Bladebait Bog

Narrative Designer

Development Time: January 2022 - May 2022

Play the game here!

Overview

Bladebait Bog is a narrative fishing game with horror elements that my team and I created in our Game Studio 2 course at Champlain College during our semester abroad in Montreal during our Junior year.

My team of 9 students started our semester breaking out into smaller groups to ideate potential game concepts. During this process, we half joked about creating a "fishing horror" game, and all rapidly became interested in actually pursing the concept for the rest of our semester.

My Work & Process

My main responsibility throughout development was Narrative Design, although I and our other narrative designer did assist with the overall design of the game, especially in the preproduction and early production phases.

A main focus of the narrative for Bladebait Bog was capturing an element of psychological and cosmic horror. To accomplish this, we did not want to try to spook the player with cheap jump scares or other clichés of modern horror games, but instead wanted to foster a particular tone through the design of our environment, aesthetics, sound, and narrative content.

To accomplish this on the narrative front, me and the other narrative designer worked to out line two main tracks of delivering the narrative of the game to the player: Dialogue & Journal Entries.

Fish Dialogue:

For the Dialogue in Bladebait Bog we originally were going to have townspeople for the player to interact with, but decided to instead have the characters the player interacts with be the fish themselves.
The dialogue from the fish is all written in a verse form, as we wanted to convey a sort of reverence towards whatever it is that lies at the heart of the waters, from the transformed creatures of the bog.

Journal Entries:

The Journal Entries provide a separate narrative than what the fish will tell the player, but their collection still works towards the player's progress. When writing journal entries, we wanted to capture a feeling of mystery, by showing the perspective of a researched named Gilbert, who had previously explored the waters and disappeared.

I wrote the second half of the Journal Entries in the game, and was afforded the opportunity to portray Gilbert's rapid descent into mania over his self described "rapturous" discoveries.

Fishing Mechanic & Dialogue

Journal Entries

Ending Cutscene

I created this interaction using Unity's Timeline feature, and aimed to create a simple yet effective moment that would both make the player think and uncomfortable by using only sound and the visuals of the game's UI.

Upon reaching the very bottom of our play space, the player's agency is taken away as their controls cease to function, and the entire game except for the depth UI fades to black. Then, in a break from convention, the player's boat icon moves down towards the hook, implying that the player has met their fate by being dragged towards whatever lies at the heart of the bog.

Documentation

Bladebait Bog GDD.pdf

Bladebait Bog Journals.pdf