Star Citizen

NEW GAMEPLAY PILLAR

I had the fun & honor of helping bring Star Citizen’s first official racing missions to life. I:

• Developed the background for Wildstar Racing — the organization in charge of the racing missions.

• Wrote the initial racing missions, establishing the voice & tone of the Wildstar organization.

• Worked with level designers to name the racing tracks, paying tribute to community contributions.

• Worked with gameplay designers to set tiers of achievement for lap times.

• Worked with product owner to develop a narrative foundation for future development of racing gameplay pillar

WORLDBUILDING & STORYTELLING

The Tevarin species are one of the few alien species in the Star Citizen universe. As a writer, I enjoyed the opportunity to collaborate with other members of the narrative team to expand upon the lore of this avian species.

• Wrote well received short story (“Crossroads”) featuring Tevarin main character & introducing new lore to the species.

• Participated in internal narrative workshop to expand upon culture, history, and characteristics of the Tevarin species.

• Suggested designs and names for Tevarin equipment utilizing the con-lang glossaries created by other members of the narrative team.

TOOLTIPS, DESCRIPTIONS, & STRINGS

As a live-service game Star Citizen regularly releases new weapons, armor, and miscellaneous items. The narrative team is a bookend for this development pipeline.

Beginning: The narrative team gives every weapon a narrative identity according to the design goals of the gameplay team, First, we select or create a detailed fictional brand responsible for the item’s creation. Then we decide how that company would market the item to its audience.

End: As a last step, the narrative team edits each item to better reflect its final look and design. Then, we input the actual text for the name and description of each item into the game’s string management software.

QUEST CHAIN

[Redacted]

• Wrote multiple scripts with full branching NPC dialogue

• Wrote & outlined connected quest chain deeply connected to central lore of setting. Intended to be one of the first major chapters of the main story.

NAME AND BRANDING

Even paints each needed individual names — this is the real trenches of writing for a video game with such a high volume of items. How many sci-fi sounding names can you come up with for a variation of teal?

All jokes aside, I enjoyed getting to collaborate with the narrative team to name a number of ships. For each one we picked suitable fictional brands from the universe and developed the history behind each ships development.

My lasting contribution is the name of the MISC Fortune.

QUEST DESIGN & WORLDBUILDING

During my time at Cloud Imperium Games I contributed to many missions that made their way into Star Citizen. Here are just a few examples:

• Foundational Racing Missions

• “Data Heist” mission debuting a new quest archetype

• Procedural mission design for many mission categories (combat & non-combat)

• Missions for new star system (Pyro) tied to interests of established factions

• Missions and new factions for new star system (Nyx) with histories and identities for every faction that correlated to certain categories of missions.

• Multiplayer missions that were broadcasted publicly to large player groups.

BARKS & MISCELLANEOUS WRITING

In addition to working on Star Citizen I also had the opportunity to work on Squadron 42, a AAA single-player action-adventure RPG set in the same universe as Star Citizen.

I helped write a number of barks for generic NPCs throughout the game, and did other miscellaneous narrative tasks including:

• Interface / Player UI text

• Item Names & Descriptions

• Playtesting & Proofreading

THE NEW, NEW PLAYER EXPERIENCE

During my time working on Star Citizen one of the major projects I undertook involved representing the narrative team in the development of a new tutorial to introduce players to the game, from their very first steps.

I worked closely with a mission designer to establish a light, narrative premise for the mission chain.

Under tight constraints, I wrote a clear set of mission instructions and accompanying UI tip text intended to help facilitate the player’s entry to the ‘verse.