Decomposition is a survival horror experience that follows Gareth Zeal, a guilt-ridden man encouraged by his husband to reconcile with his estranged brother Gawain Zeal after many years. After tracking his brother down to an abandoned church, he discovers his brother has merged with an infestation of reality bending rot. Gawain begs Gareth to deliver him dead corpses from the cemetery outside in order to keep him in control. With each body that is brought, the church building sinks deeper into a cavernous maze below that is crawling with monsters created by the rot.
Working in a 3d game.
Going from writing primarily text-based games to working as the lead narrative designer for a 3d survival horror experience was a big change. The largest struggles I’ve had to face so far is how the creation of assets and environments completely changes workflow that I’m used to with Visual Novels. Due to how long it takes to make content, I’m needed to provide content for programmers, environmental modelers and concept artists to iterate on a lot of the earlier than I expected. This meant lots of documentation and meetings all the time to communicate my progress effectively with the rest of the team.
Now that the team is much later development, the limitations of our team are also starting to force necessary changes to the lofty goals we had set originally. Lots of revisions and changes due to playtesting. It’s been a very stressful yet extremely rewarding process that requires me to be in close communication with nearly every member of the fantastic team I am working with.
I have learned so much from working on this game.
concept art by DudalMaster
Scale and balance.
One of my primary concerns with this project is maintaining a balance with gameplay and narrative. A huge focus of the narrative design work so far has been finding unobtrusive ways to tell our story during gameplay that still gives lots of room for tension during monster encounters. Environmental storytelling is required to do a lot of the heavy lifting during gameplay sections. Which ALSO has become increasingly tricky because of the shrinking scope of our game. This has given me a lot of great experience in trimming the fat and finding new ways of slipping in story, but it is still an ongoing process.
concept art by DudalMaster