The Swords of Ditto: Mormo's Curse

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The Swords of Ditto is an adorable Zelda-inspired roguelike, where players team up with a scatterbrained dung beetle to take down the evil witch Mormo.

Game director Jonathan Biddle was the previous design director of Curve Studios while I was there, and after going indie he asked me to join his new project. It was a couple of years into development, but I was given the (genuinely) wonderful direction "Just tell me what you need and you'll get it -- I just don't want to have to worry about story or writing" and that was enough for me.

The core loop and player goal were already set, but the rest was up for grabs. That largely meant a huge, huge amount of NPC interactions, which were then seeded into the randomly-generated world based on the player's past performance and the way they played -- all of which had to be reflected in the dialogue.

I also created a grand backstory, which I separated into 51 lore entries that can be collected by the player in any order to gain new context about the world and characters in the game, and designed and wrote a short "forward" story that was told between successful "runs" of the game, culminating in a final boss and ending.

It was a hugely fun project to work on, mostly because it fit with my natural writing tone -- silly, surreal, funny, with a dark undercurrent occasionally poking through the surface -- but also because of the freedom I was given to design the story systems. I'm very proud of this one!