The Greatest Knight in all the Lands

Team: Solo Engines: Unity, YarnSpinner Role: Narrative Designer/Writer, Programmer Timeline: 2 Months

Overview: Comedic narrative focused RPG with non-linear dialogue

Intro Sequence with the Greeter

Game Description

You play as the Greatest Knight in all the Lands, traveling through towns in search of adventure. You come upon a small city on the waterside with a king looking for a brave knight to slay the Beast (based on a giant cat) spreading terror amongst his city. You head to the Beast's cave where it lives ready for a huge fight, but instantly die, thus ending the story of the Greatest Knight in all the Lands. The player respawns as a new character at the border of the same city, and refers to themselves as The Greatest Knight in all the Lands. Hearing of previous knights who died to the Beast, you head into the city to talk to the townsfolk in search of ways to kill the Beast. Be quick though, as once nightfall hits the Beast will come to town to rip the place apart.

The player has a certain number of actions that they must expend strategically to find a unique way to defeat the Beast by end of day. Currently due to time restraints there is only one questline which is fully polished and playable in engine, but there are designs for more questlines to be implemented in the future.

Quest Beat-Diagrams

Interactive flavor text for items as the player attempts to find the "Red Crystal Light" in the wizard's storage

Player Interactions

A big focus of this project was not just making a single storyline, but having lots of small interactions that make the world feel real and compelling. While the players focus will mainly be the quest they are pursuing, I wanted to encourage exploration and talking to npcs by having small barks and funny conversations. It's these little interactions that I believe make the players stay interested and are compelled to keep going.

To push players towards exploration, I designed the gameplay where you're forced to try interacting with different objects and people. Coins are hidden all throughout the map and to get them you go through a fun little interaction with a couple non-linear options. This gives players freedom to play how they like in the relatively linear overarching story.

Takeaways

Set up a variable system beforehand. A huge part of this game are the variables as that's what allows the writing to loop, jump, count, etc. I initially wrote the script out of engine, but I did not have any variables set up as I needed the engine for that, so when it was time to add that functionality I just did it as it came along. When initializing the variables, I dumped them in an unorganized section with names that I understood at the time but became mixed up with other names later on. This led to me finding some mistakes in the variables when editing the final version, and I had to redo some of my work because of it. For the future, I'd want to take more of a forward thinking approach and plan each variable more carefully so it doesn't mess me up or anybody else who may be looking at the script.

Full Scipt of the Introduction and First Questline

The Greatest Knight in all the Lands - Final Script