The Fowler

The Fowler is our 5th-year graduation project. It is narrative-driven and is inspired by Japanese-RPG.

✨We published the game on itchio (free) if you want to try it !✨

Here is the trailer, as well as the walkthrough, I hope you'll enjoy it as much as we enjoyed making it!

Synopsis:

In this game, we follow a band of revolutionary punk bards led by Robyn, who decided to take their instruments and fight the tyranny of the Fowler.

In this medieval-inspired world where music is a religious and cultural part of everyone's life, the King, named the Fowler, decided to take this god-given gift and use it to establish his despotic reign.

Through this game, we wanted to tell a story of friendship, redemption, and revolt. We had this goal of giving the player a fast-paced J-RPG where they can use the characters' instruments to fight against their royal enemies and can recruit a fallen misunderstood rival into their rank.

Our game had to last around 20 minutes. Thus why we don't tell the whole story of Robyn's revolt. We join her and Abby when they already have launched their revolt and are near to fighting the Fowler. The game begins in the last castle standing on their way before the King's castle.

The 4 environments composing the Castle.

Our 3 main characters:

Our team:

Game Art: Yuna (vision owner; animator), Maxence (environment artist), Julien (character and 3D artist), Alberto (concept artist; UI)

Game Design: Adrien (producer), Clément (sound designer), Edrick (UI/UX), Charlotte (narrative designer)

Programmation: Quentin M (lead game designer), Quentin R (lead programmer)

My roles in the project:

Narrative Design:

My main role was the one of Lead Narrative Designer. As such, I was in charge of the story, characters, and their evolutions throughout the game. I also wrote the dialogues and the script (that we used use for the actors who voiced our characters).

Additionally, I did the integration of the dialogues directly in the game to set a pace, to test them, and for Alberto to create cinematics.

Here we can see the story curve, with the main events, fights, and their emotional gravity:

Here is the character development we had in mind. However, since our game is supposed to be quite short, we couldn't give them a total evolution or it would have seemed rushed. So we worked around those ideas to make it as realistic as possible;

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Since we wanted our game to be voice dubbed, I wrote the script for the actors. After finding them, we did several sessions witch Clément to record their texts.

✨Link to the complete script in English✨

Here is an example of the character's voice pitch I wrote for our voice actors:

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Game Design:

As a Game Designer, I was in charge of systems, more particularly the Harmonisation one. It's a system that allows the player to deepen Robyn's bonds with her fellow rebels. Through choice dialogues, interactions and combats, the player can develop their friendship with the other characters and unlock specials skills to use in battles. I wrote the documentation for those systems so it could be used by the programmers.

Right below, we can see a scene of Harmonisation. It consists of a visual novel-style dialogue moment where the characters exchange about the adventure and their emotions. In each of those Harmonisation moments, the player will have to choose between different answers.

(Sadly, because of the time frame we had to develop the game, as well as a want to focus on the fights and to deliver a complete narrative arc, we had to scrap the harmonisation moments. However, they were totally written and are available at the end of the script if you want to learn more.)

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Level Design:

As a Level Designer, I did the schematics of the 3 floors of the castle the player will evolve in. Since I was in charge of the story, it was decided I'd plan the levels to represent the narration as much as possible. The plans were then given to Clément who created the levels in Unity.

Here are the 2 first floors of the game:

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Our game is finally done and finished, it was a wonderful adventure, with a great team, and amazing people met along the way! I'm so proud and happy with what we created, I can only hope you'll enjoy what we created together!

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If you have any questions, feel free to contact me! 🌸