I was tasked with creating a story that resembled the one seen in the movie we take inspiration from, Battle Angel Alita, while also having it fit the scope of the project. The biggest challenge was to create a narrative thread with very few characters, and in a short span of time.

Aside from that, what's been pretty tough is to find ways to deal with our engine limitations, especially when setting up triggers for the dialogue events. For instance, we could not have two different triggers for one same dialogue so I had to find ways to set up just one trigger that was activated in all the paths the player can take, or also moving some triggers to other areas that the player cannot access initially so to not have it display earlier than it should.

The scripting of these dialogues has also brought up some issues that needed to be circumvented, such as not having multilining in early versions, and even when we had it, it was limited to 64 characters so synthesizing phrases to fit the textbox gave me lots of headaches.

We dabled with having dialogues play as the player moved and fought, not pausing the game, but it proved too chaotic since the buttons that were used to skip the dialogue were assigned to gameplay, so I had to remake most dialogues not to be very long, because they now had to pause the game and I didn't like the idea of having the story stop the gameplay for so long so frequently.

In the first versions, the main antagonist of the game, Macaco (based on Grewishka from the movie) was going to make an appearance as the final boss, but in the end it was cut because of time issues and I had to rewrite part of the story so that it still made sense. Zapan, the evil cyborg played by Ed Skrein, was also going to be featured in the game, but he was also cut. In the end I made the decision to keep his dialogue since it was a cool shoutout to the original story, and overall a great character that gave an interesting situation to the final cutscene.

Probably the most fun part about implementing the narrative into the game was gathering some teammates and recording the voice overs for all the characters in the game.

In the early stages of development I started as a combat and overall gameplay designer, coming up with the idea of changing the focus from a Diablo-like ARPG to a brawler combat akin to something like Supergiant Games' Bastion or Hades. I then moved to work on narrative but I helped in building environments, setting colliders in early versions and giving feedback to gameplay programmers.