The Attendant
(2021)
The Attendant is an interactive fiction narrative game, developed with the Twine engine. The landing gear on your aeroplane has jammed and the plane is forced to fly around in limbo burning fuel ahead of an emergency landing. As flight attendant Evie, your job is to keep the passengers, and on some occasions staff, at ease during this crisis.
While doing so you’ll learn about them, but more importantly Evie –and how she reflects on her life as a result of the situation and the choices she makes.
You can read more about it’s development in my interview with Scottish Games Network.
The Matrix Online
(2007-2009)
The Matrix Online was an MMORPG developed by Monolith Productions, before being purchased by Sony Online Entertainment. I was recruited as a member of the Live Event Special Interest Group (LESIG). My remit was to develop a story character responsible for interacting with one of the five organisations of players on a daily basis. I worked with the lead developer to design at least one Live Event each month (effectively a live quest), which progressed the game’s overarching narrative. Other times I played minor characters in other organisation’s events, giving me experience of tailoring a character to the requirements of other LESIG members.
The role gave me the experience of working with an established IP, developing my ability to create original stories which tie in to the main plot, as well as staying true to the The Matrix universe. As the game was an MMORPG, I had to interact with myriad characters - often players who didn’t roleplay - which allowed my dialogue to flourish. The varied nature of the relationships developed meant that the tone or manner in which we interacted helped improve my ability to deliver the same information in different ways.
SAUDADE
(2020)
Saudade was a solo entry into Week 160 of the Weekly Game Jam on itch.io, developed using Twine. The theme was ‘Nothing Stays Forever’. The game was ranked 2nd/74 for creativity.
Saudade is the deep emotional state of nostalgic, or profound melancholic, longing for an absent something or someone that one cares for and/or loves. In a series of vignettes about memory, love and loss; you travel down memory lane - revisiting past holidays, interstices in your life infused with a sentiment of joy, resignation, fate and melancholia.
This was an experimental game revolving around a past which had been set in stone. Rather than allow the player to pick and shape the past in the moment, they are left to reflect on paths not taken, and how they may have influenced the present. The goal was to create an emotional response to these choices which appear as broken links. This was created by experimenting with Twine’s link system, creating a new passage and then deleting it leaves a choice which at first appears clickable but upon further examination is broken.
The Fear Liath
(2019)
The Fear Liath was my first Twine project. It’s a 20 minute game with multiple endings, developed for a Cryptid Game Jam.
As the theme encouraged you to pick a cryptid from your country, I opted for Scotland’s only known cryptid known in Gaelic as ‘Am Fear Liath Mòr’, ‘The Fear Liath’ in English and more colloquially as ‘The Big Grey Man’. The creature’s presence is said to haunt the summit of the Ben MacDui, the highest peak of the Cairngorm mountains and second highest in Scotland.
The protagonist sets off to conquer the mountain in honour of their recently deceased partner. Due to the altitude, the nature of the creature an the sense of dread it is said to evoke - often suddenly just prior to appearing - this felt like an interesting setting to explore trauma in. Trauma can alter our perception, creating a sense of immediate dread, so there was an interesting duality to be drawn between the creature and the theme.
With this being my first completed Twine project, I learned much about it’s potential. I tested using audio, timers and various other design elements which I’ve refined in more recent projects.
The Glitching Graduation
(2020)
The Glitching Graduation was a Visual Novel developed for the AdventureX 2020 Narrative Game Jam. It was produced by a team of six over the course of two weeks, and centres on a group of teenagers who fall into a time loop during their graduation ceremony.
The theme for the jam was ‘A Good Time’. As a team, we decided that it would be interesting to explore the doubts which can often undermine what is traditionally a time of excitement. In order to escape the loop, the characters had to identify those doubts and talk about them. They came in different forms such as social, career or financial insecurities, each of which were resolved when the player chose to explore them with their dialogue choices.
What made this such an enjoyable project to work on was that half of the time was formed with people I’d met at the Writer’s Guild of Great Britain networking events. The WGGB events have been a source of inspiration and motivation, so build something tangible with peers who I’d never met until the event was far more rewarding than the average portfolio entry.
