Dragon's Dream
Exploration - Exotic Missions with or without AI Companions
On a project I worked on, the "Exotic" missions were special campaign missions that hit significant narrative beats within the game. A fundamental part of the game design was that the player could play the campaign missions either on their own or with friends. Also, a fundamental narrative aspect of the game was the interpersonal relationships between the characters. Both of these ideas in coexistence with each other does create a problem for design due to the player being allowed to complete the campaign missions solo if they wished. I was tasked with exploring the options we had to try and preserve both the game and narrative vision through how we could use AI companions and to what level of AI companion could be used.
Exploration - Open-world Dialogue Structure
On the same project as the above "Exploration - Exotic Missions with or without AI Companions", the game was to have an open-world aspect to it. This also created problems for the VO design structure due to players being able to play on their own or with friends and didn't necessarily have to remain with each other while doing so. I was tasked with looking into how we could design the dialogue structure that allowed players that played with friends to split up across the map if they wished - looking into what information would be required for all players to know, what's needed for the characters' interpersonal relationship growth throughout advancing in the open-world and how such a dialogue structure would look like within the game-play.
Due to the specifics of this design exploration a lot of the document has been redacted due to NDA.