Summary
The Biggest Bad That Ever Was is a turn-based tactics RPG utilizing mini-games, where you play as a misguided villain who believes the quickest path to fame is to get rid of the competition and collect new minions as you progress in gameplay.
Date: Aug 2023 – Dec 2023
Role(s): Lead & Narrative Designer, QA Management, Production, Video & Trailer Editor, Voice Actor
Platform: PC – Keyboard & Controller
Team Members: Avery Whitehead, Kiera Robie, Keegan Buckingham, William Esancy, Nicholas Tvaroha, Merle Roji, Osiah Dorman, Nicolas Siraco
Project Information
With this project, we started off not knowing exactly what we wanted to do together as a team, but ended up discovering that creating an RPG which deals with strategy and mini-game attacks was something we all liked the idea of.
As the resident narrative designer on the team, I began to conceptualize different worlds and stories that would suit this vision, with the favorite option becoming the plot of what we now know as “The Biggest Bad That Ever Was”.
I did my best to focus on interdisciplinary work as I began to flesh out the universe further, toying with different settings (fantasy, retro, etc.) until we arrived at the very modern and futuristic metropolis that the game takes place in.
I worked a lot on the characters simultaneously with my character artist, so that we could form creative villains with both fun designs and interesting backstories. Since the gameplay in combat revolved around mini-games, this also means that I could be able to discuss with the other designers on what games would suit what characters and how we could pull it off with our programmers.
Once I had a good narrative base of characters and worldbuilding complete, I spent time beginning to fully plot out the narrative for each section/level of the game, since we had always planned on doing a linear story that can be easy to follow. This meant a lot more collaboration with my level designer and environment artist during this part of the process.
Here are a few examples of the quest and level outlines I made for this game, including the beginning of what would be our tutorial section:
Game Trailer
Project Takeaways
Working on this game has been an incredible journey for me and also my teammates. I think the best part of it was how much fun we had as we created the game together, as well as the lessons we learned.
Like any large-scale group project, there were of course moments where not everything went as smoothly as hoped, but any mistakes we made were rectified and became learning moments.
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