Guano
My role in the project:
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Developing the tone of the narration with my colleague Roman Cros
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Develop the ethos of secondary characters
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Staging dialogues to support missions
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Collaboration with character artists
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Writing dialogues
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Cutscene storyboard
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Challenges:
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Responsiveness to follow the evolution of Level Design needs
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Match the humorous tone of the project
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At that time, biggest team I had
Comedy
Flight
Exploration
Aventure
Guano is a project carried out in the Unreal 5 engine as an end project for the BAC in Video Game Creation. The project was spread over two semesters. The team was made up of around twenty graduates from UQAT. A group of UdeM music students was responsible for the sound design at the end of the project.
Description
Play as a delightfully dumb seagull, find food and complete quests to help free the Grand Masters and gain their powers. Harrass humans and free the Pohemeda Islands from the evil Food Inc. with your powerful poop and loud screams!
Process
Narrative Design
Throughout development, Roman and I adjusted and provided materials for the different missions in Guano. Very often, an order would come to us with the constraints (mechanics, environments, etc.) and we would have to produce a narrative context in return. This had to include the character who gives the quest and the dialogues which clearly indicate the objectives of the mission. Over time, certain characters have been associated with a certain mission archetype. For example, it makes more sense that our handywoman Dr. Squawkson asks you to test her flying buoys, untested of course.
Also, it was our task to ensure that the overall story adjusted to the rapidly changing size of the Pohemeda Islands.
While my colleague worked on the environmental storytelling, I took care of having a two-way collaboration with the character artists. A narrative sheet could line up an artist. Conversely, an idea explored visually can greatly deepen a character by giving them a posture, expression, etc. It often happened that a character idea did a 180 degree to follow the vein discovered. The end results were therefore a beautiful collaborative process.
Game Writing
This project allowed me to practice writing dialogue more since it was one of the main axes for transmitting information about the world of Guano. I couldn't rely solely on descriptions like other projects. This allowed me to grapple with the difficult balance between 1) the clarity of essential information for the player and 2) that the characters retain their personality.
Additionally, I started the project with no prior experience writing material in a humorous tone. I think I was able to instill a touch of humor through the eccentricities of the characters.
© Bianca St-Germain
© Bianca St-Germain