Official Start Menu

It’s no secret Brunette Games works with amazing clients from all across the world, but this new release hits far closer to home. Developed by Atari and Graphite Lab, RollerCoaster Tycoon Story launched this week as part of the latest installment of the classic Atari franchise. Not only did Brunette Games write the dialogue and in-game text, but we had the honor of working hand-in-hand with Graphite Lab through every step of the script process.

Official In-Game Screenshot

Like Brunette Games, Graphite Lab is centered right here in St. Louis. They have some amazing talent in their studio, and our two companies’ relationship goes beyond the walls of work. So much so, that one of their employees and I are actually neighbors! RollerCoaster Tycoon Story was one of my first big original writing projects, and getting to sit down and talk with their team face-to-face as we developed the narrative was an experience I’ll never forget.

St. Louis is slowly growing its own gaming community, one both Brunette Games and Graphite Lab are happy to be part of. We had the great opportunity to work together, and RollerCoaster Tycoon Story is the product of that collaboration. For the first time in the series, this new release has a rich narrative built around exciting Match-3 puzzles. Even more, Graphite Lab has evolved the typical Match-3 genre by including a rails mechanic never before seen in these types of casual games. A third St. Louis studio, Fat Bard, provided music and sound effect support as well, making this a truly homegrown effort all around.

Official In-Game Screenshot

If that’s not enough to sell you on this new release, hear it from the developer themselves with the official App Store description:

Welcome to RollerCoaster Tycoon Story! The legendary Eagleland theme park has fallen into despair and it’s up to you to restore it to its former glory by solving exciting Match-3 puzzles. Based on the beloved RollerCoaster Tycoon franchise, RollerCoaster Tycoon Story uses an innovative rail match system to earn tickets that can be used to complete tasks such as repairing rides, cleaning up park grounds and rebuilding shops. Partner with Sam, your dependable mechanic and other park staff to help restore the land around the park, unravel hidden mysteries, meet interesting characters and become a true RollerCoaster Tycoon.

Features:

• Hundreds of Levels: Match three or more pieces using the rail match system to complete fun puzzles or earn powerful boosters. Complete more complex puzzles to uncover special items including the famous Screechin’ Eagle booster.

• Exciting Story: Finish each round to progress through the storyline and advance to the next level. As you continue to play, additional zones of the park will unlock revealing classic RollerCoaster Tycoon rides like the Log Flume water ride.

• Renovate and Decorate: Improve sections of your park by removing debris, adding decorations, and investing in research to further upgrade rides, attractions and more.

• Endearing Characters: Interact with multiple characters including Sam the maintenance worker, Maggie the mechanic, Tyler the panda mascot entertainer, and many others.

• Daily Rewards: Earn bonus rewards each day for restored rides and attractions. More rides, more money!

• Leaderboards: Top the global leaderboards and compete against friends.

Official In-Game Screenshot

Also, did I mention you get to name a pet squirrel? Download now, and tell us here at Brunette Games what you think!

For more information, visit the official website here!

The Brunette Games crew, from L to R: Anthony Valterra, Lisa Brunette, and Dexter Woltman.

At this time last year, I'd taken my first steps toward going beyond the solo act by engaging with a few project-based contractors, but I soon discovered that wasn't enough. There was opportunity to build Brunette Games into the dream team I'd always envisioned: A collaborative cabal of casual game scribes delivering the best narrative in the business.

Brunette Games has now tripled in size, with three full-time staff members:

• Anthony Valterra, an industry vet who steered flagship brands such as Dungeons & Dragons and Avalon Hill for Wizards of the Coast. His publishing company also released the only roleplaying game guide governing the romantic lives of D&D characters, The Book of Erotic Fantasy. His thirty-year career in brand and grant management makes him ideal in his role as business director, and we've been grateful to get his seasoned perspective and writing chops on unannounced projects for Jam City, Daily Magic Productions, G5 Entertainment, Tuyoo, and Super Gaming. He's also contributed to our work on a new game app set to release in 2020, Tiles & Tales for Helsinki-based Kuuhubb, and Jam City's 2019 game Vineyard Valley. Some of you already know he's my husband in real life, too, making Brunette Games truly a family business.
• Dexter Woltman, who, though new to the industry, is cut from the same cloth as the rest of us. As one of my original contractors, he's now put in a year with Brunette Games, and sometimes we think he gets us better than we get ourselves. Dexter is lead writer/designer on the top-performing Redemption Games title Sweet Escapes, and in his spare time, he's also written his first interactive novel for an unannounced new mobile app and designed and written for a new franchise title to release in 2020. A superb team player, he's also contributed to our work on numerous games for clients Kuuhubb, Jam City, G5 Entertainment, Tuyoo, Super Gaming, Storm8, Belka Games, and Cherrypick Games, just to name a few!
• Lisa Brunette, intrepid owner and leader of Brunette Games. My focus this past year has been on taking the skills I honed on industry-dominating titles Matchington Mansion, Lily's Garden, and Choices, plus the five years I spent at the narrative helm at Big Fish, and transferring them to my team so that we have a group expertise not dependent on any one of us. Our collaborative process ensures clients an above-average narrative product, and I'm confident we'll see many more hit games in the coming year as a result.

In addition to the core three, we've got two others on the Bru Crew, both voice-over actors. Cammie Middleton records voiceover work for TV, film, and games out of her L.A. studio, while also playing lead roles in both film and stage productions, including appearances in the Golden Key award-winning "Rochester 1996," to rave reviews. Andy Mack is a longtime video-game voice actor whose work has been showcased at E3, Gamescon, GameInformer, and elsewhere and includes 2019's The Amazing Fantastics and Postal 4. They've both recorded for an unannounced Jam City title to release in 2020.

It's been a whirlwind year of success, but not without its struggle. As a small business owner, I can tell you that running a business from scratch is one of the hardest things I've ever done... from providing employee benefits such as health care to grappling with decisions like liability insurance to handling the complexity of a remote client network spanning the globe. Whether it's working over the July 4th holiday on a rush job (which we did) or getting up for 6 am calls with clients in an opposite time zone (which we do regularly), you have to be willing to go the extra mile. I'm proud to say everyone on this team is, and we have the game credits to prove it. That makes the struggle so worth it!

In 2019, Brunette Games worked with a total of 12 different clients to release three new games and produce new content for three existing games. We've also been working on 10 other games still in development. 

Here's a list of our 2019 new releases:

• Lily's Garden, for Tactile Entertainment - narrative design, concept origination and character consulting, intro storyboard
• Sweet Escapes, for Redemption Games - intro storyboard, narrative design, scriptwriting
• Vineyard Valley, for Jam City - general consulting

We delivered new content for the following games:

• Survivors: The Quest, for G5 Entertainment - narrative design, scriptwriting
• Homicide Squad: Hidden Crimes, also for G5 Entertainment - narrative design, scriptwriting, editing
• Sweet Escapes - narrative design, scriptwriting

And finally, we're working with the following clients on unannounced projects in various stages of development:

• Graphite Lab
• Daily Magic Productions
• Storm8
• Belka Games
• Jam City
• Tuyoo
• Super Gaming
• G5 Entertainment
• Kuuhubb
• Cherrypick Games

Looking ahead, we're excited about the opportunities for us in 2020 both close to home and far away. Our projects gel best when we can kick off the teamwork in person, which we were able to do this year right here in St. Louis with Graphite Lab, in Helsinki with Kuuhubb, and in L.A. with Jam City. Not every client has the budget for an onsite, but we look forward to seeing you at the Game Developers Conference in March and perhaps at other venues later on.

We wish you a prosperous 2020 filled with creativity, imagination, and great game stories!

The question of whether to design a game and then fit a narrative into it, or to have a narrative and design the game to fit is probably as old as chess. There are numerous examples of success in both categories. And there are plenty of successful games with little or no narrative. I guess a narrative with no game would be a story, but  that is another blog post entirely.

But in the current genre of casual iOS games, the value of narrative is beginning to be understood. The huge success of Matchington Mansion and Lily’s Garden, in particular, has caught the attention of many a developer.

But there is a secret to both of these games: The narrative design was brought in early. No, it wasn’t the case that the narrative designers were brought in first. But in both cases, they were brought in early enough that art assets and game play could be adjusted to the narrative. Those cute little pillows in the Match-3 of Matchington Mansion? They were suggested by the narrative design. Lily’s tragic story in the first narrative cut scene? Created by the narrative designer.

A lot of terrific synergies can occur if narrative is brought in as early as possible. Narrative can be incorporated into tutorials and game mechanics. Game art assets can reflect or support the narrative. Tying the narrative closely to the game makes the user experience seamless and encourages engagement. This has been shown again and again in A:B testing and in focus groups.

The worst situation in game development is taking a nearly complete game out to A:B testing and hearing from representative consumers that the story is not engaging, or that they find the story boring, or even worse: offensive or problematic. Then narrative expert or consultants are called in to salvage a game. But in these cases it is almost always true that the budget has been spent and there is no money to revise, alter or add assets, change code or alter UI. In the very worst cases some narrative or text is part of the graphic art and cannot be altered, either. Now the narrative designers must try to revise and improve the story by only changing the text. This is an extremely difficult proposition.

If you bring in expert narrative early, you might avoid becoming the next Internet meme!

YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE:

New Release in Games: Matchington Mansion!

New Release: 'Lily's Garden' for Tactile Entertainment

The Brunette Games Writers' Room

One of the distinguishing features of working with Brunette Games is that you're not trusting your precious game story to some isolated, solitary freelancer but rather a team of highly trained professionals who work together to deliver narrative design and writing that consistently out-performs other games on the market.

Two of us on the team came to game design from backgrounds in traditional publishing. The convention in book publishing and journalism is for all writing to go through a series of checks and balances before it's ever put out to the public for consumption. The process looks like this:

1. The writer, sometimes working in a team with other writers and editors, outlines the concept for the work.
2. A developmental editor provides feedback to the writer on the overall theme, setting, story arc, characters, and the structure of the work.
3. The writer goes through the draft stage, writing and then revising, with the feedback of the developmental editor.
4. Once the writing content is pretty well locked down, it still gets two more passes. The first is from a copyeditor, who tinkers with sentence structure and might punch up lines for more humor or drama or both.
5. Finally, the work gets a final proofreading pass to clear away any typos or errors in grammar and style.

Game writing has not traditionally received anywhere near this much scrutiny, and that's part of why the writing in games has often had a bad rap. The other reason is that game text has often been written by game designers, artists, programmers, and others who usually have zero training as writers.

At Brunette Games, we apply the standards of traditional publishing to our game projects. Whether one of us writes a scene or we draft the scene as co-writers, the text also receives several rounds of feedback and review. What goes to the client is a highly polished product. No one's text gets to the client without review.

Borrowing heavily from TV and film, we work as a "writers' room." We discuss and try out characterizations, scenarios, and dialogue, tapping the team brain. We conduct what's known in Hollywood as a "table read," each of us taking a character and reading out the script aloud to listen, critique, make adjustments, and finely hone the text.

We're also experienced specialists in both writing as a professional skill and specifically game writing and design as that unique practice combining the right-brain creativity of fictional world creation and the left-brain activity of integrating that world with the primary mission of gameplay.

Our newest member, Anthony Valterra, is a game-industry vet with 30 years' professional experience. He steered high-profile game brands such as Dungeons & Dragons and Avalon Hill, leveraging his master's degree in religion on titles with heavy mythological content. His former company published the classic D20 player guide, Book of Erotic Fantasy. Since joining Brunette Games, he's designed and written locations for G5's game Survivors: The Quest and works on several unannounced projects as writer, editor, and reviewer.

Dexter Woltman has worked with Brunette Games for more than a year. He possesses a BA in Scriptwriting and has already designed and written an interactive novel and the launch content for an unannounced narrative puzzle game. He's also lead writer/designer on Sweet Escapes, and you can see his impact on this game in the rave reviews players give the character Scoops. Dexter also edits the games Homicide Squad: New York Stories and Jewels of Rome for our client G5 Entertainment.

Most clients and followers know my background by now, so I'll just say this. When I entered the game industry more than a decade ago, I brought an editorial acumen honed as a journalist, published fiction writer, and professor of writing to all the games I've touched. But I also approached every game as a player first, crafting my stories in service to the game. I believe this is why I've had so many successful games to my credit, and that same spirit is why my team continues to rack up successes.

My longtime friend and fellow Saint Louis University grad, Lubna Somjee, posted the above recently on LinkedIn. We're honored to be thought of here at Brunette Games, and I'm personally grateful for the recognition. I hadn't realized what a small cohort I'm part of as a female entrepreneur. As the Forbes article Lubna links to says, only 24.5% of U.S. startups in their first two years are owned by women. You can read the full story here, which provides a list of the top 20 cities for female entrepreneurship; St. Louis is no. 1. There's also an interesting discussion of what challenges and factors go into making a city a supportive place for women to start successful businesses.

When I relocated my business to St. Louis from the Pacific Northwest in 2017, I was a solo act. Two years later, we're a team of three full-timers and two contract voice-over actors. We love our Midwestern headquarters. It's been a privilege to hire Dexter Woltman right out of my game design classes at Webster University, and we're active members of our local St. Louis Game Developers Co-Op. I've always said that St. Louis is vastly underrated as a city in a "flyover state." The degree of cultural and natural world offerings at your doorstep compared to the low cost of living makes it, in my opinion, a much better option than cities I've lived in on the East and West Coasts. Of course, my family is here, too, so that helps tip the scales.

Congratulations to St. Louis for this distinction. We're thrilled to be part of the entrepreneurial spirit here in the river city!