UNANNOUNCED RPG

Studio: 5TH Cell Media

Position: Content Designer, Junior Cinematic Scripter

Responsibilities:

– Designing and later interpreting narrative description to translate into character and prop placement.

– Working with a proprietary data inputting tool used for content generation in Unreal Engine.

– Collaborating with other Designers & Writers across the globe to deliver high quality contents.

– Setting up blockouts and cinematic scripting through UE’s Blueprints.

– Playtesting and reviewing contents.

Somewhere in March 2022, I was recruited as a Content Design contractor for an unannounced project, created by 5TH Cell Media and funded by a big entertainment company. The project was an Action RPG that features Rogue-like elements and story-driven adventure, where the player’s choices can lead to different outcomes and change how they can progress the overarching story.

Due to many reasons, the game wasn’t able to be released, so I couldn’t go into detail about it, but I’ll try to summarize what I was responsible for in this post, and I’m more than happy to give some samples upon request.

As mentioned, originally as a Content Designer, my main job was to set up scenes in the game (you can say they were quests or missions in other games), which involved:

1. Wrote dialogues based on the general direction from the Lead & Director.

2. Inputted dialogues into a proprietary data tool, which later generated in Unreal Engine.

3. Set up blockouts in Unreal Engine, then scripted some basic cinematics through UE’s Blueprints.

Blockout Setup using props and meshes from Art department

4. Performed playtest and made sure everything felt right and connected to the previous / next scenes.

5. If it didn’t feel good or interesting, or if I didn’t make sense, I repeated the process.

Since the game was really heavily emphasized on branching story, combined with rogue-like approach, it was crucial to have vast amount of scenes to keep every game session interesting, and content designers needed to do rapid implementations and iterations, while maintaining the quality.

Later in 2022, we brought dedicated writers on board to scale up the project. I was slowly shifting away from writing dialogues, and steered my focus on implementing and helping out Cinematic department as a Junior Cinematic Scripters. Still, I was responsible for all scenes that I worked on, either my own scenes or other content designers’ scenes if I had the chance to refine their cinematic sequences.

Since I was in two different shoes, I developed better communication method, providing feedbacks to writers and occasionally content designers to make sure every scene met the end requirement.