Hunt awe-inspiring gods in a vast twin-stick neo-western RPG! Tobacco is the action-adventure shooter with high-octane boss battles, cinematic moments, and immersive world design.
Currently in development by Noisy Club Digital.
My Roles
studio Founder
In 2023, I founded Noisy Club Digital (NCD), alongside three other individuals. NCD is a four-person indie studio focused on making immersive narrative games.
Team lead
I developed the initial idea for the project and led the team from pre-production to a complete demo of the game. I maintained design documents, managed meetings, and crafted the team culture.
Project Management
Using project management software, I created and maintained a production timeline, ensuring Noisy Club Digital finished the Tobacco Demo exactly on schedule.
Narrative Designer
I collaborated with my team to design engaging level, combat, and quest design, working with the team artist, sound designer, and programmer to bring to life our collective vision, and ensure a meaningful player experience.
Writer
I wrote the story of Tobacco, ranging from the main character, to NPC’s, to Gods, to combat encounters, to hundreds of pages of backstory. I then communicated this story to the team via recorded, edited, youtube videos, and worked alongside them to help bring about our shared vision.
Marketing
While the team created the trailer and pitch deck for the Tobacco demo, I wrote email copy, co-wrote pitch deck copy, and contacted over 20 triple and double i publishers.
What I’ve Learned
Tobacco is currently still in development. As I write this, my team is working on refining, editing, and tightening the demo. We are working towards another round of pitches. For that reason, what I write here comes with a caveat – it’s what Tobacco has taught me thus far. What has this project taught me as a narrative designer, team lead, and writer?
It’s taught me about how to lead. How to communicate. How to create, develop, and realize ideas as a team. In the past, I’ve always been a very solitary artist. I’ve always needed to write entirely independently, totally apart from others, operating only within my solitude. This project has forced me to change that. It’s taught me how to develop art with others, what healthy communication and collaboration look like, and how to bring your ideas to life with the help of others. Collaboration isn’t like I had thought it might be: a flowing river. It’s not smooth and constant and seamless. Collaboration is, should be, more like… countless explosions. Ideas will strike seemingly out of nowhere, and a group of artists, previously silent, will explode into conversation, heading off in seemingly inane and useless directions. Side conversations, totally unrelated, will split off for fractions of a second. Sparks will ignite, then fizzle out, to frustration. There will be lulls. The team will decide on an idea, only for one member, often guiltily, to prove the idea a non-starter. There will be quiet. Then, another burst, and suddenly, the team is charging with a new idea. And abruptly, just as quickly as it had started, the conversation ended, and everyone was furiously working. Repeat a few moments, or hours, later.
Those exothermic, rapid, collision-based moments are what collaboration looks like. My job as the narrative designer and team lead isn’t just to partake, synthesize, and moderate. I must ensure the conversation never spirals off and that those moments of slight conflict, vital for art, never spiral into confrontation. The lulls of having an idea disproven never become a stagnant depression amidst the team. I learned how essential it is to ensure that every voice is heard and that, while it’s imperative to let people get excited, it is also mandatory that people never get trampled over in discussion. I learned how to manage conflict and emotion in a healthy, collaborative, creative way. How to negotiate and lead diplomatically. How to combine massive ideas, trim them down based on scope, core vision, and needs, and translate that wild idea into tasks with deadlines, accountability, and deliverables.
Of course, being able to do this relies on, in my opinion, one thing, and one thing only: workplace culture. Great projects are made by great teams, and great teams are made by a group of diverse individuals working together with great relationships. I do not believe great teams require great people – great teams require excellent communication. If the team members are individually highly skilled, that’s great. It’s a huge bonus. But what’s far more critical is that they have a passion for their work, are positive and healthy, and have a strong work ethic and sense of initiative. They don’t necessarily need incredible skills. They need to be able to form great relationships. A great workplace relationship does not necessarily mean a devoted friendship. It means a respectful, safe, and dignified creative arena to exchange ideas.
To that end, to make a great project, a team lead must divert considerable attention to creating a great team culture. If those great relationships are what we need, then ensuring a rock-solid foundation for those relationships is mandatory to make a great project. On a systemic level, we must ensure that healthy collaboration is built into our interactions. To me, that’s workplace culture.
From “Culture Code” by Daniel Coyle, I learned the structural foundation of a great workplace culture. A great project is built on three central tenets: 1) every team member feels safe, 2) every member feels heard, and 3) every member believes they have a future. To that end, I ensured conversations were always built on a backbone of mutual respect, dignity, and goal orientation. Negativity is an insidious toxin and must be cut out immediately. Conflict, when monitored, is the cornerstone of solid collaboration. People need to feel free to disagree and be respected enough to be allowed to work through a disagreement. If people, if artists are not allowed to disagree, then they do not have a voice. However, these disagreements must be carefully monitored – as soon as they become disrespectful, personal, or insulting, they must be immediately quashed. I learned how to check in with people, read people’s emotions carefully in a group situation, and check negative interactions without disrespecting, insulting, or silencing team members.
As a writer and worldbuilder, I gained more experience learning how to create significant, branching narratives. The beauty of worldbuilding a project like this is the freedom it grants me in making connections. As a player, that’s what I love discovering – the interconnected, knotted, causal fabric of the universe I’m playing within. As a writer, that’s what I love creating. I love those moments of discovering a knot in worldbuilding, where I suddenly have an event, an interaction, or an idea that perfectly links two seemingly unrelated elements. I learned how to create these stories, how to begin them, how to develop them, and how to tell what information is relevant to my needs as a designer. I also learned how to communicate my worldbuilding information to a team. For a programmer, it’s not only intimidating but almost untouchable to simply read twenty thousand words of a block of text. That’s a huge time-sink. Instead, I used video essays to communicate my written work to the team, allowing them to interact with my writing on their own terms, almost as if it were a podcast or audiobook.
It feels strange to boil down such a massive project in my life to a few key takeaways. As a creative, this project has been a watershed moment. How reductive. But that’s okay. I could talk for hours about how this project changed me, but I suppose I must stop somewhere.