Blade Bound is a first person platforming game I worked on with Genna Zitzmann and Joseph Chung back in 2018. My main jobs were to get the core features of the game working with blueprint nodes, design the main menu layout, design the sound systems, and write dialogue for the story.
The above video shows a brief sample of the gameplay and story presentation. In it the player must throw a knife in order to teleport from one location to the next. This game was difficult to work on since it was my first Unreal game engine project but my programming background allowed me to quickly pick up on how to make stuff work the way I envisioned it.
My main jobs were as follows:
- Design core mechanics.
- Design the main menu layout.
- Write dialogue for the story.
My favorite thing about this game is that I got to play a large role in designing the game’s core mechanics and the overall story. In order to deliver the story though my team had a couple hurdles to overcome. Firstly, we did not have enough time or people to tell our story through cutscenes. Our lack of experience with the engine also made pausing the gameplay to deliver story content a little too daunting with the time we had available. To get around this problem we decided to take inspiration from the game Portals and tell our game’s story from the perspective of the antagonist who is constantly monologuing to the hero as they progress through the game.
This would’ve worked great, but we also had a problem where we didn’t have access to voice actors. Regardless we were undeterred and took inspiration from yet another game. The opening of Kingdom Hearts featured a lot of dialogue that was told by this an omniscient voice that speaks directly into the main character’s head. This voice has no sounds, but instead, uses text on the screen to communicate. My team and I decided on a similar approach for our game and had text appear on screen whenever the knife talks, allowing us to feature a Portals 2 style narrator with a Kingdom Hearts style delivery mechanism. Nice!
With our story telling method in place all that remained was for me to do was write the dialogue that would deliver the exposition necessary for the player to understand what was happening.
The game’s story follows a one armed thief who steals a dagger from a booby trapped cave. This dagger is cursed so that whoever holds it can never let it leave their possession. This doesn’t mean that the user can’t physically release their grip on it, but if someone were to try and drop the dagger they will be teleported into a position where it would be impossible for their hand to not catch the dagger. What this means is that if the user tries throwing the dagger away they will be teleported into the path of it so that they are able to catch it before it hits the ground. The thief realizes this and uses the dagger’s strange ‘curse’ to warp through the cave and hopefully to freedom.
The story is told entirely by the dagger itself, which contains the spirit of a man who killed thousands so that he could live forever inside of it. He speaks directly to the thief’s mind, allowing it to boss her around or otherwise monologue. In the story my goals were to communicate the antagonistic nature of the knife, explain how the knife came to be, and on the very last level of the game offer some sort of resolution to the story. My team originally wanted to, despite our limited time, have a cutscene at the end of the game but we simply did not have enough time to do it which left the challenge of resolving the game’s story entirely on me with the dialogue system.
Below are all of the dialogue clips in the game, most of which play at the start of their given level.
Level 1
Death thought he could take me, but I was able to hide inside this measly blade.
We are bound now, and whether you like it or not you will bring me to the surface.
Come now, there is work to be done.
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Level 2
I know what you are doing, exploiting the bond that binds us.
Make no mistake, you may never truly be rid of me….
What? You only have one arm? How amusing.
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Level 3
Thousands were sacrificed so this knife could be forged.
Not that it matters. What is lifetimes of unspent years to my eternity?
We are nearly at the surface. Just a little further and I will be free….
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Level 4
A couple days after I made the knife the families and friends of those I felled came for me.
My murder was flawlessly executed. Fortunately they weren’t aware of the knife’s existence.
How I’d love to see their faces when I…when I…hold on…
Something is wrong, the knife is…cracked on the inside.
But how is that possible? The knife was flawless, it was…
Oh that damned blacksmith.
That fool. By killing me those people died for nothing.
Listen very carefully: we must not leave this cave until I am repaired. We….
Stop! I’ll die if you leave now!
There were a couple things I did right with the writing, but also a number of things that I would’ve done differently knowing what I do today about writing. First off I like how the knife had a unique voice. I think I did a good job of covering up the way I talk and making the bad guy actually sound like a living person with his own motives and thoughts. With that being said the knife was very one dimensional, its a bad guy who does bad things and will continue to do bad things for very little reason. If I could do this over again I would have liked to have better explained why the badguy is so evil, but I suppose his desire to live forever is an acceptable, albeit cliche, excuse.
For the most part the knife dialogue was an effective means for me to tell the story of how it was formed and how it would ultimately be destroyed through the player leaving the cave. This was good because it gave the player an emotional motivation for leaving the cave but it could have been better. Adding an element of conflict would and forcing the player to make some sort of choice would have helped to get them more invested in the story as well as make the gears in their head turn a bit more than if they simply had to bear the level. This could have been done by making it so that the knife offers the player the option of restoring their missing arm if they get it fixed before leaving the cave (which would kill it). This would have forced the player to make a choice between being a slave with two arms or a free woman with only one arm and nothing to show for the perils she faced in the cave. In order to reflect this choice in the actual gameplay there could be a separate exit goal with different text that displays depending on which exit point the player chooses to use. This would have helped to end the game with a bang and leave the player with a memorable impression of the experience.
Writing the story was easily my favorite part of making this game but there were other important tasks that I had to do too. I needed to find and implement background music into the game, design the main menu, and help conceive, design, and program the main mechanic of the game in the form of the teleporting knife. Like all of my other game projects working on Blade Bound required a lot of communication with my teammates to make sure we all knew what we were doing and to address problems as they sprung up. I had a lot of fun, but one important lesson I learned was to make sure that everyone feels comfortable and is excited about the job they have to do. One of my teammates was tasked with designing all of the level layouts because it made for a more even distribution of work between us all and I wanted to be polite and let him take the task even though I would have really liked to have done it. In the end he did a great job but I didn’t get the impression that he was especially excited about it which left me wondering if I should have done the job myself and maybe had him deal with some of the programming stuff so that everyone was playing to their strengths.
Darren Walsh 