Johannes
Brunnhuber
Senior technical narrative designer
on Alan Wake 2, the Max Payne remakes & an unannounced project
At the crossroads
of narrative and
technical design
RESPONSIBILITIES
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Explicitly requested for my current project for:
rapid iteration of systems and gameplay in pre-production
design and testing of new node-based narrative tool
preparation of engine, tooling, scripts and prefabs of narrative features (dialogue, conversations, animations, emails, in-world media etc.) for when rest of narrative team join
implementation of all narrative features in horizontal slice
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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)
Left this project June 2025 for the unannounced project.
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Technical Designer role was created for me at Dlala straight out of uni. They didn’t really know where to put me and I made below minimum wage 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
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Hired early in this project to own:
Dialogue
Gameplay conversations
triggered dialogue
ambient dialogue
generic dialogue
Complex setups
interlinked Lua scenarios
narrative animations
echo scenes
Onboarding
intro to narrative tools
simplifying workflows
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I am the primary Narrative Design stakeholder for development of the Narrative Editor (NED), a node editor paired with a dialogue management suite.
Also contributed foundational aspects to the dialogue and animation systems at Remedy.
“Tech narrative design is a totally new discipline, and I intend to find out how deep this rabbit hole goes."
Me, 2021 (probably)