Contraband
Avalanche Studios
Narrative Designer (2019 - 2025)
Contraband was the first project I joined during its early phases of development, as opposed to my past experiences of pushing a project through its final year of development, or maintaining a live service experience. This process was eye-opening and rewarding for me, as I had much more influence over the direction of many of our characters and world-building elements. While the project unfortunately ceased development after 6 years, that time was spent developing my narrative design skills to accommodate a much larger remit, beyond my previously specific focus of cinematic implementation.
World Building
Branding
I spent months researching the real-life brands of 1970s South-East Asia, aiming to create a series of brands that were accurate for the period and place, but would also allow us to make our world feel “real”.
This work included coming up with histories and iconography for the brands that our players would interact with directly, such as cars, weapons and clothing.
On top of this, I took a great deal of time to research and create “decorative” brands that players would only ever see on store shelves, in our NPC’s homes, or in advertising. From biscuits and tea to motor oil and power tools.
I collaborated closely with our internal art team and external partners, coming up with in-world logos, colour schemes and marketing materials for some of these brands.
I participated in the legal checking process for our in-game brand names. This has taught me that if you can think of an animal that is fast or strong, there’s probably already at least one car with that name.
I wrote most of our item descriptions, as part of a collaborative effort across the narrative team.
A Cast Of Characters
Across the narrative design team, we shared responsibility for the creation and evolution of a range of named characters. Many of them were crafted to match a brief from our directors, but several of my characters were almost a by-product of the many hours of research that I’d been doing for some other world building element.
Creating a cast of anti-heroes and villains that were intended to reinforce, underline, or otherwise represent a theme that we wanted our game to convey. Some were very clearly connected to major cultural elements of the time and place, such as the cold war and the proliferation of microchip technology.
Adjusting pre-existing characters to match changes to the game’s tone. With our stable of characters established, we did make major adjustments to their personalities as the game’s tone shifted during development. This process made me much better at identifying what was at the core of a character, and what could be changed without making that core crumble to dust.
Creating documentation and collaborating with the art team to ensure that my written character designs matched the visual representations that we were generating for them.
Placing our named characters in the world. This involved creating a template for “contact compounds”, and designing spaces where our characters could be approached. This template would dictate the rules for these locations (ensure the character is protected, permit the player to access the location easily etc.) The locations themselves were reflections of the characters that existed inside them, and gave us insight into their daily lives.
As a team, we would submit our own work for peer review, and we’d give feedback on the work of others. This collaboration often led to inspiration, where we could see how our characters might relate to one another.
I created and contributed to a matrix of our character and faction interactions, with the aim of creating a network of characters that knew each other, and would have canonical ideas about each other that would inform our writing.
Creating internal pitches for entire factions, including their named characters, rituals, traditions, appearance, organisation & hierarchies.
Voice Over
During most of my time on Contraband, we had a dedicated VO specialist within the narrative design team. I wished to grow my skillset, and to be able to cover during periods where our VO specialist was busy or on vacation, so I volunteered to learn more about VO implementation. This was very useful, as when our NYC office was closed in the summer of 2024, we lost our VO specialist and I needed to cover that responsibility for a few months.
I could complete a loop where I took a VO line from inception, all the way to implementation with minimal/no assistance.
Writing VO lines to a brief. Most of these were either radio lines during missions, or face-to-face dialogues with major characters.
Generating temporary VO lines (Using Elevenlabs or in-house lines).
Updating our stringtable (using our editor and Gridly).
Implementing and triggering lines during gameplay.
Contraband was where I learned the ND art of writing barks. This process had a few stages that I was directly involved in.
Writing briefs for the dialogue styles of particular factions or enemy archetypes, ensuring tonal consistency with their wider design.
Collaborating with the mission and gameplay teams, and playing the game to understand what would be triggering our barks.
Writing the barks themselves, and updating our string table so that they could be hooked in by our VO specialist.
I learned how to add efforts to our player and enemy combat animations, which involved digging into the animations and manually placing triggers for grunts and exertions.
Designing Narrative Systems
During my time on Contraband, I designed some of our narrative-focused systems. This process normally involved receiving a brief from my lead or possibly a director, then working iteratively to generate a design document.
Narrative Pickups - Essentially our collectible notes that we could use to tell stories outside of VO.
Contact Compounds - The design of the spaces that would house our major characters.
Item Descriptions - We chose to use the item descriptions as a means to tell stories about our world. Some would be abstract and esoteric, while others might answer questions the player had about the game.
Cinematics - This was a collaborative effort, but during the development of Contraband, I was seconded to another team for 6 months to write documentation for our cinematic implementation tools, and design an optimal workflow. This is work that I brought back to Contraband.
Collaboration
Over the course of my 6 years on Contraband, my areas of responsibility shifted over time. When I began, I was transitioning from junior to experienced, and when our NYC office closed, I became the only narrative designer on this large-scale AAA project. I was lucky enough to have a good support system around me, as well as having picked up some of the skills I needed to keep going while we waited for a narrative lead and a VO designer to join us. For almost a year, I had no lead to report to, and so I had to step up and maintain or generate workflows that left me out of my comfort zone.
In some cases, I became the de-facto lead, especially when interacting with other disciplines, such as audio or mission design.
Collaboration with other teams became especially important, and finding a workflow that suited all parties became a regular part of my work. I could no longer rely on information to trickle down to me from my lead, and I became more assertive in chasing down answers.
I developed good working connections with my counterparts in other teams, but I also found myself talking more frequently with project management.
I also took on the informal tutoring/mentoring of some of my team, as the project’s demands resulted in a need for more narrative designers. The distinction between writer and ND was firmly reinforced during this process, but I believe all parties developed their skills and understanding during this time.