Development Info
Features
Genre: Open World Survival
Players: 1-70
Engine: Unreal Engine 4
Platform: PC, Xbox One and PS4
Time on Team: May 2016 – January 2017
- An online, open world survival game with hardcore mechanics and RPG statistics
- A wide variety of dinosaurs and other creatures that can be fought, tamed and bred
- A deep crafting system that includes structure building, farming and more
- The ability to form tribes with other players and conduct large scale PvP battles
Game Overview
As a man or woman stranded naked, freezing and starving on the shores of a mysterious island called ARK, you must hunt, harvest resources, craft items, grow crops, research technologies, and build shelters to withstand the elements. Use your cunning and resources to kill or tame & breed the leviathan dinosaurs and other primeval creatures roaming the land, and team up with or prey on hundreds of other players to survive, dominate…and escape!
Responsibilities
- Wrote over 500 in-game journal entries or “Explorer Notes” for multiple characters in ARK: Survival Evolved, ARK: Scorched Earth, ARK: Aberration and ARK: Extinction
- Used said journal entries to craft a cohesive and coherent narrative for ARK and expand on its lore
- Wrote “Dino Dossier” in-game and promo documents describing new creatures that were being introduced to the game and its expansions
Cutscene Example
Below, you can find the final cutscene from ARK: Extinction, which I wrote the script for. This included dialogue, shot descriptions and direction, and notes for our composer.
Explorer Notes
Players can find various Explorer Notes across the map in ARK: Survival Evolved and its expansions, Scorched Earth and Aberration, which tell the stories of a diverse cast of characters who arrived on the ARK from a various points in human history. I originally wrote all of them in English, and some are in that language by default. Others initially appear in a foreign language or stylized font for the sake of immersion, but players can read them in English by turning on subtitles. In a later update, the Explorer Notes for two of the characters — Sir Edmund Rockwell and Helena Walker — received voiceover from David Tenantand Madeleine Madden respectively, which you can enjoy in the videos below.
The text from all of the explorer notes them is also available on the ARK wiki, and the below Google documents – though please note that since these documents were compiled by fans, they may have some typos or minor inaccuracies that were not present in the originals. You can also scroll further down to see some examples of how they appear in-game.
Explorer Notes: Scorched Earth
Dino Dossier Examples
The Dino Dossiers were written by Helena, one of the characters above, and can be collected by players in the same manner as the journal entries. However, many of these were completed before I joined the team in May, 2016. I am only responsible for the ones released after that point in time, including all the dossiers from the Scorched Earth expansion.
