The greatest world that never was.
Everhaven (also known as Project Dragon) was an unannounced project from Phoenix Labs. It was a visually stunning open-world survival crafter, inspired by games like Minecraft and Breath of the Wild. Unfortunately, it was canceled shortly before our planned launch.
I worked on Project Dragon as a narrative designer. There, I had the opportunity to work alongside a tight-knit team of game designers and artists to shape the dynamic, living world of the Inner Lands.
Narrative systems
Everhaven was a procedurally-generated sandbox game—and we saw narrative as another vector for player agency. With our design team, I helped craft systems that enabled players to experience their own emergent stories alongside a cast of colorful characters.
Together, we concepted and built systems for:
Quests
Dialogue and friendship building
Responsive VO that would react to locations, items, player actions, and world state changes
Interactions between NPCs and their surroundings
I also worked in Unreal Engine for testing and implementation.
Character writing
Everhaven featured dozens of unique characters, each with their own backgrounds, desires, and capabilities. I worked in tandem with our artists and designers to weave our characters’ personalities into their visual designs, quest objectives, and gameplay behaviors.
I wrote many of Everhaven’s questlines, ambient dialogue, and cutscene scripts, as well as their voice guides and casting sheets.
You can find excerpts of my narrative writing from Project Dragon in the “Samples” tab above.
World-building and themes
Everhaven featured a brand-new IP set in a vibrant, uplifting fantasy world.
Our narrative design lead, Alexander Newcombe, established the setting and premise: players would act as the Keeper, whose goal was to explore the land and unite the scattered peoples of a newly-made world. He created five distinct cultures, each with a main protagonist: the Heroes of the Inner Lands.
I helped our team flesh out this world, building out lore for Everhaven’s cultures, enemies, NPC relationships, and more. I also worked on integrating these stories into the dialogue, allowing players to dig deeper into their world.
To reflect the mosaic nature of Everhaven’s world, we chose stories that simply but meaningfully touched on topics like generational differences, immigration, loss, belonging, and inclusivity. We also believed it was important to represent a wide array of characters from different ages, levels of ability, gender identities, and orientations.
Our hope was to create a warm, bustling fantasy world where any player could feel like they belonged.