Sovereign Soul - Game Design
-Anthony Mercier's Portfolio
Game Writing
Detailed pieces of narrative and examples of actual gameplay, featuring details like branching narrative, how choices affect gameplay, and more.
Bloodstone - Barks Document
For one of my conceptualized games, here's a document of character & villager barks for the three main characters and some of the early villagers.
Bloodstone is an action-adventure RPG where players will interact with a wealth of surreal environment, a wintry continent in the sky where the elves have long been banished. Players seek to unite the races, escaping vampires and various nefarious characters to destroy the Bloodstone, the accursed relic which caused the separation long ago.
Each character's lines are carefully crafted to hint at rather than tell their personality, with directions for the voice artists as well as the gameplay engineer. Lines are constructed to tell bits of story, help the players realize what to do next, to spot hidden treasure, to notice specific areas that characters can interact with, and give them clues of where to head next in the story.
Embark on a Haunting Journey: Legendlore: The Reaper - Twine Adventure
Step into an immersive branching narrative adventure.
Legendlore: The Reaper invites you to dive into an immersive choose-your-own-adventure experience crafted in Twine. Begin your journey with the prologue and Chapter One, unveiling a modern world steeped in the supernatural.
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Branching Narrative: Every choice you make steers the story. I employ techniques of storing variables, dialogue choices, random chance, and more to make wide aspects of the story variating in a controlled way.
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Menu and HUD: Engage in the game with an always-accessible menu to access inventory, equipment, and stats. A header features important character information, funds, and an in-game time system.
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Relationships System: The game tracks your interactions with the cast and your impacts on them via your choices, affecting their dialogue and treatment of you.
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Time and Date System: Choices and events take up time, advancing the in-game clock to limit exploration time and foster a sense of urgency.
Shows part of the storyboard used to run the game.
Shows a panned-out view of the storyboard that runs the game.
Shows part of the introductory prologue story.
Shows part of the storyboard used to run the game.
A Narrative Challenge - Designing a Pokemon Region
It's pretty much everyone's dream at this point, and I took it as a challenge to tackle a different Pokemon region in the form of a concept videogame.
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Stepping outside of the traditional regions, Harohto is a glimpse into a darker Pokemon world where humans and Pokemon battle alongside one another.
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The Pokemon Elements are presented by elemental 'Source Crystals', the source of that elemental might. Pokemon and mankind unite to protect these mighty crystals that hold the world's stability. Guardians of the Source Crystals embed shards into their Pokemon, greatly augmenting their power and offering serious risk vs reward.
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Imagine Pokemon with multiple human party members, each with their own team! Players control their character or can swap to other party members. Pokemon act of their own accord, but you can still give them orders or fight alongside them!
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A story-driven adventure fueled by intrigue and mystery. Who is your mysterious protagonist and unique Eevee? What is your role with the Source Crystals? What kind of person are you? And... who is the villain that gathers Source Shards in great numbers?
Narrative Design - Descriptions Master Doc
A master document of all things narrative.
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Game Concepts: View a summary of two of my game concepts, a classic RPG Adventure title and a RPG-Strategy title. I summarize the concept, briefly encapsulate the characters, the defining features, and a scope of the narrative.
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Characters: I take a deeper dive into some of the characters, delving into some of their progression through the story and aspects that will be explored in-game.
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Class Descriptions: I explore some of Defenders of Laia's class system, showing progression, sample skills, class descriptions, and a brief summary of how each class works.
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Item Descriptions: Samples of some in-game items, touching on in-game lore and each item's usefulness.
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Beasts: Entries of bestiaries and descriptions of monsters and their balancing. Uses entries of worldbuilding lore to illustrate not just cardboard cutouts of monsters, but breathing aspects of the world and how they are shown.
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Lore/Books: Samples of lore entries found in-game, via books or other sources of information as a source of worldbuilding.
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Barks: Samples of character barks, ranging from in-battle to brief blurbs in the overworld. I range from things a character might say when selected, to idle dialogue that may appear when interacting with a character outside of story events.
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Dialogue Samples: Expanded on from barks, in-game conversations between characters with stage direction. Some of them are fun bantering, others have more story relevance or take place in cutscenes.
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Quest Writing: A detailed sample quest going over every aspect of the mission. Includes description, relevant barks and conversations, aspects of level design, scene direction, and more.
