I'm Rob, a narrative designer and games writer with eight years of experience.
I believe great narrative design happens by telling stories with the tools unique to games.
To do that, every discipline must share a sense of ownership and excitement around story. That's why—while I sometimes wear many hats—I view myself most importantly as a collaborator.
Read on to learn more about my recent work!
PERFECT DARK
SENIOR NARRATIVE DESIGNER
Project highlights:
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Owning and developing the narrative of multiple missions through planning and writing to final implementation.
My process starts with a visual narrative outline, using tools that let us most easily collaborate, like Mural. In the outline, I map major beats, expand on themes, delve into what tough choices our characters will make to move the plot forward, and more. For me, the fun part is sharing the outline with our art and design partners to brainstorm clever ways to tell the story with mechanics and visuals.
From there, I move to the narrative beat chart in Excel, where I can plot and track the crunchier, more discrete details of the script. It's here where I focus more on story comprehension, clarity of goals, signs and feedback, pacing, as well as other important aspects of the moment to moment in coordination with other disciplines such as level design.
Using the beat chart as my guide, I start writing the level script using Final Draft. While I write, I try to keep in mind what I call the "three C's"—clarity, conciseness, and character (often in that order).
Finally, after formatting the script so its legible to our in-house tools, I import to Unreal 5 and start implementation mainly using Blueprints and Sequencer. Implementation is sort of a Happy Place for me—I love getting into the flow of knitting the story together and putting it on screen.
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Collaborating with all disciplines to define how we use narrative and develop the tools we need to put it on screen.
On Perfect Dark, we built many of our narrative tools from the ground up. Most important was our scripted dialogue system, which I coordinated closely with our engineering team to help develop—maintaining a living list to track requests as needs grew.
Some of those needs were the ability to assign priorities to dialogue to help control flow, as well as the creation of a separate channel to handle overheard dialogue from ambient NPCs.
I was a leader for my team around dialogue implementation—writing guides, best practices, and directly training junior NDs (I'm a stickler around keeping graphs clean and using color-coded comment boxes to indicate the conversation ID a given series of nodes is triggering).
I also led the design around our barks system. I (famously) love barks—in many ways, it's where rubber meets road in terms of narrative and gameplay. I wrote a complete feature outline for this system, with emphasis on how barks can be more than just signs and feedback, but also an engine to build the player's relationship to the world, support our spy fantasy, and let character shine.
I additionally led the design of our collectibles system. I operate from the starting point that players want to play, not read—so while thinking about collectibles I try to scheme around how to get players most interested to pick them up. Brevity, strong visuals, and playing to the player's curiosity were pillars of our approach.
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Collaborating with writers and creative leadership to develop our story, world & characters.
Good stories are about hard choices. How lucky are we then, to work in a medium where the audience gets to make them?
On all of my projects, I advocate as loudly as I can for the unique ways we can tell stories in the medium. I also served as story-doctor in the more traditional sense, collaborating with our team around how we can create a structurally sound, satisfying journey—featuring characters with believable motivations and compelling arcs.
Happy to provide work samples—please reach out to me directly.
GEARS 5
JUNIOR NARRATIVE DESIGNER
Project highlights:
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Implementation of campaign dialogue for multiple missions in Unreal Engine using Blueprints visual scripting and Sequencer.
In Lizzie Carmine's intro scene, timing was key—I used Unreal's Sequencer event track for implementation.
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Writing & implementing barks for over twenty five unique characters.
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Designing, writing & implementing over eighty collectibles to improve story comprehension & expand worldbuilding.
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Gears 5's story is in many ways about connecting the franchise's past and present—collectibles were key to supporting this
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Designing, writing & implementing new bark events to support the PVE multiplayer mode: Escape.
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Strong signs and feedback were crucial in a mode with a ticking clock, environmental hazards, and non-linear environments
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Coordinating with level design partners to develop the "Lost Outsiders" open world side quest.
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This quest starts from a collectible discovered on the critical path, acting as what I call a "trailhead collectible"—the first of a set that puts forward a mystery to get the player curious
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Each collectible acts as a breadcrumb—ultimately leading to the location of our lost outsiders' fate, and an ability upgrade
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