In-Game Content
In-game content enhances story. The Golden Path won't hold interest forever: eventually, the player will explore what else the game has to offer.
Item descriptions, audio collectibles, codex entries and more evolve the narrative experience by contextualizing game assets, cultivating tone, and rewarding players for completing additional gameplay content.
This added content meets the player on their own terms, smack-dab between the writer's story and the player's story.
Bestiary Codex
Fantasy Action RPG
Bestiary Sample
Enemies. The Big Baddies standing between the Player and their objective.
These enemies are key to challenging the Player's skill and progression. And once they've spent hours taking in a monster's design and memorizing its powerful moves, they'll ask the question: what's this guy's deal anyway?
These Bestiary entries from the sample ARPG, Beastbreaker, seek to give each monster a "deal". Written from the POV of Ita Haart, a scholarly NPC, Bestiary Logs appear in the Codex Menu after the Player’s first in-game encounter with each respective monster, emergent or scripted.
Each brief details creature characteristics, expands in-universe lore, and highlights gameplay tactics to defeat said monster.
Of Wights and Men
Collectible Audio Logs
Single Player, Action-Adventure
Audio Collectible Sample
Game worlds are filled with stories.
To breathe life into the setting, characters and conflict must exist outside of the main story. Audio collectibles allow writers to tell minor tales with an episodic approach, rewarding the player's investment and progression through an unfolding narrative. To be effective, these audio snippets should be brief and direct, easily understood without taking gas out of the Golden Path.
In Deadlands Rising, a sample Action/Adventure title, players journey across a post-apocalyptic wasteland crawling with Wights, the soulless undead. This Audio Collectible Set, entitled Of Wights and Men, uses six V.O. snippets – each under 400 characters and targeting 30 seconds in length – to tell the story of a man and his estranged father as they roadtrip across the desolate land in search of a cure.
Item Descriptions
Fantasy/Horror ARPG
Item Descriptions Sample
One constant in games are items - the tools players use to push their gameplay experience forward. These can be inventory items, gameplay modifiers, weapons, or cosmetics – whatever the case may be, these items exist within the game's world and demand language befitting of the game's tone.
These weapon descriptions for Dominion of Fire are crafted to highlight weapon rarity, thematics, and gameplay abilities with personality and flair, leaning into the horror genre by utilizing harsh phrasing and recalling disturbing imagery. Additionally, varied word choice and a limited word count [20] ensures that descriptions avoid repetition and make use of economic brevity.