Stakes

This was a Visual Novel that I wrote and designed for. The team and I pitched it as a mystery comedy about two ghost hunters realizing that vampires are in fact real and being drawn into their world of supernatural peril; having to adapt quicky to this new status quo in order to survive by making allies and chasing down clues. The demo for which you can find on Itch.io.

Meet the Team

Writer / Designer / Scrum Master

Wolfgang Westdorp

Managed development, maintained backlog, lead meetings, organized slide decks, wrote game script, developed game design docs.

Lead Artist / Product Owner

Nikki Lazar

Created all concept art and ingame assets, maintained original vision, assisted in character development.

Programmer / Proofreader

Jess Freeman

Programed all game systems, maintained and updated builds, proofread game script, reviewed documentation.

My Contributions to Stakes

Designer

System's design
Branch Formatting
Script Implementation

As a Designer, I focused on ensuring that, regardless of the path the player turned down, they were getting a worthwhile and cohesive narrative experience.

To do so, I focused each scene around a simple framework of "good-end", "bad-end", and "neutral-end"; working backwards from that to create scenes that transition into or out of those three anchor points.

I also designed the systems that would open or change the pathway players were on as a reward for cultivating certain skills and playing to a character within a given scene. Incentivizing players to make character-defining decisions through mechanical interactions with the game.

Producer

Backlog Management.
PBI Prioritization.
Team Management.

As a Producer, I focused on maintaining a proper workflow while making the most of our limited development time. Initially, we planned a five-day, five-night period for the player to uncover this overarching mystery. However, given the time we had, I prioritized getting the first day and night portions of the game working so we could have a more polished prototype to showcase.

Once we had set our goal, it was my responsibility to divide the workload for each Sprint and ensure that we all maintined proper communication as well. I led all our meetings and managed the Backlog, ensuring that others were aware of changes within it, whether someone had completed a task or was taking longer than expected.

I also ran all the other Scrum Ceremonies like Review and Retrospective. However, due to our tight time commitment, I combined those meetings with Planning; therefore, each Planning meeting began with a brief Retrospective of the previous Sprint, helping to set the tone for the upcoming meeting.

Writer

Outlying.
Scripting.
Editing (Copy & Content)

As a Writer, many of my goals blended with my work as the designer, only now I was putting theory into practice.

I organized my script by character and node for ease of implementation. My goal there was to create a script that serves as a companion to the Outlines I made for my design work, with each section representing a grounding node in the story that the player can flow in or out of, depending on their choices.

However, in practice, more sub-nodes appeared than initially planned. So I had to start labeling things accordingly and communicating with Jess what was contained within each node as they expanded.

If I could go back and redo something on this project, it would be to create a more consistent naming scheme at the start. So that as I moved from outline to script, Jess and anyone else looking at these documents could have followed the logic without asking me.

The finished draft can be found at the bottom of the page if you wish to read it yourself.