GAME SYNOPSIS:
Eight misfit soldiers are stranded in a foreign land. Masked troops hunt them while an ominous fog lurks in the background. Can they survive all the challenges on their path to freedom? More importantly, can they survive each other?

MY ROLE:
Story Writer & Designer

DURATION:
Spring 2018 – Winter 2020

GAME PAGE:
https://brokenlinesgame.com

STEAM PAGE:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/926580/Broken_Lines

Broken Lines takes place in a fictional Eastern European nation. Guided by reference pictures from the region, we worked extensively on fleshing out the lore of the nation, including its people’s culture, fashion, beliefs, and language; I even fabricated the latter from scratch using Hungarian and Romanian for inspiration. This eventually meant that I fleshed out side characters in the area as well, such as Izkor the vendor.

The game’s combat is “simultaneous turn-based” – players plan their moves and actions at the same time as the enemy does, and then both turns play out at the same time. Since I had played many similar games in the genre (X-COM, Mutant Year Zero) and WW2 setting (Commandos, Jagged Alliance), I contributed significantly to the design and testing of the gameplay mechanics.

The bulk of my work on the game was in writing the plot, characters, and story segments that took place in-between and during the missions. Many of these segments had morally grey choices to be made, where either choice had gameplay-affecting consequences for the soldiers that the player must manage. I designed, implemented, and balanced these, and other gameplay aspects of the story (character traits, stats, etc.) too.

The plot is partially procedural: any of the main playable soldiers can die or go crazy, and the game will adapt and move on, shuffling soldiers around to “fill in the blanks”, so to speak. I not only helped design and implement the system that generated the plot, but also managed to simultaneously give each soldier a distinct personality and arc (such as Hailey, the sardonic Irish medic numbed by the blood she’s seen and spilled), and design character abilities and combat barks to match.

My QA testing of the game involved a variety of its aspects, such as as the gameplay flow, the enemy layout in levels, the user interface and UX in both combat and squad management gameplay, and the controls on both PC and the Switch port, among others. In addition, I also set up, recorded, edited, and then compiled video footage together with screenshots for the game's cinematics and marketing material.

Other areas in which I contributed to the game's development include:

• Designing some of the levels (such as Ambush, the level shown below), and also adding items and markers to enhance environmental storytelling in all the levels.

• Testing and tweaking the UX flow in some game sections.

• Administrating and contributing to the game's Discord server and Steam boards, which were the main hubs for the game's community.

• Representing the game at Gamescom 2019.