Narrative Design on PREY
On one of my first days at the studio, I mentioned to our lead designer that, my current tasks aside, if there was ever any story work that they needed help on, I would auto-volunteer to do it. Well, it turned out there was a lot of writing and design work to do.
Environmental Storytelling
I was given a number of levels, including the Power Plant and the Shuttle Bay, and asked to craft short stories about the people who had lived there. Their corpses had been placed around the levels and snippets of dialogue for select characters existed, but for the most part no one had yet decided what kind of people these would have been. So I set about coordinating with level designers, architects, and prop artists to help me put together vignettes of some of the crew members.
Below you can find some examples.
Below you can find some examples.
Scott Parker in Shuttle Bay
Click on the images above to move through the story. Captions are located above the gallery.
Matthew Connolly in Power Plant
World Building
We wanted the world of Prey to feel alive, like it had a history that had existed long before the player got there. One way we went about doing that was by creating in-universe documents that talk about world events or explore the backstory of many of the creatures you encounter on Talos I.
Morgan's Research Notes was one of my first narrative tasks. They were intended as a way to give the players more background on the world of "Prey" as well as gameplay advice. As a result, the entries ended up being a mixture of database information from TranStar, notes from past scientists, incident reports from around the station, and Morgan's personal comments and tips.
I was also in charge of documenting and writing up ideas for in-universe books and documents as well as assisting with writing the content. Our goal with these was to build out the alternate timeline of Prey, one where JFK survives his assassination, Soviet Russia never falls, and the Space Race continues for many more decades as man is catapulted into living in space. We also saw this as an opportunity explore TranStar, the mysterious corporation at the heart of the story, a bit better.