Donner Boy (2026)
Narrative Design | Game Design | Writing
Donner Boy is a Visual Novel for PC/Linux that puts players in the shoes of an immigrant facing xenophobia, wrapped up in a horror-mystery plot that keeps players on their toes.
Developed with a small team of six people it was my master thesis project, on which I got to take the lead on narrative design and writing. The project underwent many interactions while we were planning it—especially on the game design side, where I had to wrangle scope creep and keep us focused and on track.
The end product is a concise and yet poignant exploration of a socially relevant topic that landed well with players and the team was genuinely happy with.
Contributions
Ideation & Concept
Concepting was a team effort — one that involved an incredible amount of brainstorming, discussions and scrapped ideas. Each team member had their own focus during this time with mine being on game design—concepting different dialogue mechanics and thinking up interesting ways to affect the narrative outside of dialogue choices.
Writing
Almost every line of dialogue in Donner Boy was written by myself; from draft, to revisions and final polish. I worked to keep things to the point, but descriptive, differentiate the characters “voices” and strike the right balance between entertaining and terrifying the players.
Narrative Design
Outlining a story is a mammoth task in and of itself, even more so when that story has branches, diverging routes and character relationships that affect one of the eleven possible endings.
To manage this task I rigorously cut and condensed scenes that didn’t serve the story structure, created visual overviews of the acts and scenes, as well as making mock-ups in Twine.
Implementation
I worked with the Dialogic plugin in Godot to not only implement almost every written line myself, but also created the variables and logic that governed what happens “under the hood”.
Meanwhile our main artist and I collaborated on setting up the visuals, music and transitions using the same plug-in.