I was the sole writer and narrative designer on our 12 person team; I laid out the entire game’s plot and narrative structure and had a hand in designing the number of stages, their contents, and the way they connected to each other. I also wrote all of the dialogue and cutscenes in the game, and implemented that text (and the associated art assets provided to me by our artists) into the game using the Fungus plugin for Unity. I did not, however, design the characters or the concept for the game: I was gave the already-conceived characters appropriate voices, and ensured that the Chinese cultures the game was inspired by and drew from were respected and represented appropriately even though I am not a member of those cultures. The members of my team who had created the game’s concept and characters were a part of those cultures, and I worked closely with them and did some of my own research to fill the gaps and correct the misconceptions in my knowledge.
Bìxié (辟邪; bìxié; pi-hsieh; lit. “to ward off evil spirits”) is a 2-player beat-em-up plus visual novel hybrid about a dragon princess and her lion guardian fighting to hold back the darkness that threatens their people — and to find a balance between their duty to the kingdom and their self-hoods. My goals for this game were to create a powerful and engaging story focused entirely on just the two player characters, and to elegantly use that story as a vehicle for the themes and cultural background that inspired the game’s creation. I found immense success in doing so: Mei Lien and Qinyang have the most effective character voices I’ve ever written, and their relationship’s evolution combined with the arc of their story conveys the core theme of the game extremely powerfully. That theme — that to find a way to accommodate the duty one has to others and to one’s culture AND the needs and desires of the self (which are both valuable and important), one must forge a new path forward — is heavily informed by the Chinese diasporan culture that suffuses the game. I’m proud of how my work contributed to that, and thankful for the members of my team who provided me help and guidance I needed to perform my work well.