The Killing Stone
Role: Senior Game Designer
Game: The Killing Stone (single player narrative-driven deck builder with first person exploration)
Platform: PC (Steam link)
I designed the core card battler rules including the novel "Reserve" system allowing players to stack creatures and buffs for long term planning. I also designed and implemented many of the cards in Lua, built and iterated player and enemy decks, scripted all narrative beats (connecting Unreal Blueprint and Articy: Draft X written content), implemented every tutorial, and built a suite of developer cheats for rapid iteration.
Narrative Design
Malthe's Chapter
As the first character the player must save in TKS, Malthe’s chapter had unique tutorial and story introduction needs. Our Narrative Lead, Jordan Thomas, created a script for TKS’ voice talent, then we discussed the critical path for gameplay. I created a flow in Miro breaking down each beat into art, lighting, code, and design needs. I presented this to the team for feedback, then revised and tasked each outcome.
In Articy I populated content nodes with functional sample text, for example: “Vollem, Malthe's grateful grandfather, reminds the player to sleep upstairs before they can proceed.” This process identifies where players stop understanding what to do next before Narrative commits writing time. The pink node below shows what shipped from that prompt. I used Senior Gameplay Programmer Nick Crosgrove's Articy import pipeline to get the content into Unreal Engine.
I then scripted logic to catch story events in Blueprint. I made a parent class for all family members containing their frob logic. I kept the logic tracking which line a character should say in Articy, cleanly separating “do once” checks only relevant for individual lines from gameplay state.
And with that Vollem speaks! This line repeats if the player continues to interact with him - a signal to continue playing to unlock more dialogue.
For other story beats I built a manager Blueprint that reacts to spatial, cinematic, and card battle triggers from Technical Designer Gretchen Carlson's ritual progression system.