Story of Development

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The Brief: 

The Co-labs unit is a free form creative unit where we are free to create what we desire, once I learned of this I approached some of my friends that I knew would want to work on a TTRPG idea I had together. After we had formed a team, we brainstormed ideas on what we wanted to create. I thought this was a good idea to be able to introduce new concepts for the module, so that I didn’t steamroll my team with ideas I already had for the world setting and story.

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Researching Table Top Role Playing Games:

Lost Mines of Phandelver and The Players Handbook, both official content by Wizards of The Coast for DnD 5th Edition, formed the backbone of my research into the writing style and formatting of our 3rd party content.

When researching the formatting and writing style of Dungeons and Dragons 5th edition content I read the Players Handbook and Lost Mine of Phandelver. These being Wizards of the Coast’s official release material for the game greatly informed the writing process for the project and design of the story. The players handbooks

Whilst I had already come up with a significant number of ideas for the world setting prior to the unit the story itself needed fleshing out. To this end I sought out modern media with extensive worldbuilding and stories that highlight them well, these included Adventure Time and Black Clover which both prominently feature plot devices known as MacGuffins.

I also took inspiration from historical events. The climactic finale of the story where the capital city is flooded, and the lower-class undercity destroyed was inspired by research into the Titanic where the survival rates dropped off significantly with social class.

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Project Management:

As the one who brought the team together with a vision for a project, I became the team lead and assigned everyone in the project a role they were responsible for as a way of dividing up work. This way we could work on separate parts of the module and bring them together in one final piece towards the end. I was head of design for the whole project directing others on art, mechanic design, and narrative design, all while writing the sessions for the campaign.

Throughout the unit we worked well off an agile scrum methodology, due to our game development backgrounds, with weekly sprints to focus our efforts on what needed to be done to complete the project. We were able to look back on the week and say what went well, what didn’t and how we could change what we were doing to move forward.

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Development and Skills gained:

My contributions to this project were substantial throughout the development. Not only did I lead the team organising sprints and delegating tasks, but I also embraced the role of writer for the campaign creating large amounts of the written content seen in the PDF above including combat encounters, unique game mechanics and the guided narrative which makes up the bulk of DnD modules. Moreover, I functioned as chief editor ensuring content written by others was upheld to the DnD 5th edition standard. From this process my skills in project management and design across the board flourished.

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Scripting

• I quickly learned Markdown for this project so we could transfer the content we had written to the typical TTRPG design.

Design​​

• I designed the initial story and world setting prior to development and fleshed it out with the team upon our formation.

• I designed and wrote many of the written elements.

  • Overarching narrative.

  • Written campaign session.

  • Combat encounters and dungeons.

Project Management

• I gained excellent leadership skills.

• I exercised and improved my project planning skills.