SunnySide

With this game, our biggest writing goal was to make the residents of SunnySide feel dynamic, interesting, and fully actualized. When I first came onto the project, initial character art had been created and the roles and professions of each NPC character had been decided, but the backgrounds and personalities all needed a complete overhaul. My first main assignment on the game was to comb through prior documentation and rework each character. Towards our goal, it was important to consider the family and neighbor dynamics between characters as I went about developing their personalities so that the NPC questlines would feel organic and compelling. Further, we knew we wanted nearly every resident of SunnySide to be a potential love interest, so it helped early on to identify the appeal and type of attraction each character brought.

I began working on my initial pitches for NPC questlines in tandem with finishing character sheets. In addition to showcasing our cast of characters, it was important for these questlines to return again and again to the overarching themes of the game: harmony and balance. Working with these intentions in mind, many of the questlines went through countless iterations. I created story maps for each questline before pitching them to my boss and reworking them based on feedback. Eventually, we decided to loop the romance arcs into the NPC questline pitches. While the romancing mechanic was mostly unaffected by the NPC questlines, it had become clear that the best way to make these characters dynamic and compelling was to develop all facets of them all at once. Once pitches were approved, we wrote dialogue for each of the individual story beats, then mapped out the scenes in Unreal Engine.

This project presented a number of hurdles and new challenges for me. Due to localization needs, the scope of dialogue was cut in half a few weeks before we were set to wrap dialogue. Editing within this kind of constraint was not new to me, but leveraging the original intent with the approaching deadline was a balancing act. Further, SunnySide takes place in modern Japan, so it was necessary to conduct extensive cultural research. Through all of this, however, I had the support of my team, and was given a golden opportunity to expand my skills. I was very happy with the final product, and was honored to have my first shipped title have both a Steam and console release.