EGREGORE
Written on November 29th, 2023 by Jake Wylykanowitz
Narrative Designer
(Adventure/Puzzle Game, PC, Unreal Engine)
You’re pulled into an occult conspiracy in Cairo surrounding the summoning of a mysterious being called an “Egregore.” Using your ability to shift reality based on connecting information together, you find yourself falling deeper and deeper into a rabbit hole about the very nature of reality itself.
USC Games MFA Thesis/Advanced Games Project
Egregore is slated for release in late June.
Most Recent Playthrough
Responsibilities
- Outline and finalize narrative for all 3 major acts of game: Tutorial, Cafe Ramses, and Sanctum
- Generate documentation for entire team, including style guides, story beats, narrative outlines, and character sheets
- Establish unique dialogue for 50+ node combinatorics available at any time to players
- Implement and finalize dialogue interactions with an emphasis on culture, surrealism, and information flow
- Update narrative in-game weekly based on team and playtest feedback
- Conduct weekly narrative meetings alongside other Narrative Designers and the Director
- Attend VO Sessions to assist VO Director and give additional narrative context to dialogue
My Process
Our gameplay is driven by graph combinatorics, so I draft each combo generated by the Design team in a spreadsheet, only using 2-3 sentences to describe each interaction.
A snippet of the Graph Combo spreadsheet, color-coded to represent what is currently in-engine versus what needs drafting/editing.
Green = Implemented | Red = Not Implemented | Orange = Partially Implemented/In Progress
- I expand each interaction to a full sequence in Unreal Engine after drafts are accepted by director
- Graph/node spreadsheet combinations correlate with requirements to unlock the dialogue nodes in-game
The Not Yet graph for the first interaction with Al-Bawab. Each line connecting between nodes represents a potential dialogue option for players.
Feel free to share!
