Dragon Tails | Niall Dunlop

Narrative Design and Production: Dragon Tails

Platform: PC

Engine: Unreal Engine 5

Genre: Puzzle, adventure

This was a particularly ambitious project, and one I had a lot of fun with. I had to build a world around a puzzle game with a fantasy setting, giving reason and context to game mechanics, environment and player characters.

As part of this, I developed a dialogue system, wrote a series of journals and even developed a language to flesh out the game's world.

Concept

At the beginning of the project, we were given a theme. This theme was to serve as a prompt to build our game concept around. As soon as we found out our theme- Isolation and Connection- we got to work brainstorming Ideas.

Eventually, after about a day's deliberation, we settled on our game: A puzzle game focused around the relationship between a girl and her pet dragon.

I began work on a narrative brief for each of the other roles using our Miro board: Everybody had easy access to this board and could refer to my work as they worked themselves.

With our concept settled on, we presented our pitch. For the narrative, the feedback given was to ensure everyone was fully aware of the narrative, and to ensure the narrative was seen within the game's world.

With this feedback, I began my worldbuilding in earnest to ensure the story had a strong presence within the game and its development.

The game would be set in ruins, so there are several questions that the narrative needed to answer:

who built these ruins?
where are they now?
what happened here?

To answer these, I created a fictional race based off the "Aos Si", a race of elf-like creatures from Irish Mythology. Their backstory in the world is that they served and protected the dragon's previous incarnation but were killed in a bloody battle centuries before the game's beginning.

To ensure they had a presence within the game's world, I began to work on a system of glyphs that would serve as their language, with its' own lexicon and syntax.

Initially, this language would have accompanied a series of tapestries depicting the background of the story. These were unfortunately never completed, however I created a detailed brief, outlining what the pictures should contain.

With my pre production finished and the game's world established, the next step was implementation. I built a basic Dialogue system using this tutorial: https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=hbs0xaNOeA0

I made a few changes to the code in this video: I made it so that a sound played alongside the interaction, and instead of reading the text by indexing from an array, I made the text instance editable for ease of use.

Using a beginoverlap and endoverlap event, I created a dialogue prompt sprite billboard which appears and dissapears when the player moves in and out of its range.

I also wrote a series of journals, detailing an archeological dig gone wrong, giving the story more depth and revealing details of the world outside of the game. these journals are scattered throughout the games environment.

Creating a language

With my pre production complete I began working on my language system in earnest.

At this stage, feedback from my group was that "Aos Si" was too difficult to pronounce and may confuse players, so for simplicity I changed their name simply to "The Shi"

My primary inspirations for the lexicon’s design came from Celtic knots and Egyptian Hieroglyphs.The reason I worked off these two sets of symbols is that the Shi are based off Celtic mythology, and the Egyptian Hieroglyphs is the most recognisable cipher- if you saw hieroglyphs, you would recognise that it was written text rather than a picture.

Some designs were based off other common cultural or religious symbols.The symbol for magic is based off the Yamantaka Mandala, a Buddhist art piece that depicts the true nature of reality.

The symbols for “Hero” and “Guardian” are based off the cross: a shape seen throughout different cultures, typically representing a prominent historical, cultural or religious figure, originating from paganism and popularised by Christianity.

The symbol that represents the Shi is a simple head shape, which shows off the distinguishing features of the shi, namely their pointed ears and glowing eyes. The Shi communicated telepathically as opposed to verbally, so their mouth was not depicted in this symbol.

I created a basic syntax for the language. The language would be used throughout the game in the environment,props, and story. The narrative justification for the language being simplistic is that the Shi designed it to be easily translated, with elements like past and present tense being inferred through context.

I used Adobe XD to create the symbols as it had a versatile set of tools that made working with shapes very easy.

I turned each symbol into a decal within Unreal, making it easy to apply them and spread them across the world.

Production

As well as Narrative designer, I was also co-producer on this project.

Working with Paulina Grubyte, we hosted 2 meetings a week on Discord, one chaired by me and the other by Paulina. This allowed for team members with conflicting schedules to attend one meeting or the other.

To ensure everyone was on the same page, we recorded the minutes of each meeting.

We also utilised a "daily sprint" system to ensure people were being truthful about the work they had produced; each day the team had to write what they had done, whether it was working on the project or taking a break, allowing us to account for everyone's individual contribution easily.