Narrative Work on Jellyvale: A Match Tale

Jellyvale is a hybrid-casual F2P Match 3 Platformer and Town Decorator. I was brought in during pre-production to establish the foundational lore and narrative design systems of the project.

This involved designing an NPC-driven quest-based system that emphasized engaging stories, and co-leading the Hub World (Town) player experience and design goals in tandem with our Lead Economy Designer and CEO.

My first milestone working on Jellyvale was to spearhead our IP development: our goal was to building a cozy, delightful world filled with familiarity.

This led me to pitching “Fairy Tails,” an anthropomorphic Fairy Tale world filled with Fairytale Critters—which eventually became Jellyvale.

A core design philosophy for Jellyvale was developing all features with narrative design at the forefront.

For our team, “narrative design” is responsible for developing a core gameplay metaphor—the harmonization of mechanics, story, and art—and then outlining how these gameplay metaphors become full features.

Whether it was for NPC Questlines, Live Ops, Events, or new gameplay verticals, our design team was constantly asking, “does this design feel delightful?”

“Dynamic Delight” was our mantra throughout every feature process, always evaluating if our gameplay or narrative content inspired delight for our players.