Indigo Levy
Oxalis Games
Hi! I’m Indigo Levy, Senior Narrative Designer currently working at Oxalis Games on our first project – a life-sim, live-service RPG called Moonfrost. My primary responsibilities on the project revolve around narrative design and game writing – I design, plan out and oversee all systems & features related to telling our narrative, as well as being the sole writer for the project (meaning all our lore, narrative, quests and dialogue).
I studied Creative Writing & Game Design at Brunel university, receiving a First Class Honours when I graduated in 2018.
I immediately got a job at Mediatonic as a Junior Designer working on a Microsoft project called Gears Pop!, a mobile game set in the Gears of War universe, in which I was responsible for our content management systems and part of a two-person balancing and content design team.
Two years and a promotion later, I was moved as a Mid-level Designer to focus on feature and system design for a Scopely published title, Yahtzee with Buddies - a top-grossing casual mobile title.
I then spent a year working on physics-based battle royale Fall Guys after Epic’s studio acquisition, where my feature and system design skills continued to develop.
At this point, I decided I wanted to specialise in narrative design, and was very fortunate when an Art Lead I had previously worked with got in touch asking if I was interested in joining her new studio. With only a genre and a game title, my job was to figure out what the story of Moonfrost is, how we’re going to tell it, and how we can create something never-ending to bring players back for years to come…
Indigo Levy is speaking at the following session/s
Creating a World from a Word
This session will outline a step-by-step process that starts with nothing and ends in a storyworld; a fully fleshed-out narrative and world that players will want to return to.
I will take the audience through a breakdown of my process - created through my own personal experiences and challenges - which will also involve an explanation on why narrative is so vital to creating successful games, including specific examples of games currently released that have seen tangible benefits through the use of narrative.
I will go through each step I identified and undertook one-by-one, in order to offer an approach to narrative design that can add value to whatever project you may be working on, and help you make informed and rationale-based decisions to better serve your own projects. Notable steps of the process will include things such as designing systems to tell your story, forming restrictions and theories to help create something potentially wonderful from nothing, and coping mechanisms when the daunting task ahead of you seems a little too intimidating…
From experience, a little step can take you a long way. I hope to share some of the knowledge I’ve accumulated in the last two years to help anyone else who may eventually, or already is, walking in similar shoes - with the aim of making a daunting task a little more bite-size and manageable.
Session Takeaway
- What narrative design is, and why it’s so valuable
- A process for coming up with a narrative from scratch
- How to communicate that narrative in your game
- How to develop your design skills in order to make decisions that will most benefit the game
- How to create a narrative that will develop a strong emotional connection between the player and the game
Session speakers
