Captain Hookfoot

Game & Narrative Designer

Play the game here!

Overview

Captain Hookfoot is a point and click puzzle game about a crew of pirates that I made along with my team for the third and final project of our Game Studio 1 course at Champlain College during our sophomore year.

We were tasked with taking inspiration from a list of movies provided to us and to use that inspiration to develop a vertical slice of our core idea within a six week time frame. The movie that we drew the most inspiration from was The Goonies, and we wanted to create a game that delivered a player experience that had a similar feeling to that of the film, most importantly the light hearted humor and the relationships between the characters.

My Work & Process

When writing the dialogue for the game, I would write rough drafts in Google Docs and then revise them to a quality that I and other team members were satisfied with. Then, using DB Browser for SQLite and my previous experience of database management, I would work inside the database that our programmer Demetri set up for the game, to implement lines of dialogue into different tables where I could attribute the character that was speaking, which portrait the game should display, and group lines of dialogue into conversations.

The conversations would then be called in a simple event system in Unity, which managed which conversation should be associated with each NPC at any given time. This process ended up being a very smooth pipeline for integrating all of the narrative content into our game, and was a big contributor to our success.

Dialogue drafts of the different character conversations written in Google Docs.

Dialogue implemented in the database organized by conversation ID with markers of which character portraits to display.

The final dialogue implemented in game through the database integration.

My Team and My Role

The members of my team were:

Maliki LaForce - Producer
Demetrius Nekos - Programmer
Eli Moore - Programmer
Isaac Herbst - Environmental Artist
Michael Aucella - Character and Object Artist
Jess Beaucher - Puzzle Designer
Ev Hintz- Narrative Designer

My role on the team was acting as the Narrative designer, and I wrote the general story of the game as well as all of the dialogue. Once we had the general story concept down, I worked with the other team members, chiefly the other designer Jess, in order to contextualize the puzzles that the player had to solve and their place in the world of the game. My job was to take the context of our game and its puzzles, and then write dialogue that allowed the player to interface with our game in a way that provided them the information they needed to progress as well as entertainment.
I tried to focus on conveying everything in a comedic way, with the player character Margaret spouting puns and jokes about what she is interacting with. However, throughout the project I tried to make sure that the comedy within the game wasn’t just an overly repetitive crutch, and I put care and effort into making the dialogue showcase the personalities of different characters, the relationships between those characters, and convey useful information to the player.