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Concord

Concord is a first person hero shooter that takes place in the Concord galaxy after the Tempest, a mysterious phenomenon, tears a rift between the Core Worlds and the Wilds. Play as a crew member of the North Star to fight, plunder, and disrupt your way across several colorful planets as all of you go down in infamy on the Guild's most wanted list. 

Role

Narrative Designer

Game Engine

Unreal Engine 5

Platform

PS5 & PC (Windows)

Time on Project

2 Years 6 Months, 2022-2024

Team Size

210 People

Concord Trailer

Trailer

 Responsibilities

  • Maps Team 

    • Narrative Design Liaison on Shock Risk, Robot Ruins, Star Chamber, and Sorting Hub.​

    • Created and Maintained extensive documentation on each map and planet I was responsible for.

    • Took part in weekly updates for map progress to report on my portions, evaluate current narrative elements, answer narrative related questions, and uphold the narrative vision of the Director of IP. 

  • Characters Team â€‹

    • Narrative Liaison on the character teams for Duchess, Bazz, It-Z, and a future facing character.​

    • Write the gameplay barks and casting materials for Duchess, Bazz, and the future facing character. 

      • Each bark sheet was around 300+ lines and covers both combat and challenge gameplay lines.​

    • Write, Rework, and Maintain existing lore pages on Confluence and Miro as well as creating additional pages that were focused on needs for the art and marketing teams. ​

Responsibilities

Leviathan 

Shock Risk Map

  • Shock Risk is the second in a series of three maps on Leviathan, an industrialized ocean planet that needed story continuity with the Water Hazard map. 

    • ​The big element I was tasked with addressing was a massive kite up in a raging storm.​

    • I shaped the story of this map being a power station that collects lightning energy to supply the fishing platforms with electricity. ​

    • I took inspiration from Edison's kite and asked the question of "How would a mostly oceanic planet get power out to artificial fishing platforms?"

  • Industrial planets had the extra challenge of working with Concord's alien alphabet systems.

    • There were two invented alphabet systems for Concord. One was native to the Wilds and the other was native to the Core Worlds. ​

    • Any industrialized planet would use the Core Worlds alphabet, but the usage had to be closely tracked.

  • The additional challenge of external development:

    • Due to the timeline for Concord's development, some maps had to be put through an external development process. ​

    • This made all of the evaluations that much more important for me to get right because of how sign heavy this map was.

    • I spent several days with our archivist to comb through this map and identify what each sign says in the alien language, evaluate if the words are appropriate, and the extra challenging task of locating and flagging any mirrored signage on assets.

Leviathan
Gloom

Gloom

  • Gloom was the first planet I was tasked to making an entire narrative arc for.

  • The inspiration for all of the maps came from the serene nature presented in works by Studio Ghibli. 

  • I started with the prompt of a map named Robot Ruins. 

    • What was it for?​

      • My collaborator and I worked through many ideas of what this robot was doing in this peaceful landscape.​

      • We ranged between terraforming robot, to giant seed pod, and many more before landing on this being a tool of colonization for the Guild.

      • This made the most sense because the Guild is a society that values corporate greed over everything, which runs antithetical to nature. 

    • What happened to it?

      • We determined that it made sense this robot was utilized to kick off the Robot Wars. ​

      • The Guild sent this robot to Gloom as a fake Sparked Robot, and remotely controlled it to decimate the existing people there.

      • ​When the robot destroyed enough of the planet, the Guild hit a kill switch and it "died".

    • What is happening to it now?

      • A group of scavengers are working to harvest parts from the robot while another group is trying to decode the robot's memories. ​

      • Freegunners are there to smuggle the parts off of the moon.

  • I worked with another of our narrative designers as well as the concept art lead to create a deceased culture and set up the mystery of what they meant to the Concord galaxy.

    • We named them the Sentries and they viewed themselves as guardians.​

    • Everything that belonged to them tells a story about their society.

Robot Ruins

Star Chamber

  • Star Chamber was an interesting design challenge.

  • The maps team wanted the center of the map focused around and orrery. 

  • My job was to create a reason for the orrery to be in the center of an open meteor at the peak of a mountain.

  • What was it for?

    • Societies that look toward the skies early on tend to have a balance of scientific and spiritual interest, so I wanted to focus on that for the Sentries. 

    • This seemed like a thing that was uncovered rather than built, so for a society focused on protecting the Concord galaxy from the unknown, this would be treated like a message in a bottle.

  • What happened to it?

    •  After the meteor landed on the mountain, the first Sentries began uncovering the orrery.

    • As the structure was dug out, the Sentries began identifying that these are astral bodies that they could see from Gloom. 

    • This meteor became a place of discovery and spiritual contemplation for the Sentries. ​​

  • What is happening to it now?​

    • Archivists are there studying these structures, star carvings, and Sentry artifacts. ​

    • Freegunners are there to smuggle out artifacts and information.

  • I enjoyed working to expand the Sentry history and create more mysteries for players to contemplate.​

Silo

Silo

  • Silo is the first fully Guild planet and is the start of the story for what their sensibilities are.

  • It's fitting that the first map that was assigned to it is a massive Sorting Hub that also serves as a living quarters for the workers.

  • The big idea: 

    • I felt it made sense to lean into the dystopian nature of a culture that's fully in late stage capitalism with no guardrails to prevent the exploitation of nature or people. 

  • A new world formed from nothing:​

    •  This is a world where the construction is so new, that there's very little history here.

    • Silo, as a planet, was uninhabitable until the Guild sent a spire to it to begin the terraforming process. 

    • From there, this hub of commerce began to flourish as everything the Guild extracts and produces passes through this warehouse.

Sorting Hub

Duchess

  • Duchess is one of the first characters I was responsible for.

  • While she existed before I joined Firewalk, I got the unique opportunity to further shape her history as well as her in game voice.

  • Who is she?

    • She's from a prominent political family in the Core Worlds.

    • She abandoned her life and her position of power there to pursue her lover, a Sparked Robot, that had been taken by the Decommissioners at the height of the Robot Wars. 

  • What has she done?​

    • She's an accomplished metal Mystic.

    • She survived in the Wilds on her own for close to 100 years. 

    • She's written guides, brokered deals, and made several above and below board connections across the galaxy.

  • What are her goals?​

    • To survive long enough to reunite with her lover.​

    • Train Haymar to be in better control of her Mystic powers.

  • How did this translate to dialogue?​​​

    • All of these factors went into how I wrote and iterated upon her in-game dialogue and barks. 

    • I wanted players to experience her as being a dangerous, elegant, motivated, and highly competent woman that has been around long enough to know her way around a battlefield. 

  • Casting and VO:

    • I wrote 250 lines of in-game dialogue for Duchess that covered current game modes, efforts, selection lines, and challenge modes.​

    • I also had the pleasure of working with Sumalee Montano, providing feedback on line reads during recording sessions.

Duchess Abilities Trailer

Duchess

Bazz

  • Bazz is the most complex character that I got the chance to work on. 

  • Advocacy for the best outcome:

    • She's a Black, Trans woman, neither are communities that I'm part of. So I advocated for particular care for her with both her backstory and how her VO lines got written. 

    • I made it a point to push for further sensitivity consultation to make sure she read authentically.

    • There was a concerted effort to find a voice actress that aligned with both identities to play Bazz.​

  • Who is she?

    • She's the granddaughter of Dom Lunem, the boss of the Crescent Moon Syndicate, a prolific crime family outside of Silo. ​

    • Before she transitioned, she was next in line to become the head of the family. Unfortunately, since that position passes strictly to men, she was pushed out of the running. 

    • She, alongside her cousins, were trained from a young age to wield knives to deal with business.

  • What has she done?​

    • When left with the options of either accepting the less glamorous role of being a woman in her family, or striking out on her own, she took the second option.​

    • She built a name for herself on Silo before joining the North Star Crew. 

  • What are her goals?​

    • To become a crime boss even more formidable than her grandfather.​​

    • To take down the current acting head of the Crescent Moon Syndicate.

  • How did this translate to dialogue?​

    • Her life experiences needed to reflect a woman that was denied her rightful place. ​

    • I wanted players to experience someone who is sharp, reticent, witty, and just a bit arrogant because she knows she can dominate the field. ​​

  • Casting and VO:​

    • I wrote close to 300 lines of dialogue for Bazz that covered gameplay, selection lines, efforts, and future challenge modes. ​

    • I got the honor of being part of Mila Jam's recording session and giving her feedback on line reads.

Bazz Abilities Trailer

Bazz

Post Mortem

What Went Well ?

  • Collaboration across narrative, characters, and maps tended to be really fruitful.

  • I feel proud of the narrative work that I did. I became a notably faster and more efficient writer and narrative designer as the project went on.

What Went Wrong ?

  • Collaboration between narrative, gameplay, monetization, and engineering could have been significantly improved. There were too many items left to the last minute that would derail our small team for weeks at a time.

  • The narrative work that I did for launch was mostly internal facing for the maps team, with the exception of two characters' voice over work. I could have pushed harder to get more opportunities to work on launch content.

What I Learned ?

  • While it wasn't my place to fix communication where people were letting it break down, it's also my job as a good team member to join the ranks of people actively flagging it as an issue to leadership so it can get addressed.  

  • Narrative work that isn't seen by the players is important, but it's equally important to advocate for myself to have more opportunities to have my work be player facing.

Post Mortem
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©2025 by Chevis McMillin

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