Viking Voyagers

For our first semester of capstone during my undergrad, we were put into smaller groups and told to make a playable game in just one semester. Our group decided to make a Viking game inspired by Oregon Trail, a more text based survival RPG. Given the title of Narrative Designer, I was tasked with finding a way to weave story and gameplay together in order to create a world that was both mysterious and energetic.

The Challenge

(2022)

Play the game now on itch.io!

The Solution

The first step in my process was to create a gameplay system that both gave the player something to do while giving them bits and pieces of a story. Working with our coders, we developed Viking Voyager’s Event System, which did just this in a fun and intuitive way.

One the groundwork had been laid on that front, I began working on hundreds of ideas for different events that could occur. With each one, I crafted it to be something familiar you would see in your standard Viking/Pirate tale, but with a noticeable twist on it to make it fresh and endearing. Combined with the event system, allowing players to choose what they wanted to do, this led to very satisfying outcomes in our tests where players would feel like they got a personalized story that was special to them.

Due to the short work window, a majority of written events had to be cut out, but thanks to the help and work of the rest of the team we were able to make a decent handful of these events come to life. Sound effects, animations, artwork, soon we were able to take the ideas from the page onto the screen, resulting in a fantastic little experience that is different in every playthrough.