Games

Narrative Design

The Lord of the Rings: Gollum (2023)

"And there it was, in Déagol's little hand. All those years it must have been down there, on the bottom of the river, hidden from the world. Waiting. A ring of glittering gold, like a tiny sun. Brilliant and beautiful."
The Lord of the Rings: Gollum was published by Daedalic Entertainment in 2023 and is an action adventure that features Gollum as the playable character. I was the lead writer on the project, mapped out the story and wrote and scripted the majority of the dialogs.

While Gollum wasn't a commercial success, it was still the most exciting and challenging project I had the honor to work on.
‍
Story briefings
One of the most important and challenging parts of a writer's job is briefing the narrative to the team, keeping in mind all the different departments, like artists, designers, scripters, sound designers, musicians, animators, cutscene artists, voice actors and many more.
For Gollum, we used the narrative design tool Articy Draft to script dialogs, map out the story and showcase characters and locations.

The following video highlights some of the methods we used to visualise the story for the different departments.
"Sssméagol. Odd name... A deal then: We each leave the other alone, and we shall relish our solitude and noble oddity."
Characters
Articy Draft was also used for character descriptions (Articy on the left, final character design on the right): 
Locations
Schematic maps allowed us to link walkthrough elements like events and dialogs as well as images to give artists, scripters and level designers a starting point for designing the levels:

State of Mind (2018)

"Reality wants to kill us all, painfully and slowly and without any point. But we have found a loophole and we escaped."
State of Mind was another project by Daedalic Entertainment in cooperation with writer Martin Ganteföhr, published in 2018. It won the German Developer Award for Best Story 2018 and the German Computergame Award for Best Serious Game 2019.
‍
State of Mind is a story adventure set in a dystopian Berlin in the year 2048 and explores the dangers and chances of rising new technologies like artificial intelligence and virtual realities. A lot of the topics that seemed far away and futuristic when we began working on the game in 2016 have started to become or already are a reality now.
"The past is always a lie, Adam. People take it way too serious. We could reset everything. Just keep on living here... be a normal family again... Maybe we'd fall in love, maybe not. It's worth a try."
Storytelling through game mechanics
For State of Mind we pushed ourselves to go beyond the classic storytelling devices like text or cut scenes and use or develop game mechanics in creative ways to add another layer of meaning to the story.

The following video shows the prototyping I did for some of the game's original features: 
- An interactive, virtual art show, the Liquid Sky where the player can create his own "universe" of sounds and particles.
- A "magic piano" the player can play himself via the game controller, both as a utopian and a dystopian version.

Have a look:

Dialog and Scene Samples

Below you can find two short samples for scenes translated from ARTICY DRAFT to TWINE, so you can play them as a choose your adventure story. Have fun!
State of Mind - Examination Scene
Umbrella Man - A Game about Lying
Powered by Webflow
FacebookTwitterInstagram