That so many developers still contract out their games’ writing might suggest that narrative is a secondary concern for the medium. But for Meghna Jayanth, who over the past decade has worked across a broad range of titles and roles, from building worlds to writing barks, it’s been a boon. “My career trajectory is unusual, and my professional circumstances are not everyone’s,” she admits. But she’s happy with the tradeoff of getting to work on multiple projects at once. “I really value that kind of freedom, and the independence of that.”
Just as unusual, perhaps, is how Jayanth came to video games. Born in 1987, and spending her childhood between Bangalore, London and Saudi Arabia, she didn’t own a console before buying an Xbox 360 to play Grand Theft Auto IV. After studying English literature at the University Of Oxford – where she also directed sketch comedy group The Oxford Revue – it was during a year at film school that she found herself drawn to parser-based games and interactive fiction. That resulted in her final-year project being an interactive Web series rather than a film, a choice that “was not hugely popular with my tutors, who were into cinema as the purest artform”.
A job at the BBC, commissioning games, brought her into contact with other developers including Failbetter Games, creator of the browser-based Fallen London. It was in that game’s Storynexus engine that, after being made redundant, Jayanth began writing Samsara, a choice-driven game about dream walking in 18th-century Bengal. While it remains only partially complete, it set her on the path she’s followed for the past decade. Looking back over her career so far, Jayanth reflects: “I’m so trained to think in possibilities now.”
image [https://cdn.magzter.com/1387349800/1725452903/articles/7VEdG26UV1725525907882/fcfA8AlUF1725525983011.jpg]
80 DAYS
Developer/publisher Inkle
Format Android, iOS, PC, Switch Release 2014
I think [Samsara] had caught the eye of Jon Ingold. Inkle wanted to make this game, 80 Days, but Jon hates doing historical research. Samsara was set in 18th-century Bengal at the moment of the British Raj, so it's very deeply historically researched but quite fantastical as well and I think he liked some of the design elements like moving between day and night. He pitched me on the project, then asked me to do a writing sample. I think I came up with mechanical camels in Suez, and he was like: "Sold!" I was about three-quarters of the way through Samsara, and ended up being hired to write 80 Days, so that took priority.
image [https://cdn.magzter.com/1387349800/1725452903/articles/7VEdG26UV1725525907882/JeG-uKgW71725525993500.jpg]
I was using their scripting language, Ink. I didn't know Ink before - Jon and Joe [Humfrey] created it, so I was lucky enough to be mentored by Jon, but it's always really interesting being taught the basics by someone who's so inside the system. But Jon used to be a maths teacher, so I think he had some of that patience [laughs]. I can really see the parts of it in the early stuff that I wrote, where I was much less proficient with the system. But as you go on, you start to get playful with it. It's almost like learning the grammar of it you're learning to express yourself with these new mechanical rules. For me, when you start being able to make jokes using the format and structure, that's when you definitely know what you're doing.
image [https://cdn.magzter.com/1387349800/1725452903/articles/7VEdG26UV1725525907882/9599552052.jpg]
We had bottlenecks we wanted all the players to funnel through, but as we kept working on it, Jon was like, "No, let's take all these out". The only things that must happen in a player's 80 Days journey is that they must begin and they may or may not end [the journey]. Lots of people did.
image [https://cdn.magzter.com/1387349800/1725452903/articles/7VEdG26UV1725525907882/qD8TcKwll1725526001674.jpg]
I think the average number of playthroughs was 2.2, which is really unusual in a world where ten per cent of people finish a game.
Obviously it's a short game, but it's really built for that kind of repetition.
To get into that design mindset, you have to give up on the idea that any single sentence or scenario you write will be seen by the player, which is freeing in a way. You can set up this great story moment, but you don't necessarily know what exactly has happened before and what exactly is going to happen after one playthrough is about three to five per cent of the content, so players are going to have vastly different kinds of individual experiences. To me, that's really exciting because it's almost less like you're telling a story than shaping a possibility space for players to experience thousands of potential stories.
SUNLESS SEA
Developer/publisher Failbetter Games
Format PC, PS4, Switch, Xbox One Release 2015
I worked on this game mostly because I was a fan of the Storynexus system, I was a fan of Fallen London, and I was really interested to see what I could do in that space. Failbetter had generally only used internal writers beforehand, but they opened it up and approached three or four writers to come and write guest islands.
It's such a content-heavy game, and I think they were really looking for ways to add new perspectives to this world. I don't think I fully understood how it was going to work, which is always really interesting to write as an external contractor.
I wrote the Isle Of Cats, which is this historical alternate Singapore [that references] Leopold Raffles, this really incredible interesting historical figure. But also they make this thing called red honey which preserves memories - but you basically have to rob people of their own.
image [https://cdn.magzter.com/1387349800/1725452903/articles/7VEdG26UV1725525907882/2559792929.jpg]
It's this vicious extractive thing that harms people, which is a really lovely kind of thematic resonance to the extraction of capitalism and colonialism. You're left with some interesting moral dilemmas about which of your crewmates to sacrifice, and you can't actually progress the story without committing that immoral act that has mechanical as well as narrative consequences. After that, I also wrote Varchas, which was much more a fantastical Indian Hinduism-inspired place that was very steeped in a lot of casteist superstition around outsiders, and casteist hierarchy being very important to them.
HORIZON: ZERO DAWN
Developer Guerrilla Games
Publisher Sony Interactive Entertainment
Format PS4 Release 2017
The team approached me as they were fans of 80 Days. I think they were also really interested in having other perspectives on the team. At the time, the team was all white dudes, writing a story about a young woman. It was still a year or two before launch when I came on. I'd never worked on anything of that scale before and I thought, "There's loads of time to change things! But then I very quickly realised: 'Oh, we're launching in two years, but 400 people have been working on it for two years. So it's a massive ship and it's really difficult to turn. It has huge resource implications for any changes to be made at that stage. So that was quite a learning experience for me.
image [https://cdn.magzter.com/1387349800/1725452903/articles/7VEdG26UV1725525907882/7599745525.jpg]
I got to write barks for the first time, which is such a different skillset. And I did lots of world-building. I'd have liked to write quests but, at that time, you had to be on-site to be able to use their internal quest-writing software, and I wasn't able to get a visa in time. So we kept it to what I could do remotely.
I never really went back to triple-A. I had a great experience with the team, though Ben Schroder, my main contact, is a wonderful writer and human. I just prefer the nimbleness of indie and working on smaller teams - you're able to be more experimental and take a lot more risks, be more responsive. For 80 Days, we were always changing things and adding huge features the day-and-night system only got added three or four months before launch. It’s much easier to do that when it’s a small team.
There are plenty of [triple-A] games I’ve worked on and consulted on that haven’t shipped or were cancelled, even after so much money went into them, which to me is always wild. Coming from indie, to see a studio spend nine months – and more than what three indie games would cost – and then just scrap the whole project… There were projects I worked on with huge amounts of marketing and professionally produced posters and animation and standees, even, which just got shelved because corporate priorities changed.
image [https://cdn.magzter.com/1387349800/1725452903/articles/7VEdG26UV1725525907882/W890l5G3D1725526144096.jpg]
As complicated as the indie space can be – it’s not for everyone, and there’s certainly tradeoffs – I’m really lucky in my career at this moment where I can make other tradeoffs for creative freedom.
THIS WAR OF MINE: THE LAST STORIES BROADCAST
Developer/publisher 11-bit Studios
Format Android, iOS, PC, PS4, Switch, Xbox One Release 2018
The team happened to have a booth next to me when 80 Days was up for the IGF awards, and they really loved the game. This War Of Mine is very historical and fantastical, so it really kind of fit within my skill set. I think it's one of the most interesting war games out there, because it is told from the civilian perspective, and in no way glorifies war.
On The Last Broadcast I did scenario mapping and choice architecture, the major branches. They have so many interesting levers and mechanics [for telling stories].
For me, it's always really interesting to go into a game that has its established mechanics: 'Here are the tools, here are the verbs, here are the things that you have at your disposal what kind of story do you want to tell with it?' Horizon and This War Of Mine was me learning to be mindful of resource costs.
image [https://cdn.magzter.com/1387349800/1725452903/articles/7VEdG26UV1725525907882/2999521417.jpg]
80 Days is mostly told through text, so if I want to have a giant explosion and the airship crashes, I can just write that and it doesn't cost anything except my time writing the words. You can't necessarily rely on that kind of grandeur when someone has to animate or create assets, so you have to know a lot more about what other departments are doing and how their workflows work. You're understanding the design space, but you're also understanding the process and then you also have to understand a little bit about budgeting and time and resource costs, which I think are all really important skills for narrative designers.
SUNLESS SKIES
Developer/publisher Fa...
Just as unusual, perhaps, is how Jayanth came to video games. Born in 1987, and spending her childhood between Bangalore, London and Saudi Arabia, she didn’t own a console before buying an Xbox 360 to play Grand Theft Auto IV. After studying English literature at the University Of Oxford – where she also directed sketch comedy group The Oxford Revue – it was during a year at film school that she found herself drawn to parser-based games and interactive fiction. That resulted in her final-year project being an interactive Web series rather than a film, a choice that “was not hugely popular with my tutors, who were into cinema as the purest artform”.
A job at the BBC, commissioning games, brought her into contact with other developers including Failbetter Games, creator of the browser-based Fallen London. It was in that game’s Storynexus engine that, after being made redundant, Jayanth began writing Samsara, a choice-driven game about dream walking in 18th-century Bengal. While it remains only partially complete, it set her on the path she’s followed for the past decade. Looking back over her career so far, Jayanth reflects: “I’m so trained to think in possibilities now.”
image [https://cdn.magzter.com/1387349800/1725452903/articles/7VEdG26UV1725525907882/fcfA8AlUF1725525983011.jpg]
80 DAYS
Developer/publisher Inkle
Format Android, iOS, PC, Switch Release 2014
I think [Samsara] had caught the eye of Jon Ingold. Inkle wanted to make this game, 80 Days, but Jon hates doing historical research. Samsara was set in 18th-century Bengal at the moment of the British Raj, so it's very deeply historically researched but quite fantastical as well and I think he liked some of the design elements like moving between day and night. He pitched me on the project, then asked me to do a writing sample. I think I came up with mechanical camels in Suez, and he was like: "Sold!" I was about three-quarters of the way through Samsara, and ended up being hired to write 80 Days, so that took priority.
image [https://cdn.magzter.com/1387349800/1725452903/articles/7VEdG26UV1725525907882/JeG-uKgW71725525993500.jpg]
I was using their scripting language, Ink. I didn't know Ink before - Jon and Joe [Humfrey] created it, so I was lucky enough to be mentored by Jon, but it's always really interesting being taught the basics by someone who's so inside the system. But Jon used to be a maths teacher, so I think he had some of that patience [laughs]. I can really see the parts of it in the early stuff that I wrote, where I was much less proficient with the system. But as you go on, you start to get playful with it. It's almost like learning the grammar of it you're learning to express yourself with these new mechanical rules. For me, when you start being able to make jokes using the format and structure, that's when you definitely know what you're doing.
image [https://cdn.magzter.com/1387349800/1725452903/articles/7VEdG26UV1725525907882/9599552052.jpg]
We had bottlenecks we wanted all the players to funnel through, but as we kept working on it, Jon was like, "No, let's take all these out". The only things that must happen in a player's 80 Days journey is that they must begin and they may or may not end [the journey]. Lots of people did.
image [https://cdn.magzter.com/1387349800/1725452903/articles/7VEdG26UV1725525907882/qD8TcKwll1725526001674.jpg]
I think the average number of playthroughs was 2.2, which is really unusual in a world where ten per cent of people finish a game.
Obviously it's a short game, but it's really built for that kind of repetition.
To get into that design mindset, you have to give up on the idea that any single sentence or scenario you write will be seen by the player, which is freeing in a way. You can set up this great story moment, but you don't necessarily know what exactly has happened before and what exactly is going to happen after one playthrough is about three to five per cent of the content, so players are going to have vastly different kinds of individual experiences. To me, that's really exciting because it's almost less like you're telling a story than shaping a possibility space for players to experience thousands of potential stories.
SUNLESS SEA
Developer/publisher Failbetter Games
Format PC, PS4, Switch, Xbox One Release 2015
I worked on this game mostly because I was a fan of the Storynexus system, I was a fan of Fallen London, and I was really interested to see what I could do in that space. Failbetter had generally only used internal writers beforehand, but they opened it up and approached three or four writers to come and write guest islands.
It's such a content-heavy game, and I think they were really looking for ways to add new perspectives to this world. I don't think I fully understood how it was going to work, which is always really interesting to write as an external contractor.
I wrote the Isle Of Cats, which is this historical alternate Singapore [that references] Leopold Raffles, this really incredible interesting historical figure. But also they make this thing called red honey which preserves memories - but you basically have to rob people of their own.
image [https://cdn.magzter.com/1387349800/1725452903/articles/7VEdG26UV1725525907882/2559792929.jpg]
It's this vicious extractive thing that harms people, which is a really lovely kind of thematic resonance to the extraction of capitalism and colonialism. You're left with some interesting moral dilemmas about which of your crewmates to sacrifice, and you can't actually progress the story without committing that immoral act that has mechanical as well as narrative consequences. After that, I also wrote Varchas, which was much more a fantastical Indian Hinduism-inspired place that was very steeped in a lot of casteist superstition around outsiders, and casteist hierarchy being very important to them.
HORIZON: ZERO DAWN
Developer Guerrilla Games
Publisher Sony Interactive Entertainment
Format PS4 Release 2017
The team approached me as they were fans of 80 Days. I think they were also really interested in having other perspectives on the team. At the time, the team was all white dudes, writing a story about a young woman. It was still a year or two before launch when I came on. I'd never worked on anything of that scale before and I thought, "There's loads of time to change things! But then I very quickly realised: 'Oh, we're launching in two years, but 400 people have been working on it for two years. So it's a massive ship and it's really difficult to turn. It has huge resource implications for any changes to be made at that stage. So that was quite a learning experience for me.
image [https://cdn.magzter.com/1387349800/1725452903/articles/7VEdG26UV1725525907882/7599745525.jpg]
I got to write barks for the first time, which is such a different skillset. And I did lots of world-building. I'd have liked to write quests but, at that time, you had to be on-site to be able to use their internal quest-writing software, and I wasn't able to get a visa in time. So we kept it to what I could do remotely.
I never really went back to triple-A. I had a great experience with the team, though Ben Schroder, my main contact, is a wonderful writer and human. I just prefer the nimbleness of indie and working on smaller teams - you're able to be more experimental and take a lot more risks, be more responsive. For 80 Days, we were always changing things and adding huge features the day-and-night system only got added three or four months before launch. It’s much easier to do that when it’s a small team.
There are plenty of [triple-A] games I’ve worked on and consulted on that haven’t shipped or were cancelled, even after so much money went into them, which to me is always wild. Coming from indie, to see a studio spend nine months – and more than what three indie games would cost – and then just scrap the whole project… There were projects I worked on with huge amounts of marketing and professionally produced posters and animation and standees, even, which just got shelved because corporate priorities changed.
image [https://cdn.magzter.com/1387349800/1725452903/articles/7VEdG26UV1725525907882/W890l5G3D1725526144096.jpg]
As complicated as the indie space can be – it’s not for everyone, and there’s certainly tradeoffs – I’m really lucky in my career at this moment where I can make other tradeoffs for creative freedom.
THIS WAR OF MINE: THE LAST STORIES BROADCAST
Developer/publisher 11-bit Studios
Format Android, iOS, PC, PS4, Switch, Xbox One Release 2018
The team happened to have a booth next to me when 80 Days was up for the IGF awards, and they really loved the game. This War Of Mine is very historical and fantastical, so it really kind of fit within my skill set. I think it's one of the most interesting war games out there, because it is told from the civilian perspective, and in no way glorifies war.
On The Last Broadcast I did scenario mapping and choice architecture, the major branches. They have so many interesting levers and mechanics [for telling stories].
For me, it's always really interesting to go into a game that has its established mechanics: 'Here are the tools, here are the verbs, here are the things that you have at your disposal what kind of story do you want to tell with it?' Horizon and This War Of Mine was me learning to be mindful of resource costs.
image [https://cdn.magzter.com/1387349800/1725452903/articles/7VEdG26UV1725525907882/2999521417.jpg]
80 Days is mostly told through text, so if I want to have a giant explosion and the airship crashes, I can just write that and it doesn't cost anything except my time writing the words. You can't necessarily rely on that kind of grandeur when someone has to animate or create assets, so you have to know a lot more about what other departments are doing and how their workflows work. You're understanding the design space, but you're also understanding the process and then you also have to understand a little bit about budgeting and time and resource costs, which I think are all really important skills for narrative designers.
SUNLESS SKIES
Developer/publisher Fa...
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Edge Uk (Digital) - 1 Issue, November 2024