Hey, hi, hello.

I’m Brian Lee and I’m a member of both the Narrative and Tech teams for The Hierophant. For the most part, working on The Hierophant has been a tale of two sides as I’ve looked at the project from two differing perspectives. That said, there have also been opportunities where being a part of two separate teams has presented me with overlapping tasks.

At the beginning of the project, I was personally more heavily focused on the narrative aspects of our game. Naturally, this makes sense as we would need to know what we were making before we begin to make it. We had an interesting concept that would require sufficient worldbuilding, as the narrative content for our game would be more predominant than gameplay mechanics. 

One of the first tasks I had was to write the narrative concepts for the characters and setting of our world. Descriptive biographies of characters help us understand how a certain character will have an impact on the story while also giving proper justifications as to how they impact the story. Does a character’s upbringing change how they behave later in life? What drives an empathetic character to have a passion for helping others? 

Besides later helping write the script for our narrative, my other main task was working within Unity as a part of our Tech team. As I preface, before this project my coding skills were vastly limited and my work within Unity itself was just as limited. Innocently enough, this became quite a challenge as each week became a new learning experience as I was learning things in Unity on the fly. Up until this point, my main objective for the Tech team was working on getting cards dealt; this seemed like an easier task before I realized the code that would be required to deal a set of cards out of an array was more complicated than I had anticipated. This includes logical math in the form of statistics when dealing cards and some other minute factors. 

At first, I couldn’t get the cards to deal properly because I was missing a single i++ (incrementation); this was a problem I had dealt with for many weeks, staring at my code wondering why it did not work. With that being said, I do enjoy challenges and there is always a rewarding feeling when the programming works properly.

It’s an exciting but stressful time for The Hierophant as more and more pieces of the game are beginning to come together. There’s still plenty of work to be done but just as much promise as when we started this project. I look forward to how it all shakes out at the end.

Brian.