The short story
I wrote an officially-licensed adaptation of Agathie Christie’s Death on the Nile as a season pass story for Mystery Match Village. My responsibilities spanned the entire narrative pipeline:
- Adapting the novel into a condensed storyline.
- Creating a scene structure, character profiles, location briefs, etc.
- Designing a task structure to integrate narrative with gameplay.
- Writing briefs for art (internal and outsourcing).
- Writing dialogue (sporadically using lines from the novel).
- Guiding localization.
- Implementating narrative content in Unity 3D.
The slightly longer story
For a Mystery Match Village season pass, Outplay licensed the use of famous Belgian detective Hercule Poirot from Agatha Christie Ltd. We decided to specifically go for Death on the Nile. It was up to me to adapt that complex novel to fit our game, which meant I had to cut many characters and locations without losing the essence of the story. It was an enormous challenge – probably the biggest I’ve faced as narrative designer – and I’m very proud of the result. The entire team did amazing work to create an exciting Death on the Nile experience.
Check out my favorite scene below, and the entire playlist below that.