Alexander Blum

In-Game Lore Sample

In a science-fiction adventure game set in the year 3722, the player reaches a GRAVESTONE in the former campus of the Kennedy Space Center. In-game, the area is now a ruin and a cemetery, with little trace of its former identity preserved. The player begins to read:

Here lies Neil Armstrong, a Druid who once walked upon the gleaming orbs of the abyss. Armstrong and his contemporaries invented the technique known as shadow-stride, an ancient American combat style lost to time. Scholars today believe that a race of Silver-Diamond Dragons, now extinct, emitted flames which defied the grasp of the Earth, permitting certain warriors to enter the abyss.

Armstrong's suit was a marvel of sorcery. His helmet contained a live Varuna, an air spirit, which enabled him to breathe even in nothingness. His gloves, believed to be behind his namesake, were used to pull apart space-time at the seams. His boots were blessed by a priestess to leap fifty feet in a single bound, empowering him to step across shadows. One phrase from his victories against the heathens of the abyss survives: "One great kick for man, one enormous stomp for mankind." We surmise that Armstrong went to war with the black holes, and conquered them through the now-forgotten techniques of the American Standing Space Armies.

Should these methodologies ever be recovered, once again, human feet shall challenge the void. Until then, we simmer, and await new Armstrongs.

In tiny text at the bottom: (By legal decree, we are required to state that Neil Armstrong is not himself buried here. This site instead commemorates a corpse that was believed to exist according to reconstructed documents, but was never found)

Environmental Storytelling Sample

Kaylee Andrews lives in a near-future techno-dystopia. I'd implement the following chain of events to demonstrate this dystopia to the player without using any dialogue:

1. Kaylee doesn't own a wallet. She has a phone case with a sleeve on the back, which contains a single ID CARD. We see her swipe this card to purchase items, access a bar, start her car in the morning, and prove her citizenship to a police officer.

2. A man in line in front of her at the grocery store swipes his card to purchase a cart full of food. It BEEPS MENACINGLY. The clerk looks down at the card. A beat. Then, the clerk reaches for a phone. The man PANICS, and flees, leaving his food behind. 

3. Later on, that same man appears on a WANTED POSTER on a telephone pole outside the park. The poster claims that his citizenship is expired, and authorities are seeking him for deportation. 

4. At a later juncture, Kaylee is behind the wheel of her self-driving car. Suddenly, the steering wheel locks up, and BEEPS MENACINGLY. The car automatically pulls over to the side of the road. Kaylee, trying to take back control, swipes her ID CARD into its slot in the dashboard. The display reads: "PERSON UNRECOGNIZED". She has been deleted from the database, unpersoned...

Game Outline: "Sibyl"

An original deck-builder RPG where you paint the future you desire! 

On her twenty-first birthday, a young woman named Sibyl gets into an argument with her father. She's too old to be unemployed, living in her childhood bedroom without a dime to her name. Her father wants Sibyl to become a famous painter like her late mother, but Sibyl only sees painting as a hobby. The commercial world of late capitalism, she says, has devalued all art. 

Sibyl storms into her room after the argument and uses paint to vent her anger - creating a vivid image of her dad being dragged through the floor by a sea of demons. That'll show him!...until she finds an empty breakfast table the next morning, goes into her father's room to investigate, and finds nothing but a massive hole in the floor leading to the center of the Earth...

Now, armed with her prophetic painting powers, Sibyl must venture into the underworld to rescue her father. She fights imps, demons and wraiths by collecting trading cards of them, and painting terrible disasters befalling them, which immediately come true. However, paint is a rare commodity at the center of the Earth, and must be earned through exploration. The game becomes something like Act II of Inscryption as a Metroidvania - exploring the underworld for paint to defeat enemies, which unlocks more of the world, advancing deeper by painting away your problems one card at a time...

At the bottom of the underworld, Sibyl meets The Hellman. He tells her that she is in fact his wife, Persephone, who foolishly escaped the underworld, died at the surface, and was reborn as the daughter of a mortal man. The Hellman waited for Sibyl's twenty-first birthday to bestow her with magical powers, then kidnapped her father, all to fool her back into his clutches. She's not a prophetess at all, declares the Hellman, her art never caused anything to happen, it was all his doing - destroying Sibyl's confidence. This allows The Hellman take away her painting ability, (and the player's decks and paint) placing her by his side as his wife once more.

All is lost...until Sibyl finds her late mother, the legendary painter, in the depths of Hades. She has been in the farthest reaches of the underworld all this time, aware of The Hellman's plan, waiting for her daughter. Sibyl's mother paints a portrait of Sibyl on the eve of her twenty-first birthday, before The Hellman took her painting powers away. This restores Sibyl's powers (and the player's equipment). Now, Sibyl frees her father from a legion of demons, and the three of them climb back up to the surface while fending off The Hellman's goons as a family, the player painting calamity after calamity to clear the hordes of demons from their path...

After defeating The Hellman in a climactic final battle near the surface, the family is whole once more. Sibyl, united with her mother and father in their home, returns to her normal life. But something is missing. Painting, even though it brought her family back together, still isn't her heart's desire. At the end of the game, she decides to get a job at a marketing agency, and moves out of her parents' home. She won't be a painter. She doesn't know what she wants to be at all. Her mother and father accept it. Her future is unwritten. Sibyl steps out of her new apartment into a sunny morning on her first day of work...