I was the first person to join the Neighborhoods team as a Narrative designer, which meant I had my work cut out for me. During my time on the project I built narrative pipelines and structures from scratch: making style guides, building core narrative system architecture, and writing design docs. And in case you were wondering... I also did (*gasp!*)... writing.
Barking up the right tree!
One of my first tasks on the project was buffing out our neighbors' barks. As a game fueled by systems, we needed to build up reactivity; NPCs needed to respond to any game state the player could make. I set to work making a host of barks for anything the neighbors would need to respond to: happiness, sadness, new businesses, closed businesses, their own personal quirks and hobbies, and more.
Since it's hard to get people to look at a spreadsheet of text (even within a development team), I also made dioramas to showcase my dialogue! Don't worry spreadsheet fans, I'll link the full sheet below.
As promised, you can find the portfolio spreadsheet of barks I wrote for the game at this link.
Chitter-Chatter
While barks were already a planned feature by the time I joined the project, I wanted to push for stronger storylines within each level. The first step was to make each NPC more unique, through expanding our quirk tags.
Each NPC has a quirk that alters their simulated needs and gives them a bit more personality. While expanding the quirks, I realized that we could also use them as unique identifiers to tell longer narratives. From that, the social chatter system was born.
The social chatter system is a pool of handwritten dialogue chains with prerequisite tags, like quirk or satisfaction level. The game procedurally assigns them to NPCs who match the required tags.
Once a piece of chatter runs, there is a chance that the next time one happens, it will be a continuation of an earlier story. These continuations can branch based on the state of the world, or the NPCs who were selected to say them when first initialized. This lets us tell longer stories that show the player's impact on the neighbors' lives.
Like before, if you want to see a larger selection of the dialogue chains I wrote, you can find them at this link.
An edit a day keeps the errors away.
During my time on Neighborhoods, I also did a considerable amount of editing, in a few forms. I did copy editing of course, but nobody wants to hear about that. I also did line editing and rewrites for some fun things like our trailer and steam page. You can see the products of my work just by looking there!
I also had the opportunity to do narrative design editing, making sure that all of the lines written by any of our writers were properly tagged, organized, and implemented, to maintain just the right amount of nonsense. If you have a tag that allows NPCs to be vegan, you have to make sure those NPCs aren't going to be talking about eating meat!
Those are the less glamorous parts of the job, but things like that keep the buy-in and immersion airtight so the rest of the game can do its work.
If you want to see how all of this work comes together, check out Neighborhoods on Steam!