Commercial Games

Story Maker

Tool Designer | Kuato Studios | Web Browser | January 2022 – November 2022 | Unreleased

A suite of tools designed to teach children the fundamentals of storytelling.

Kuato Story Maker is a suite of tools which can be used to create stories with different outcomes (to be used by parents), and then play through it (aimed at children).

  • Analysing and identifying areas of friction in the earlier version of Story Maker as part of the R&D team.
  • Developing and maintaining an in-depth document detailing feature improvements and suggesting new features,with a focus on simplicity, scalability, usability and reliability.
  • Communicating ideas, intent, and constraints to both technical and non-technical team members.
  • Collaborating with lead developer to reach feature implementation solutions within set deadlines and achieve story design vision.
  • Identifying required assets to achieve story vision.
  • Creating and implementing prefabs within data files in Unity for use within the Story Playback tool.
  • Collaborating with animator to achieve desired character poses for use within stories.
  • Implementing animations for each character rig via animator.
  • Using Story Maker to design playable experiences in line with briefs and stories provided by design team and design lead.

FEATURE LISTS

I wrote a series of documents detailing how we could improve Story Maker, with a focus on ease of use, scalability and reliability. This involved thorough testing and use of the earlier version of Story Maker. The document was divided into feature improvements, and new feature requests. I collaborated with the lead developer and producer to prioritise the features, based on current story requirements and assuming a game designer would be initially using the tool. Click on the picture to see one of the documents I wrote:

Implementation

I collaborated with the design team to write stories to be created using Story Maker.

Implementing a story using the suite of tools involved several steps (most of which would be more user-friendly after further iterations):

step 1:

Adding the art assets as prefabs to the Unity project, with the relevant scripts and settings.

step 2:

Creating data files for each prefab and adding those to the central database to be picked up by the tool.

step 3:

Using the creator tool to create story scenes using the assets.

step 4:

Using the playback tool to preview the story.

Story Playthroughs