Designing a storybook world where every interaction earns its place.

In Unwritten, the player is the book itself. To complete its story, it must explore the world, recover its missing words, and gain the abilities those words represent.

Our five-person team created the game in three weeks at Carnegie Mellon University’s National High School Game Academy. I worked as Producer and Sound Designer, shaping the experience across narrative, mechanics, feedback, and team execution.

Games invite experimentation, spectacle, and playful mechanics. The harder design problem is deciding which ideas actually belong.

Interim feedback from CMU Entertainment Technology Center faculty challenged us to make Unwritten feel inseparable from its premise: create the story through gameplay, integrate the whole experience, and make sure it could not become any other RPG by simply replacing its sprites.

That critique gave us a clearer standard: every mechanic, interface, animation, and sound needed to strengthen what the player was learning, feeling, or choosing.

Our first inventory system worked like a familiar RPG menu: collect something, store it, and use it later. It was functional, but it could have belonged to almost any game.

Faculty feedback helped us recognize the missed opportunity. If the player was a book searching for its stolen language, then collecting a word should do more than fill a slot—it should literally rewrite the book.

We redesigned progression around words. Each recovered word fills in part of the book’s missing story while also becoming a usable ability.

This connected three previously separate layers of the experience:

The opening library became a playable tutorial instead of a separate explanation screen.

The player first learns to move as the book. A book falls from a high shelf, leaving the word Smack on the ground. Collecting it teaches the central rule: words are both story and ability. The player then uses Smack against a spider and earns Venom, reinforcing the loop through action.

Rather than explain the system before play began, the sequence lets discovery, narrative, and instruction happen together.

Playtesters understood the combat system, but described it as weightless. The mechanic existed logically; its feedback did not yet communicate force.

We treated sound, motion, color, and particles as usability—not decoration. A red overlay made damage immediately legible. Animation and impact sounds added force. Transparent attack particles reduced visual clutter, while movement, dust trails, and changing shadows gave the book more physical presence.

We also added details such as an open-book sound and an Escape-key interaction for the inventory, making the interface feel both more responsive and more natural to use.

As Producer, I helped the team translate a large creative vision into decisions we could complete within three weeks. The work required keeping narrative, art, code, combat, level design, and audio moving toward the same experience rather than becoming separate collections of ideas.

As Sound Designer, I used audio to clarify interactions and reinforce the world: attacks needed impact, the book needed presence, and opening the inventory needed to feel like opening part of the character itself.

The role taught me to look beyond whether an individual feature works and ask whether the entire system tells one coherent story.