had to use the editor’s existing features to try and replicate the effects of scenario-specific special rules, in order to minimise the amount of time our programmers would need to spend developing new features.
For text-only samples of my writing from this project, please contact me. A video playthrough of two of my missions by fans in the community are available below: