Lands of Azadi
Sci-fi Fantasy MMORPG
Lands of Azadi is a sci-fi fantasy MMORPG in development by Ready4Player Studio. In my time there, I had the pleasure to craft much of the lore and backstory for this iconic world, as well as quests, dialogues, barks, and cinematic scripts for their game demo.
Beginning with endless possibilities, it was the narrative department’s job to find central themes and motifs which we wanted to explore in the game world. From the main storyline of the game to the demo’s core questline, my team crafted a coherent and evocative narrative that would make even those who don’t prefer to play MMOs enjoy the experience.
Due to NDA, some information is excluded from this example.
As Narrative Design—Team Lead, it was my duty to project manage our team’s tasks and ensure consistency. Using Trello boards and Notion wikis, I organized our agile workflows and continuously updated our database of content.
Thankfully, I have been project managing teams for many years, both running my own business and in academic settings, such as writing projects and archaeological excavations.
Lore
To create a world with clear principles and physics that govern it, we began by developing a system that incorporated key gameplay aspects into the fabric of the lore. Using these key gameplay aspects became our cornerstone for crafting a coherent narrative.
I am a huge nerd for worldbuilding, so took the lead in this part of the narrative design team’s responsibilities. Using a system of different races and cultures that ties into the key gameplay aspects, we were able to come up with five distinct races and a number of cultures that all have ancient histories and loree binding them together.
In the early stages, moodboards and presentations became a key way for us to communicate our ideas internally and to the other teams, ensuring that we were developing content consistently.
Cultures and Races
From the world that we created, distinct races and cultures needed to be expanded upon and understood in a way that transcended mere slapped-on names and AI-generated images can accomplish. This is where collaborating with the level design and art teams became very important. Our concepts in words needed to translate into experienceable 3D content fluidly.
My background in history and archaeology became pivotal in creating the different cultures and inspiring the aesthetic feel of each. By blending a variety of aspects of earth cultures and art styles, we began to develop our own, unique style to each of Azadi’s cultures.
Characters
From these unique races and cultures, key characters emerged from our brainstorming. We needed to make NPCs that players cared about and related to. One of the ways we did this was to write short stories and detailed bios of a number of characters that we found intriguing.
I went so far as to make an outline for a novel and write a few chapters set in the world of Azadi as well, but realize that this endeavor would take too much of our time away from making gameplay narrative. However, the outline and stories did give us a good grounding for further developing Azadi’s history and lore further, and it birthed one of the key antagonists for the game.
Quests
As with most RPGs, a quest system for the player is an essential part of gameplay. The narrative team’s job in developing the quests involved developing a flow that dictated the rise and fall of intensity in gameplay. Players needed to feel a sense of accomplishment even in the tutorial phases as well as danger and urgency in the battles with enemies.
Finding the right pacing for our demo was key to setting up the NPC interaction and dialogues that populate the quests and world. Once we had a clear idea of the pacing and flow, we wrote descriptions for the quests for the UI, including tutorials, side quests, and the main questline into an engaging and immersive experience.
Though I would have loved to use a narrative design program, like articy:draft 3, to organize our work, time and other constraint forced us to plan out our quests and dialogues with Figma, then copy the work directly into Unreal Engine 5.
Using the greyblocking map to plan player progression through the level was a key part of our collaboration with the Level Design team.
Dialogues and Barks
Writing the dialogues and barks for the demo was a collaborative effort between different members of the team. Two of the key characters I took on writing the dialogues for were the burly lumberjack and the mayor’s daughter, our potential love interest for the demo.
These two characters’ stories specifically related to my own experiences as a blue-collar worker in my youth and a writer for casual games with a romantic emphasis. Also, having years of experience as a copywriter and proofreader aided me in making sure that each character’s tone of voice was consistent and eliminating any grammatical or spelling errors.
Cinematics
The final part of our narrative design team’s work that I would like to highlight here is the cinematic scripts. Working closely with the Cinematics Team, we developed an opening cinematic to introduce the player to the world, as well as cutscenes to break up the gameplay throughout the demo.
My experience writing for dramatic productions greatly aided our ability to seamlessly incorporate our scripts into animated cinemtatics. But we certainly would never have been able to make such a great product without the help of other industry professionals who made the storyboards, models, environments, and animations for the cinematics. As with everything in game development, collaboration and cooperation are key to developing the best end results.