Harmony: Heroes of Elephantia is a narrative-led dungeon crawler made in collaboration with Cincinnati Zoo, in which heroes have to fight Shadows and save elephants to save the world.

I led the narrative & game design.

The main systems are

• Procedurally Generated Levels: Discover rewards, encounter elephants and Shadows, and find keys by tapping on grid cells.

• Real-time, narrative-driven combat - elephants revealed on the grid are being attacked by Shadows. They ask for your help! Idle tapping quickly on a sword helps players charge up and do damage to Shadows - before a timer runs out and the elephant gets upset.

• Resource management & trade - those nifty rewards give you nifty power-ups. You’ll want to find healing potions, hammers, and shields, as well as gems to buy them at the store if you run out

• Choice-based narratives - some elephants are just going about their business, and you need to choose how to deal with it. Your choices impact the elephant, the community, and your skills

• Rewards & skill progression - the game rewards making good choices and saving elephants with upgrades (they don’t transfer or stack across playthroughs, though)

• Level progression with checkpointing - there are three villages of Elephantia. You need to clear them all and fight a final boss to win! Don’t worry - if you die, you restart the village, not the game

• High scores - what’s better than being a good person? Being the best person.

The main audience for this game was teenage boys and young adults near the Kaziranga National Park in Assam, India. Here, these misguided youths are known the hurt elephants and harm them, leading to dangerous and sometimes fatal consequences.

The challenge was to design a game that meant to have an emotional outcome (being kinder) without being preachy to young men.

In my role as Lead Narrative & Game Designer, I had to

• Construct the overarching narrative & experience pillars

  We knew we were going to build a dungeon crawler. I collaborated with the Cincinnati team to identify maladaptive behaviors that the game could address within a limited budget. Our goal was to convey that elephants have emotions and families, meriting kindness, which in turn benefits their communities. Above all, we aimed for players to experience joy (no preachy moralizing here!)

• Document & design the systems & GDD

  This is self-explanatory. The most unique system in the game, I would say, is the style of narrative-driven-idle-tapping-combat (more below).

• Design & write multiple narrative touchpoints

  With the pillars in mind, I got on top of the narrative. I decided on a magic realist take to keep it relatable but mystical. We crafted two distinct locations for elephant encounters: Plantations and Woodlands, and collaborated with artists to depict elephants with dignity.

  The text also had to drive behavior change. I opted for two main touch-points

  • Combat narratives

    Shadows came in three kinds, representing the three most harmful human behaviors in Assam: The Loudmouth was noisy, The Thug was physically violent, and The Invader didn’t respect an elephant’s space. When combat was triggered, elephants would reveal to the players that they had goals, purposes, and dreams - and that the Shadows were stopping them. Thus, a high-stakes and informative CTA was born.

    I designed a timer system for combat because, just like in real life, an elephant’s patience is a finite resource.

    If you lose? The elephant gets upset, rages, and the community is impacted. The player is also mechanically impacted with a permanent drop in their Attack Power / HP.

    If you win, though? The enemy gets reformed (I decided on this after a discussion with the Cincinnati team - we didn’t want to “demonize” the kids the Shadows were based on) and the elephant achieves its goals. Well done. Harmony is slowly restored.

  • Choice-based story moments

    I created story situations that required real knowledge of elephants to navigate. There were correct/wrong answers, but we made sure it was meaningful mechanically and narratively, and never quiz-like. The biggest challenge was readability (this particular area in Assam has low literacy).

It goes without saying that the last step of any game design is iteration, iteration, testing, iteration - it’s more like the same step 10,000 times. But this game has been one of the most rewarding things I’ve ever worked on.