Play the game here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3350820/The_Crossroads/  

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This title was released in December 2024. This is my third shipped title and I was a Narrative Designer, with additional Producer responsibilities.​

My responsibilities and roles in this project:​

• Character design and writing

• Narrative implementation

• Steamworks and Steam page setup (including the teaser video)

• Leading meetings

• Setting tasks on Jira

• Presenting our current build weekly

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As part of my work as a Narrative Designer, I worked on the character Valerian. An ancient dragon trying to adjust to a cyberpunk world that has moved on without him. I wrote and implemented the entirety of Valerian’s story using tools designed by our programmer. We were a team of 6 with some extra outsourcing, and we also had 12 weeks to go through the entire production pipeline. 

With a much smaller team this time, communication was much smoother (but not without issue) and we followed a more indie studio approach than the AAA structure of previous years. We used Jira and Confluence for the first time and this really helped streamline our work and organise our tasks using a work breakdown structure.

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Some of the issues we ran into were difference of opinion on some of the character stories and flow. We resolved this by holding more meetings and working together to create something that we all agreed on. However, this took far too long to solve as the problem team member was not willing to back down easily. We had to compromise and rush things so that the game would feel complete.

One example that stands out is that I had set our tasks to focus on one day of gameplay to be written, QA'd and then re-written after feedback before implementation. One member of the group wrote multiple days and implemented them without going through the QA process or the second drafts. This meant the other 3 designers had to rush to write the rest, and implement it without much QA. I took back the reigns and made us all QA what had gone into the build, but this is where more issues arose. A team member was unwilling to take feedback and rework their character/story without significant pushing from all of us. As the lead, I was being undermined but the team member could not be kicked from the team at this point. I did my best to mediate and reason, and we eventually got to a middle ground, but we lost a few weeks to this argument.