Nightingale

2023 - 2024

Nightingale is a PVE open-world survival crafting game played solo or cooperatively with friends. Become a Realmwalker and reignite the ancient Crossway portals, journeying through corrupted forests, gravity-torn deserts, and beyond.

Build, craft, fight, and discover as you venture through mystical portals into the beautiful and dangerous Faewilds.

Engine:
Unreal Engine 5

Platform:
PC (Steam & Epic Games Store)

Genre:
Survival/Crafting

My Roles:
Narrative Designer
Encounter Designer

Responsibilities

Narrative Design:

  • Collaborated with writers to craft engaging and immersive questlines for key historical and original characters, ensuring they were enjoyable and leveraging the IP’s strengths.

  • Successfully saw many quests from brief pitch to final implementation, considering how to best leverage new and existing tools that will optimally allow us to tell our story.

  • Wrote character dialogue and text logs that were accurate to the game’s setting and emotionally impactful, fostering a deeper connection with the players.

  • Spearheaded the narrative journey of a few worlds, crafting both main and side questlines and constantly collaborating with other disciplines to deliver a purposeful and immersive experience to players.

  • Utilized cross-disciplinary knowledge to bridge the gap between disciplines, enabling more transparent communication and a more integrated narrative delivery.

Encounter Design:

  • Designed and implemented many encounters in the game in different archetypes, always considering the procedural nature of the game

  • Led the effort to optimize the player experience by establishing metrics to gauge encounter complexity and improve distribution

  • Demonstrated initiative by actively seeking out other disciplines to become proficient in different systems to improve our content

  • Championed the player experience above all, ensuring my levels aligned with gameplay goals and served the right amount of challenge

Highlights

Magwytch Marshes Questline

Responsibilities Breakdown:

  • Plotted out the entire narrative journey in collaboration with Writers and other disciplines

  • Wrote, designed and implemented all quests in UE 5, ensuring they met gameplay and narrative goals

  • Created and maintained a Quest brief flowchart to get a holistic view of the realm’s adventure

  • Laid out key POI locations in the map to encourage players to engage with the quests in any order they want

  • Intentionally placed narrative collectibles to encourage player exploration

Key Considerations

Narrative & Gameplay Goals

Magwytch Marshes is the third realm players visit in their journey through the Fae Wilds. From a Narrative perspective, the goal was to provide players with a more grounded human-focused experience in an industrialized realm that would contrast with the otherworldly nature of the previous Realms. We explored the themes of greed and trust through the struggles of the main characters of this realm and where the player sits on that moral scale.

On the gameplay side, the goal was to create a questline that could be approached in any order the player wanted, providing tangible benefits as players completed each one and culminated in their ascension to the Realm’s Site of Power, where the Harpy Queen boss awaits them. Additionally, by exploring each major Point of Interest, players may find secret documents that point to a major revelation about one of the key characters in the realm.

Map Design

Throughout the questline, players must explore 4 factories and return to the Town to access the Site of Power. Not only were the quests designed to be tackled in any order, but the factories themselves were intentionally placed to encourage an optimal route for player enjoyment and challenge. The proximity between the Town and the player’s final objective in the realm is also intentional. The moment players leave the town to explore, they know what their ultimate goal is and that creates additional motivation for their journey. Finally, the Town’s distance to the Site of Power removes any friction to go talk to its NPCs before the Realm’s big confrontation.

Truth of the Matter Side Quest

In their exploration, players may stumble upon certain documents that activate a quest that encourages them to seek other incriminating files about an NPC. I’m particularly proud of this quest for a few reasons: Its hidden nature plays well with Nightingale’s pillars of discovery and exploration while simultaneously adding depth to the relationship between the major characters in the realm. Each document was intentionally placed in areas that serve the story, with one hidden in plain sight, providing a great “ah, ha!” moment once you connect the dots.

Narrative Collectibles

One of the collectibles players may find early on in this realm is the journal of Hortensia Lynch del Solar, Mayor Nicolás’ wife. Retrieving all of the journal’s entries reveals more about the current state of their relationship. When thinking about where to place these collectibles, I aimed to support the story being told in each entry by intentionally placing them in locations where Hortensia herself would have believably left them to reflect her state of mind as she wrote each.

  1. The first entry is found on her bed as she contemplated their new life through a window

  2. This one is sitting on a chair near one of the entrances, showing her restlessness growing

  3. This entry is found on a completely different house and represents a tipping point for Hortensia

  4. The final entry is purposefully left on Nicolás’ office back at their house

In the Hollowed Moor, the fifth realm players explore in their journey, a Grendell named Danu asks the players to help silence woeful echoes that are causing her much distress. I was responsible for revamping this quest and bringing it to the quality expected from our recent quests. Additionally, I had the opportunity to write each of the three Hope Echoes that players must interact with to complete the quest.

My narrative goals were as follows:

  • Each entry must told from the perspective of a different group of Realmwalkers

  • Each entry must evoke a sense of pain, suffering, and hopelessness

  • Each entry must tell the Realmwalkers’ last moments alive

Bound to Suffer #1

Danu’s Codex

Bound to Suffer #2

Bound to Suffer #3