Writer and Narrative Designer

Awe Interactive is a fully independent and innovative game development studio focused on creating a unique, immersive, and engaging narrative-driven FPS RPG in UE5.

Our mid-size, tight-knit and experienced team has a passion for storytelling, game mechanics, and creating unforgettable gaming experiences. Our mission is to create feelings of Awe for our players.

We are currently seeking a talented and experienced Mid-level Writer and Narrative Designer to join our collaborative team and work on our upcoming title, which combines the worlds of humans, robots, and human-machine hybrids.

You are a Narrative Designer who has also written interactive fiction and dialogue, or a writer who has done narrative design as part of a videogame development team.

You will work closely with our quest designers and Game Director to build depth in our characters, help design our quests, and world and craft compelling, grounded and authentic dialogue.

In this role your focus will be on day-to-day narrative, working in-engine with autonomy as part of the team to write branching dialogue and in-game flavour text. You’ll also help make quest design decisions, tying the moment-to-moment narrative and character motivations seamlessly into gameplay.

Later in the project, you’ll be part of the team supporting any character performance capture and voiceover recording.

We are a relatively small team, and so the role has variety. You can expect to do the following:

• Write high-quality, engaging and meaningful dialogue with humour and subtlety.
• Build out a compelling interactive narrative and bring in-game characters to life.
• Work closely with quest designers to ensure story and gameplay are seamlessly integrated into gameplay, helping make narrative and quest-level decisions tie into the overarching game design.
• Work with narrative leadership and the Game Director to ensure the game’s dialogue and narrative is in line with game pillars and vision.
• Be an expert on all in-game characters and build out their bios, motivations and personalities in briefs for artists and animators.
• Work within the established narrative and world-building framework, enriching the existing lore and major story beats.
• Maintain a high level of writing quality while working within design requirements, technical constraints, and project deadlines.
• Provide constructive feedback and creative input to improve the overall player experience.
• Champion best practice across interactive fiction, narrative design and game writing.
• Update, iterate and extend existing writing.
• Collaborate with the team during later stages of development to assist with casting, character voice iteration and VO (voiceover) and performance recording sessions.
• Write marketing or other supporting copy for the game later in development.

• Experience as a Narrative Designer and/or Writer in videogame development, with at least one shipped game (or substantial experience on an in-development title that did not ship).
• A strong portfolio showcasing your dialogue writing and ability to craft character depth.
• An excellent understanding of how narrative and quest design intersect and complement each other in video games.
• Ability to work both independently and collaboratively in a close-knit team environment.
• Strong communication skills and the ability to receive and give constructive feedback.
• Passion for video games and a deep understanding of good game design practices.
• A thorough understanding of the nuance of the UK over the last 30 years, its culture, regional dialects and slang.
• A very high level of proficiency in written English.
• Technical proficiency with the usual processes of remote working and videogame development.

• Proficiency in using Unreal Engine…