Narrative Process - Yugari's Rampage

Yugari's Rampage is a Game Jam project created for the 8th Magical Girl Gamejam. The project began in August 2023 and was completed in September 2023. I was the narrative director, which placed me in charge of planning the narrative, creating the characters, writing the dialogue, and heading communication between the art team and gameplay team to maintain cohesion. This was a small team of four members and we worked remotely using Discord and Google Suite to complete the project over a month.

Creative Process

The process for creating the narrative of Yugari's Rampage began with a literal interpretation and over a few days of research, became a more organic narrative thanks to the collaboration between team members. I knew that creating the characters would be my first priority, so I created the characters through a workflow of research, draft presentation, writing, and revision.

Research

The themes of the Game Jam were revealed and the team discussed possible choices. The team lead had created a proof of concept image, which included a witch and egg based magic based on the them of "Making the mother of all omelettes here." (from Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance). We decided on three boss characters and our protagonist. I began researching magical girl characters to create a baseline character template for our artist to begin drafting their designs.
At this stage, communication between the team was rapid as I offered up concepts and got feedback on possible narrative directions.

Draft Presentation

I chose to offer up a draft presentation of different story concepts with the goal of establishing a theme for our narrative. I presented three different narrative concepts, each with a different tone. The team together agreed that the more comedic narrative concept was the best fit and I worked with our artist to finalize the personalities for the characters so they could begin line art.

Writing

I plotted out the basic plot beats and after discussing system limitations, began writing out the pre and post boss fight dialogue. I used fighting games and their arcade modes as an inspiration to create flavorful dialogue that allowed the characters personalities to shine.
I wanted the main character to seem reckless, but not callous, to maintain the goofy and comedic tone. I tried to apply that reckless, in a rush, tone in the pre-fight banter, but leave the more sympathetic and regretful dialogue in the post fight dialogue.
I found a template for dialogue using Google Sheets that allowed me to track dialogue as well as word count, which after a discussion with our programmer, I altered to track character count.
Once our artist finished the first drafts for our characters, I began to research names for our characters. Our team lead had wanted to maintain Japanese names to match the magical girl aesthetic, so I took a day to research kanji and the naming conventions for magical girls, which are often very connected to the nature of their powers.
Once completed, I sent out the dialogue for the characters for feedback and revision. I kept in regular contact with the lead and submitted some ideas for possible boss abilities that would explore their powers and personalities, though they unfortunately were not implemented due to time constraints.

Bonus

Due to unfortunate circumstances, our team member in charge of sound and music was not able to deliver all the tracks for the game. As I had already completed the writing portions of the game, I spent the last few days searching for royalty free music tracks that we could use that would fit our unfilled music slots.
I collaborated with our artist, who also had finished their section of the game, and we divided the search. I focused more on retro sounding tracks while they searched for more modern tracks. Eventually, our Team Lead chose two of my retro tracks for the finished product.
Finally, I spent the final day playtesting the game. Thankfully catching a few bugs as well as one last mix up where the Apple version of the game was uploaded into every folder.

What I learned from this project.

This project took a month to complete and I finished my research and writing in a little over three weeks. I was able to strategically focus on the characters and their personalities as the game was very linear in its progression.

Specifically, I believe this project taught me a great deal about dialogue and establishing characters in short snappy dialogue. The system that we had meant that each line of dialogue could only be a certain length which kept me to impactful lines that really let the characters establish their traits.

It was also a lesson in how important research can be to establishing a character. I was able to pull from a lot of different media and use specific examples of characters traits, voice, and personalities to showcase how I wanted a character to look and feel to the team.

Finally, the most important thing that this project taught me was the importance of communication. There were a lot of pitfalls in this game that came about, but by opening up dialogues with all the team members, we were able to quickly and efficiently find solutions and implement them to ship a finished product. Something I will make sure to take into future projects is establishing an environment where all team members can be clear about what they can and cannot do, so that everyone is comfortable with leaning on other team members to solve problems.