Abyssal Novelist presents:
Salutations. I am Alex the Abyssal Novelist — a writer, narrative designer, and game designer for hire — and this is where I showcase my work. The good stuff, anyway.
Brief intro and my experience:- I have 3+ years of commercial experience in videogame localization.
- I have 3 years of commercial experience in videogame writing, specializing in narrative design.
- I took an extensive project management course and have the certificate to prove it: Google Project Management: Professional Certificate.
- I've just graduated my Master's program in cross-cultural communication.
- My primary goal is to entwine gameplay and narrative directly for a seamless and fun experience.
- Contact me via discord: abyssalnovelist
- Or via email: abyssalnovelist@gmail(DOTHERE)com
portfolio pieces - project management, game writing, and game design
Matchmaking for Ghosts
Matchmaking for Ghosts is the latest project I am involved in!
I was responsible for early consultations, the game's narrative design, as well as for some game design bits and pieces.
I was part of a wonderful writers' room, where we cooperated as a team to write out branching narratives and dialogue trees for dates for all 28 possible character pairs!
As this was a dating sim/visual novel hybrid, this meant a total word count of over 150K words!
A Dark Forest
As co-lead, I worked on the narrative design and writing of the hit indie game A Dark Forest which reached the top of Itch.io's front page while generating over 120k views, 70k lifetime plays, and 450k impressions over the course of one week.
I helped create almost all of the player-facing text, including UI/UX, dialogue, and item descriptions.
I was also responsible for managing the project's Trello boards, management, and production.
I was responsible for sourcing localization specialists, and took part in the process of hiring our artist.
The Sproutlings
I created, designed, playtested, and wrote lore for The Sproutlings — a custom fan-made playable Spirit for the wonderful settler-destruction physical board game Spirit Island.
This included creating their own gameplay mechanics, playable cards, background lore entry, and innate powers.
Fun fact, in total it took 35+ iterations, 3 reworks, overbuffing twice, and overnerfing once to finish designing and balancing this Spirit!
portfolio pieces - game writing
Strategy Game Civs
I designed the playable civilizations and wrote their introductory text segments for CivPlanet, a strategy game currently in development.
Introductory Dialogue
I wrote the intro dialogue of Yuke and the Book of Yokai, focusing on conveying as much information as possible — as concisely as possible — to the player. This included elements such as in-game lore and setting, gameplay elements, and characterization.
I also wrote all the text you see on the Steam page!
portfolio pieces - client statements, game writing, and odd bits and pieces
Dialogue, Quests, and NPCs
This document contains a sample of various styles of dialogue, an example of my quest design work, and example NPCs.
They aren't tied to any specific project and were created for the sole purpose of embellishing this portfolio.
Statements from past clients
This document contains statements and reviews from my past clients! I like to collect them and look at them on rainy days, or whenever I don't feel as confident in my abilities.
Feels nice to be appreciated, thank you, everyone!
Deadly Empathy
I was the lead writer and narrative designer for Deadly Empathy, a now canceled roguelite cyberpunk horror inspired by games such as Signalis and Silent Hill.
I helped our team codify a project lore bible, which was quite a challenge, since everyone had different ideas on how the narrative should be structured.
I was also responsible for the narrative design documents and personally designed the eponymous gameplay mechanic: Deadly Empathy, making sure to tie it directly into the game's narrative design!
portfolio pieces - short stories
Dreams of Holy Chrome
Is a Cyberpunk Dystopia Fanfiction.
I had a lot of fun adapting and building upon the lore presented in "Mind Scanners" by The Outer Zone.
Working with other creatives is always exciting. And while writing fanfiction is a bit of a one-sided cooperation, it still gives rise to the usual challenges — such as deciding how exactly to portray and design a world. And whether or not to call a cyborg character Maeve Masheen, which is about as subtle as a shovel to the back of the head.
Nevertheless, I truly do love Mind Scanners and find it sad that the game didn't get much wider recognition. Despite my tongue-in-cheek remarks, this piece came from a place of love, and I wrote it almost as soon as I finished my first playthrough.
This short story is also my personal favorite!
Red wax, golden eyes, and a metal staff
Is a character study of sorts, firmly set in the realm of magical realism and urban fantasy.
When writing, I tried to recreate a certain sense of wonder and unease; of the supernatural implied uncannily, while never explicitly shown.
To be frank, I think a large part of this piece of writing is a bit of a love letter towards Studio Ghibli. Their movies influenced me a great deal when I was little, and I have tremendous feelings of nostalgia for them.
Other things I've done:
- Term glossaries for localization, copywriting, and worldbuilding purposes.
- Narrative design documents (including both stylistic and technical guidelines) for modding teams.
- Worldbuilding + project bible for dark fantasy projects.
- Stuff I can't talk about due to NDAs, hooray!
- Game design documents for indie games.
- Consulting for indie developers and creators.
- Ran a weekly TTRPG night as DM, no matter what ; )
- I'm also currently designing a family-friendly physical board game about mice and cheese!
- Worked on various open-source projects, utilizing a wide variety of tools (GitHub, ClickUp, Trello; Unity, Godot, and Clausewitz game engines).