I’m Bennett Jobling, a holistic designer & writer based in Los Angeles.
OXENFREE 2 : Community Center
Role: Level & Narrative Designer
Aditional Team: 1x Writer, 1x Engineer, 2x Technical Designer
Making a boss fight in a game about walking and talking
Oxenfree 2 is a narrative adventure game that builds on the original by expanding the world and introducing new characters to the Camena coast. The primary methods of interacting with the world are Oxenfree’s innovatie walk-and-talk mechanics and a mobility system that allows for climbing, hanging, and jumping.
We wanted to create a moment of elevated tension at the end of Act 2 - so I asked the team “what would a boss fight look like without systems?” What we designed was a series of conversations and interactions that pushed the players' mastery of our conversation and exploration systems to create a unique and memorable moment.
Process
Story Planning: Working together with our writing team, we identified the characters and situations that would work within the narrative and deliver on a moment of “elevated tension.”
Oxenfree is a game driven by players' choices, so we had to account for the relationships with our 3 antagonists going into the scene, and how that would create meaningful interactions that changed the outcome of this event. Good relationships made the fight easier, and bad relationships would create additional blockers.
Scene Flow: I worked on creating a layout that would suit the designs needs, and a beat-by-beat flow of gameplay within the area that would note the major areas of interaction: exploration, conversation, and mobility puzzling.
Level Design: We built the level in Unity using our standard approach to a 2.5D level, but as a piece of this puzzle the room would move, so we had to build 4-5 versions of this scene until we were able to figure out how to make the rotations work.
FROGTOWN : Companion
Role: Narrative Lead
Additional Team: 1x Design Lead, 1x Engineering Lead, 3x Writer
A running conversation
FROGTOWN, a cancelled project from my time at Night School Studio, was attmepting to create a first person horror adventure game centered around exploration, discovery, and mystery. Part of the games central plot was a sidekick- a person supernaturally attached to you with more knowledge of the past but none of the present. Together, the two of you would search a large estate, trying to uncover what happened. Her knowledge of the history and charcters would be conveyed to you through direct convesations, and the two of oyu would share information back and forth to try and come up with answers.
This meant each scene had to be designed with the players knowledge and the sidekicks knowledge in mind, and how the two might come together. We thought about each conversation as a puzzle, with peices to that puzzle being new information gleened from the scene, or objects that might spark the sidekick’s memory or open new avenues fo conversation and exploration.
A Complete Picture
Each scene in the game was planned out from start to finish with a higher degree of detail than normal to ensure we understood the full sequence of events, and how scnes might re-connect and relate to one another. This strucutre covered all the major events but only in high detail - writers would have flexability to shape each scene as they saw was appropriate, following the guidelines we created as leads.
Dialouge Trees
Every conversation was mapped out graphically, instead of just in text, to better denote the branches and additional information that had to be acounted for. We wanted to account for the kinds of questiosn players might have in the scene, and how much information was worth keeping hidden at any given time. Daily playtests enabled us to do small focus-groups with the team, letting members who werent assigned to a particular scene run through and raise questions they wihs had answers. Our iterative process would then allow us ot consider if those were worth adding back in, and reqriting the scene as needed.
Highlighted Writing and VO Direction
WESTWORLD : Awakening
Writer & Creative Director
Co-Written with Hilary Benefiel and Adam Foshko
Featuring 4 lead characters and a number of additional side-voices. I created personas for each character to help inform our writing team and casting. As the Creative Director, I was in-booth with each actor to help set context and provide direction with recording.
Sprint Vector
Writer & Narrative Designer
Featuring 12 eccentric characters in a wild and weird sci-fi world. We chose to cast influencers with experience voicing anime to lean into the cartoony nature of our world. It was a delight to direct and find creative interpretations of these characters in the booth.
Raw Data
Additional Writing
On Raw Data I had the opportunity to write all of the games found narrative content. This allowed me to work in a huge variety of voices, ranging from personal emails, newsletters, magazine interviews, propaganda manifestos, classified documents, lab notes, and technical documentation. Each required me to inhabit a different style of writing. Additionally, I was able to work on our Voice Notes, and assist in recording.
Selected UX Design
Hivemapper
Lead Designer - 2020
Hivemapper is 3D mapping tool built from user-uploaded drone footage. As the Design Lead at Hivemapper, I was responsible for creating the uploading expirience, the user controls panels, and workgroup settings for our clients. Many high-level users operated private maps for htie businesses, and had complex permisions settings that needed to be acocunted for within the system. I was in charge of leading user research efforts with clients, as well as the design for our UI/UX.
Event/Full
Student Project - 2020
Event/full was a event finder/manager project from my time at General Assembly in 2020. At the time, there werent a lot of apps in the event discovery and planning space (I use The Nudge for finding and Partiful for planning, now) so I wanted to try and tackle a problem I had to deal with regularly. The idea was you cna find local events, create invites and calendar updates within the app. Addiitonal features allowed people to vote on dates and times, similar to a calandly approach, and create invite-groups to make organization easier.