Johannes
Brunnhuber
Senior technical narrative designer at Remedy Entertainment on Alan Wake 2, the Max Payne remakes & an unannounced project
At the crossroads
of narrative and
technical design
RESPONSIBILITIES
-
Hired early in this project to own:
all non-combat dialogue systems
narrative animation systems and implementation
complex narrative features and level scripting
onboarding onto narrative tooling
-
Stayed on Alan Wake 2 to ship the Night Springs and The Lake House DLCs.
For me a similar remit to my role on the main game (see above) but now I took on a more active role in improving workflows and scripting of other departments beyond Narrative. This was a much smaller team of 30 devs delivering hours and hours of content in record time.
-
Technical Designer role was created for me at Dlala Studios straight out of uni. They didn’t really know where to put me but we made it work!
Small indie team, so I worked on so many different aspects:
behaviour design
gameplay programming
puzzle design
cine & animation implementation
QTE
-
Joined project after Alan Wake 2 to:
implement dialogue
refine narrative systems
work on complex gameplay and animation beats
own NPC codex system (design and implementation)
own goals system (design and implementation)
-
I am a regular collaborator with (or perhaps they’d say “thorn in the side of”) the engine team and the primary Narrative Design stakeholder for Northlight’s new narrative tool-cum-dialogue management suit, the Narrative Editor (NED).
Also contributed foundational aspects to the dialogue and animation systems at Remedy.
-
Worked on 6 months of pre-production, predominantly programming gameplay experiments and designing enemy behaviour graphs and implementation pipelines.
“Tech narrative design is a totally new discipline, and I intend to find out how deep this rabbit hole goes."
Me, 2021 (probably)