Echoes of Crius

Platform: PC
Engine: Unity Engine 2022.3.18f1, Articy Draft X
Development Time: 1 month
Team Size: 7
Developers: May Watkinson, Six other classmates
My Role(s): Writer, Narrative Designer, System Designer

Echoes of Crius is a short turn-based RPG with splitting story paths and several alternate endings inspired by anime and games from the mecha genre. The game has a dark story with intense details describing the violent mech fights, and the inherent horror of operating a war machine interfaced with your own mind.
My Contributions to this project include:

Brainstorming the game’s core concept with other members of the team.
Balanced the equipment the player is given for the limited RPG battle portions of the game.
Assisted in revising and editing.
Assisted in playtesting.

Handling all the writing for multiple large sections of the game.
Implemented my contributions to the plot and script into Articy:draft, as well as programming the split story pathways.

Designing for Brutality

An image showing an example of dialogue flow in Echoes of Crius. Click to view the full-size image.

Out of all the narrative design projects I worked on, Echoes of Crius was by far the most mature in terms of violence and themes, featuring mech combat that does not spare any grisly details, and explores concepts like identity death, betrayal, and body horror.

An image showing another example of dialogue flow in Echoes of Crius. Click to view the full-size image.

Because of the level of maturity in this project, it afforded me the chance to be the most descriptive I’ve been in any of my narrative design projects. Because of this, it remains my favorite project in terms of sheer writing.

Not Having Full Control Over the Narrative

As a project for a narrative design class, every member of the team was meant to have some meaningful contribution to the game’s plot, writing, and gameplay integration. This project taught me how to work with concepts that were not initially my idea. While many elements of the game’s story and the implementation of most story beats were still a group effort, and not a single person’s concept, compromises still needed to be made. Our best way to remedy this “too many cooks in the kitchen” problem was to perform multiple group brainstorming sessions to blueprint an overall plot, as well as concepts for gameplay integration.

This, and the above image is a sample of dialogue options, and NPC responses to those options in Echoes of Crius. All of the branching options were written by May, and the responses by the other writer. Click either image to view the full-size version.

I, as well as another writer on the project were assigned to one of the game’s two possible finales. This provided me the experience in matching the tone of others in a collaborative work, and not getting too involved in my own writing style. While I don’t believe I did this perfectly during this project (see the previous section), this project gave me the experience needed to better match that in the future. Additionally, this gave me a chance to explore how branching dialogue options can be used to make combat more meaningful, and how to weave narrative elements into it diabetically.