My Time at King

For most of the time I was employed at King, I was mainly involved with games in the development stage, helping to shape game play and mechanics through the narrative context of what the team wanted the game to be at the bare bones level; a sci-fi base-builder, for example, a noir puzzle, or a gritty first-person shooter. From there, I would help develop the rules of the worlds in which those games would take place. Who populated those worlds? What were their relationships? What kind of cultures did they have, whether alien or human? What were the politics, the philosophy, of those worlds? What would the tone of the game be? Serious? Funny? All those factors would go into the design choices we made as a team, and as we moved along, it was up to me that everything new fit seamlessly into a narratively cohesive universe that would ensure a player remained fully immersed.

As well as this, I acted as a shared resource across the company as a whole, jumping in and out of various production teams to help with other games where and when needed, to provide narrative structures to new live events, for example, or to overlay a narrative context to games that had been developed without one.

In terms of some of the more interesting projects I was involved with, I had a great creative time helping the lead narrative team develop the story bible for the ubiquitous Candy Crush Saga.

This consisted of creating backstories for both main characters and new, as well as helping with history of the Candy Crush world itself, what its rules were, how it came to be, how the people that lived there arrived.

And of course it also involved coming up with crazy new storylines for the game’s ever increasing content.

The project for which I provided the most traditional form of narrative was Pyramid Solitaire Saga, which at the time was presenting a linear story through a book the players could access through the game. Somewhere between Indiana Jones and Lara Croft, but leaning more towards Indy in tone, these were stories that involved ancient, mystical artefacts in far off distant lands and realms as a framework for the game map. There was a lot of fun to be had with the story. The best thing I did was introduce a villain to act as the hero Helena’s Moriarty, a rival treasure hunter called Scarlett.

In a similar vein, I was involved with the creation of a narrative bible for the Bubble Witch series of games; this time working alone, however.

Again, this was all about giving story and depth to the characters and the world in which they lived, establishing the rules of that world and the relationships and factions of the people and creatures that made it up.

I particularly enjoyed coming up with a mythology for Stella, the iconic witch at the heart of the game.