Experience

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I treat every assignment as an academic essay. First, I research. I am extremely good at skimming and acquiring knowledge under a short period of time, so my initial research always ends up being rather detailed. Then, I apply the knowledge I have gathered to the topic that is being developed. In the images above, this topic was the location of Blood Beckons. This was the initial document regarding the village and the castle.

For this process, I always use Pureref first which is an offline board. It is often either shared with my teammates via Google Drive, as we have a Pureref folder for this purpose. Depending on the assignment and topics, it usually takes multiple Pureref documents to truly nail down every aspect of a given topic. Once everything is gathered and dissected, the content of the files are moved onto the correct Miro board (images below), an online whiteboard, making access easier for everyone.

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Writing Samples

Quest Script, Item Descriptions, Lore Excerpts

The floorplan of the Red Castle was inspired by the Corvin Castle (see my research process). Not every area of the castle is explorable as true freedom is never achieved in the game. A sense of freedom is provided by carefully guiding the players while respecting their intelligence.

For Blood Beckons, I chose a fixed camera to honour “old” survival horror games, especially those released on the Playstation 2. The fixed camera angle helped us create better scripted anxiety-inducing and horrifying moments without relying on jumpscares. There are two cameras we switch between according to gameplay and narrative: 1) the Protagonist’s 1st person point of view 2) the Beast’s 1st person point of view. I tied a story element (i.e., the protagonist being watched by a predatory beast) with the camera in order to provide yet another POV for the player while also increasing their fear level. For the Beast POV, the team was inspired by slasher movies from the 90s and early 2000s where the killer was stalking their victims. The protagonist POV provides a more limited angle, creating intimacy, adding to roleplaying.

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Scene Writing

Script sample for a test scene with an additional voice actor guide.

I created the world of Venar from scratch. I built a world rich in history and mythology. My map building skills, at first, left much to be desired, so I studied geography and geology for a month, intensively, before even creating the first draft of Venar. I built a unique runic system inspired by the Hungarian “rovásírás” and by using basic linguistic rules. The system further showcases the richness of the past as well as helps us create unique and more meaningful puzzles. They also look cool.

As a graduate student of humanities, worldbuilding has always been to be the easiest and most enjoyable aspect of storytelling for me. My “world first, story second” approach has proved to be fruitful. After all, I prefer to have a carefully constructed, colourful, and logical world in which many stories can take place rather than a story that just happens to be set in a fantastical world. This gives a player a sense of deep immersion and a reason to stop and look at their immediate surroundings. Conscious storytelling and layering are very much key for any great RPG. Of course, this attitude was very much inspired by Bioware and Fromsoft games as well as Tolkien’s approach to writing.

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TTRPG Adventures

I am an active player of a 4-year-old D&D campaign. Additionally, I started my very first semi-homebrew campaign as a Dungeon Master this time around. I also played Call of Cthulhu, and I am planning to give the Avatar Roleplaying Game a try as well. It has a unique bending system that I've been eager to try out.

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