Below is a collection of scripts and narrative projects that I’ve worked on over the years. Have a look and feel free to play around with them.
Ink Script
DARK OCEAN: Cabin Demo
Below is a rough sample of the Ink file for the purposes of critique, with placeholders for gameplay sections. The top-level knot for each NPC serves as a content-distributor, handling all the logic. It then presents the ASK and TELL options if they are available, otherwise it shows the CONTINUE option. LEAVE is there just to simulate the player walking away at any point. When the player chooses ASK or TELL, they are served the appropriate content block (A1, T2, etc.) depending on game state and what content they’ve seen so far. Through the conditional statements you can achieve a lot of different structures to each dialog flow. It also makes use of some functions, which are setup for later extensibility.
(See Dark Ocean Narrative Systems for more details.)
Press ▶︎ Play to test in frame:
https://snippets.borogove.app/ink/q7fzx4
Twine
RECURRENCE
RecurrenceA sample Twine projectRecurrence is a prototype I built in Twine to test some of its features, like branching, variable tracking and conditionals. Not complete, but a good sample of dialog.
LAST STARS
Last Stars
http://www.squareship.com/n8bomb/if/slim-tweego/dist/
An early exercise set in the world of Dark Ocean (then called Last Stars). Less dialog, more prose, but there is a basic attribute system that affects how the story plays out.
Script Samples
FALLEN FROM HEAVEN
SCENE 1
An excerpt from a post-apocalyptic story, following an asteroid impact in the middle of Wyoming. Society struggles in the fallout, felt around the world. The story is set 3 years later, in the region surrounding the crater, where a cult has arisen in worship of the Heavenstone that promises eternal life. In this scene Soraya meets Dinah for the first time.
Fallen From Heaven - S1FALLEN FROM HEAVEN
SCENE 2
A more recent scene set later in the story, as Soraya and a group of survivors take over an airplane hangar. After clearing out the cultists they strategize as they consider the implications of this prop plane. By now you’ve learned that a parasite arrived on the asteroid. It has been infecting the cultists and controlling their actions. Now it had a way to travel farther faster. More about the world and story are revealed in this tense scene.
Fallen From Heaven - S2
SINGULARITEENS
This is a concept I was working on fleshing out into a cartoon series, about 3 humans and a sentient ship, lost and bewildered after emerging from cryosleep in an alien system. It’s intended to have an Adventure Time style randomness to it, with each planet they go to being full of outlandish characters. Each episode though is intended to flesh out some core idea, often an allegory for something about nature or society that plays out in exaggerated proportions. The first season has a fairly episodic flow to it as they visit each planet one at a time looking for answers. That is until eventually they uncover the sinister plots of the Cephaloids: an advanced race of 4-dimensional cephalopods. For now, you can check out the pilot.
Singulariteens - Pilot
Untitled Cyberpunk Project
The story of a fractured family that breaks the cycle of mortality. Juno Moller is a young girl born to Ava Adler, daughter of the CEO of Minerva: the largest medtech company in the world. But Juno is no ordinary child. She is the first and only human to be genetically engineered to live forever. The breakthrough is the result of the tireless work of her team, plus an illegal brain-computer interface (BCI) implant that allows her to connect to a massive transformer models. That connection grants her access to huge stores of data and incredible computational power. Both life-extension and BCIs like this have been heavily regulated, so those technologies may never see the light of day. But Ava believes that the only way for humanity to move beyond their short-sighted metrics of success, is to plan beyond our meager lifespans. That’s her hope for Juno.
Ava meets a man who shares her view: Ellis Moller, born in the year 2000. His skills take him around the world, conducting corporate espionage for a living while moonlighting as a major hacktivist. He fights to slow the growing power and influence of corporations as the rise of AI sees collusion between corps and government. He meets Ava and gets pulled into her world, operating in secrecy from inside one of the world’s largest corps. He agrees with Ava’s mission and they have Juno. Aging 1 year for every 3 of her childhood, Juno has a long life ahead of her, and no place in a society that has outlawed what she represents. So Ellis volunteers to undergo regular treatments of an experimental therapy to slow his metabolism and extend his life. If not forever, then long enough to make sure their girl grows up safe.
Grayvale
Prime Material began as a D&D Live Play podcast. I was running a campaign with some friends, including game designers, a voice actor and illustrator, and content creators. It was an interesting dynamic and we’d managed to find a solid groove, so I started recording the episodes to release as podcasts; something of a personal challenge to find how to make the content interesting to an outside audience.
Of course, by the time we started recording there had already been a dozen sessions, so I started recording what I call “Episode 0”, in which I summarize the events leading up to the first podcast. It’s taken some time to produce, but here is the first hour of it. I’ll post snippets of exciting parts soon, but feel free to have a listen!
