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Writing Tools for Game

Engines

UX

October, 2024

Interaction Design Practice,

Project 2: Roblox


Group Project with
Ben Greenfield and

Roda Berhane

A set of 2 connected tools that help bridge the gap between writers and other developers on a game design team. Writing Tools for Game Engines makes collaboration quick and intuitive throughout the story development pipeline, leading to more immersive dialogue and better end experiences for players.

Why Writing Tools?

Below is an interactive journey map highlighting what the NPC writing process is currently like for game devs, and how it could be reimagined with Writing Tools.

After
Before

Research


Our project began with a design brief from Kevin Logan, a senior UX designer at Roblox.


His challenge for us was to "design a feature within a game engine to help game developers create more immersive NPC characters."


With such an open-ended brief, our team had a lot of questions. What is immersion? What are NPCs? We reached out to game designers from all different sized teams and backgrounds to find our answers.

Game Design Students


We pinned up posters around campus encouraging game design majors to meet up with us.

We ended up giving out pizza to 6 game dev students and interviewing them about their experiences creating NPCs. Interviewees included narrative designers, environment designers, and character artists


One key takeaway from our conversation was that "immersion" in games is often achieved through good writing and story.


"Story is the biggest factor of immersion."

- Joshua, Game Dev @ IU

AAA Developer


We were also fortunate enough to speak to a AAA senior videogame writer, whose past projects have included Cyberpunk 2077, Telltale's The Walking Dead, and Spider-Man Miles Morales.


When asked about where characters originate, whether from concept art, writing, or somewhere else, she replied:


"It starts with the writers. It has to."

Insights


Writing is where immersive characters begin. Although there are plenty of other contributing factors to immersion (i.e, animation, voice acting, graphical style), writing serves as the foundation that all of those features are built upon.

The Problem


Existing writing tools in many game engines are confusing and cumbersome, even despite good writing being so instrumental to the process of creating compelling & immersive characters.

Sketches / Ideation

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