Dead Pedal
Technical Narrative Designer
About the game
Dead Pedal is a third-person, action-oriented, open-world driving game. You play as John D. Pedal, a bounty hunter in a post-apocalyptic desert on a mission to get stronger, destroy enemy factions and ultimately kill an alien sandworm known as The Worm—all in the name of revenge for the death of your pet goldfish, Ted.
I was brought on to create and implement the game’s storyline. There were some rough notes on the world and character-building, but otherwise, I was given free rein to create.
While my main focus was building the systems that supported the dialogue and missions, I also developed the enemy factions that populate the world and created the player’s arc, starting with the tutorial and ending with the final boss fight against The Worm.
Dialogue System
I built the dialogue system from scratch. It is trigger-based, syncs with the VO, and allows for both sequential line delivery and randomly delivered lines for the purpose of barks and radio chatter.
Mission System
There are two primary mission systems in Dead Pedal: the tutorial, built on the back of the dialogue system; and the main game, which I built in collaboration with a programmer. Both systems have location and kill-count-based objectives, but because the main-game is independent from the dialogue system, we can expand the possible objective types in the future.
Project Information:
Team Role: Technical Narrative Designer
Engine: Unreal Engine 5
Team Size: 17
Project Length: August 2022-May 2023 (Joined January 2023)
Team:
Thomas Charlton: Lead Producer
Aiden Wright: Lead Designer/Product Owner
Michael Bowen: Lead Programmer
Gregory Desiato: Lead Artist
Nathan Preston: Level Designer
Riley Davis: Narrative Designer/Writer
Ian Melvin: UI Programmer
Eli Moore: AI Programmer
Isabella King: Character Artist
Jason Ryan: Prop Artist
Brie Haller: Environment/Material Artist
Catherine Davey: Rigging and Animation Artist
Brynn Hooper: Technical Artist
Melina Troccolo: Graphic Designer
Shirley He: Sound Designer
Austin "FutureYou" Burkett: Composer