Gameloft

From April to December 2017, Gameloft welcomed me to develop a narrative game blending romance with criminal investigation—a project that was canceled while I was still employed at the headquarters.

The Ideal Candidate

Gameloft had its sights set on Criminal Case, and rightly so. In 2017, it was still the unbeatable hit consistently topping mobile charts. They had their eyes on the narrative-driven and—increasingly—romantic titles. Fresh from my stint crafting romantic tales for Accela’s Princes of the Night, I found myself steering the narrative in tandem with another Narrative Designer on a hybrid game at the crossroads of crime and romance, mini-games, and live-action sequences. Right from the start, Gameloft made it clear they wanted to leverage my experience across these divergent game types to craft a harmonious synthesis.

The Art of the Pitch

For this narrative experiment set in live-action, I immediately donned a dual hat. One as the showrunner of a kind of American series weaving a police drama around a murder at a university against the backdrop of online harassment, and the other as the Narrative Designer.

I oscillated between the two, pitching atmospheres, plots, characters, outcomes, then moving to systems, flowcharts, and a bit of dialogue for flavor. While the “show” part went well, the “game” aspect was troubled, as from the outset, the project struggled with monetization.

As I presented pitches that seemed to push things in the right direction, despite the input of experienced Game Designers, a clear monetization strategy for the game remained elusive. After much hemming and hawing, and the utterly bizarre decision to insert a match-3 component into the midst of the experience, the project was scrapped.

The Right Tools

What I appreciated most during my time at Gameloft was their clear commitment to the narrative aspects. Recognizing that it was an element of their games that had been previously undervalued or overlooked, they provided clear and operational means to significantly upgrade upon my arrival.

Evidence of this was the developer team stationed in Mexico, which had created a powerful narrative tool specifically for our project. This tool allowed for the creation of character sheets and the visual integration of branching and conditional dialogues. Having worked on the development of such a dedicated tool at Pretty Simple (refer to my work on Criminal Case) just months before, I was thrilled to have such resources at my disposal.

I must highlight that the work of this team was exceptional, both in feature execution and in the comprehensive documentation provided with each update. It was a genuine pleasure to explain our systems to developers eager to translate our vision into an application, all supported by solid documentation that made it incredibly user-friendly. I haven’t always worked with developers this talented!

The Love Boat

Once the narrative game project was axed, our duo of Narrative Designers was reassigned to smaller missions on licenses Gameloft had just secured deals with. There was a Disney angle, which briefly had us touching on Star Wars or Disney Princess games, and a FOX angle, whose assets had been acquired by Vivendi. I even got to pitch an Aliens game for a brief week.

But the bulk of my work, before leaving Gameloft to fully dedicate myself to my personal project, Seduction Stories, was on a narrative-driven Match3 game set aboard a cruise ship. The challenge was to present a competitor to Homescapes, with a vibe reminiscent of the TV series The Love Boat. Until, in a twist, Gameloft struck a deal with the series’ rights holders, transposing the game into the actual universe of The Love Boat.

I spent a few weeks collaborating with Gameloft’s Spanish branch, once again proposing pitches, mission designs, and onboarding that had to juggle numerous constraints and limitations. I left my colleague to finish the work. The game was later released, not too different from the state I had left it in. And although it wasn’t a title I felt particularly invested in, I can’t help but feel a pang of sadness that Gameloft has since pulled it from the stores. Yet another title I worked on that’s no longer available anywhere…