Changeling

Changeling was a VR mystery game developed by a large team of RIT students over several years. I joined the project during a summer internship as part of the first dedicated narrative team. There were six writers on the team, and our job was to build out the story, characters, dialogue, and worldbuilding for the game.

I worked closely with another writer to create the main story script, character personalities, and supporting lore documents. Over the course of the summer we wrote more than fifty pages of dialogue, built character reference documents, helped define the game's setting, and worked with voice actors as recording for the project began.

The project was much larger than anything I had worked on before. There were hundreds of students involved across multiple disciplines, and one of the biggest challenges was figuring out how narrative fit into that larger structure. Early on, our team thought we were building a narrative-focused game where the gameplay existed to support the story. As development continued, we realized the opposite was true. The gameplay teams were driving the experience, and our job was to support what they were building.

That shift created a lot of challenges. We often had to wait for gameplay teams to define levels and mechanics before we could fully understand what story content was needed. Sometimes we would spend days building story concepts only to discover that a level had changed direction or a mechanic no longer supported the narrative we had planned. We learned to become much more flexible, adapting the story to fit the game rather than expecting the game to fit the story.

One of the biggest mistakes I made was treating game dialogue too much like film or theater dialogue. During script reviews, our scenes sounded great. Characters had strong voices, conversations flowed naturally, and the story made sense. Once those scenes were placed into the game, however, it became clear that players experience dialogue very differently than an audience watching a movie.

Players want to be doing something.

We kept getting feedback that scenes were too long, and at first I resisted cutting them because I liked the conversations we had written. Looking back, the feedback was completely correct. Even well-written dialogue starts to lose impact when players are standing still waiting for it to finish. We spent a lot of time trimming scenes, cutting exposition, and figuring out how to communicate the same information more efficiently. It was one of the first times I really understood that writing for games is fundamentally different from writing for other mediums.

The project also taught me a lot about scope. As students, we consistently underestimated how much content we were creating and how much work would be required to implement it. We wrote ambitious storylines, detailed character arcs, and extensive lore documents. Some of that work made it into later versions of the project, while much of it was eventually revised or cut as the game evolved. At the time that felt frustrating, but looking back it was a valuable lesson in production realities. A good idea still has to fit within the resources, timeline, and goals of the project.

Even though Changeling was messy at times, I learned an enormous amount from it. It was my first experience working on a large multidisciplinary team, coordinating with designers, artists, programmers, and voice actors toward a shared goal. More importantly, it taught me that narrative design is not just about telling a good story. It's about understanding how story, mechanics, pacing, and player attention all work together to create an experience.