Narrative Design for a Hero-Based Rogue-Lite: Mighty Quest Rogue Palace

As games are an interactive medium, every new project poses the question HOW we want to convey its story. The first part of the answer usually lies in its game design, and how players are meant to interact with it.

To gain insights into this topic, we’ll do a deep-dive into the recently released Ubisoft-Netflix collaboration “Mighty Quest Rogue Palace” — a hack and slash rogue-lite. With its 20 playable heroes, 1 epic quest to save the kingdom and a whole world to explore, its narrative systems combine multiple parallel progressions and contextual triggers to create one non-linear choral adventure with 20 perspectives.

This talk will reveal how the game’s narrative system was designed to emphasize the core gameplay pillars, rather than act independently from them, while retaining a narrative coherency and proper pacing. It strives to give insights and inspiration to narrative designers who face the challenge of designing a narrative system from scratch, may that be for rogue-lites or other genres.