Portfolio / Writing & narrative design
Alone aboard a drifting ship, salvage, survive, repair, and explore to find your crew and escape the void.
In this galactic robinsonade, you're alone aboard a drifting ship. Salvage every piece of debris, repair your ship, manage your resources, and explore the wreck to find your crew.
In 457 AE (After the Space Exodus), humanity has scattered to the far reaches of the galaxy, surviving through isolated colonies, orbital shipyards, and, for the more adventurous, often dangerous contracts. In this intergalactic void, it's the major corporations that dictate the laws, exploiting resources and crews for their own gain.
For most, there's only one option left: work for them. Risky, poorly regulated missions, where human lives matter little against profit. Refuse, and you disappear. Accept, and you survive... a little longer.
On the industrial planet Arsène, a hub for maintenance and spacecraft construction, worn-out ships come to be repaired, to rest. That's where the Flying Cuckoo ends up, a mercenary ship marked by failure. Its captain, Brannigan, is trying to get his crew back on their feet after a disastrous contract. Searching for new recruits, he crosses paths with Harold Marlowe, a young Arsenian from the space shipyards, resourceful and comfortable working with machines.
The Flying Cuckoo, a small crew of mercenaries, accepts a lucrative contract: escort a cargo ship to the planet B223. But the operation goes wrong when a pirate attack leaves the ship badly damaged, drifting in the void of space.
When he wakes up, Harold discovers he's alone, the crew lost somewhere aboard the ship. Systems are down and resources are dwindling.
Trapped in an unstable wreck, he'll have to survive by salvaging what he can find, repair the ship, and explore its depths to understand what happened, and hope to escape, one way or another.
Four texts pulled from the document: three diegetic pieces, and one line from a dialogue scene, to show both registers of the narrative.
"This is Cap'n Brannigan. It's March 13th. I'm currently on Arsène, a dump of a place, if you ask me. I hired a new guy while the ship was being repaired. Some local yokel. Eh, as long as he does the job, I don't give a damn who he is."
"The Flying Cuckoo will be taking off in a few hours. I landed a contract from Red Apple, a big company. Hope it goes well this time."
"Hey you... It's been a while since I've written or talked to you. We left Arsène three days ago. What a rathole... We passed through there together over thirty years ago, remember?"
"Back then, I still felt like I was somebody. People knew my name, I was on screens across the whole galaxy... And now look at me. An old mercenary stringing together crappy contracts."
"I miss you more with every second that passes... just like I miss him."
"Manufacturer: Morbo. Type: Autonomous survival drone. Activates only in case of emergency. Functions: organic recycling, repair, extraction. Mobility adapted to changes in gravity."
"Note: autonomy recently improved, but persistent difficulty getting through certain doors."
"I can't repair the reactors alone... I need Morbo."
Later, once Morbo has been found and brought up to speed: "This will take me approximately 12 hours of work."
This project pushed me to combine two approaches to narrative: diegetic storytelling (found documents, audio logs, codex entries) for worldbuilding and context, and performed dialogue for the story's key moments, like the reunion with Morbo or the discovery of the traitor. It required being precise about what each channel should carry: context and worldbuilding to the diegetic layer, emotion and turning points to dialogue.
Writing several registers (the gruff captain, the intimate and bitter Jaga, the formal tone of the robot or the corporate documents) within the same universe was also a good exercise in voice: keeping every character recognizable even when they never physically appear in a scene.