knights of the open road

NARRATIVE & quest design + CINEMATICS

3rd-person action adventure
Knights on bikes! Motorcycle jousting!
a Game World Design term project at ITU Copenhagen

AVAILABLE ON ITCH.IO

The original pitch made by our Creative Director Peter Gaspár was a rather striking and high-concept: “motorcycle jousting”. It was such a simple yet compelling idea that I found it surprising no such game seemed to exist yet. It really didn't take much convincing to get me on board. I had the great pleasure of collaborating with him and five other incredible game designers and developers, taking up the responsibility of the game's lead narrative and mission designer. I designed the mission structure and pacing of the vertical slice, wrote the lore bible, did historical research, developed characters and conflicts, wrote branching dialogue, did a little bit of scripting and created the intro cutscene you can see above.

I had to construct a story and characters that would support the game’s core gameplay loop: high-speed mounted combat using motorcycles and lances. Naturally, that made me deeply involved with worldbuilding in general. From the start, I tried my best to tailor the narrative around gameplay needs, with a particular focus on “horseback” (motorcycle) combat – a major feature and a recurring theme of the vertical slice.

An initial challenge of the project was finding a narrative justification for motorcycle jousting in a medieval setting. An early concept involved modern bikers travelling back in time and adapting to feudal society. However, this approach created several problems: it delayed access to the game’s core mechanic, required extensive exposition, and framed the biker-medieval contrast as a temporary novelty, thus naturally lending itself to satire rather than “honest” worldbuilding.

We therefore shifted toward a different approach: instead of depicting the clash between biker culture and medieval society, we explored their complete fusion. Ultimately, we decided to depict a world where motorcycles had existed since the time of Christ and had become fully integrated into feudal society. In this version, “Holy Engines” functioned as symbols of nobility, religion, and knightly status, while outlaw riders operated as mercenaries and raiders known as “Steel Riders”. The Catholic Church incorporated motorcycle worship into its doctrine, treating engines as sacred relics and brewing “Holy Spirit” to fuel them.

This approach proved creatively liberating because it transformed the premise from a parody into a coherent mythology. Instead of drawing attention to the absurdity of the setting, we treated the world seriously and kept it grounded in historical reality, even using the real-world location of the Bayon Valley in Provence (see below). During development, the tone gradually shifted away from a “realistic” historical drama with motorcycles toward something resembling a “medieval Catholic Mad Max”.

We chose to introduce our fictional universe through an introductory cutscene depicting a community of monks praying to Jesus Christ (on a motorcycle) and asking him for protection against the dishonourable “Steel Riders”, one of whom turns out to be the player character. This is where I could leverage my AAA experience to the fullest, having worked as a cutscene artist on Kingdom Come: Deliverance II.

Since we wanted the world to retain some historical grounding, I researched late medieval Provence, eventually landing on the 1390s interregnum period as the setting. The absence of a stable authority created an environment well suited to the game’s themes of bandit and raubritter violence, territorial conflict and social instability, while also complementing the fantasy of wandering biker-knights operating outside of conventional law.

The protagonist, Ademar de Peyloubié, was conceived as a disgraced minor noble stripped of his lands after betraying his king during a military campaign in Italy. Returning to Provence as a landless knight, he discovers that his home has been seized by the Seneschal Georges de Marle, who also holds Ademar’s brother hostage (the brother was later changed into a sister, as I will elaborate on later). This provided both a clear antagonist and a strong personal motivation for the player character.

From the very beginning, narrative was shaped by gameplay requirements. Because the core gameplay centred around motorcycle combat and traversal, Ademar needed to operate largely alone, travel constantly, and repeatedly confront mounted opponents. It was also important that the story provided a reason for tutorialisation and a learning curve: in a combat-focused game like ours, this meant confronting the player with enemies of increasing difficulty (monks > footsoldiers > mounted knights > boss fight).

Since the core gameplay centred on violent mounted combat, Ademar was conceived as an anti-hero rather than a classical good guy. This presented us with the classic anti-hero problem: how do we make the “audience” (the player) root for the main character? A traditional means to this end is using the “save the cat” figure invented by Blake Snyder: “the hero has to do something when we meet him so that we like him and want him to win”. However, the way we had constructed the plot, Ademar is not saving the cat; he’s killing the cat (monk) at the very start of the game (!).

My initial instinct was to soften the scene by replacing monks with armed guards. However, playtesting revealed that this made the situation more confusing rather than more sympathetic, since players no longer understood why combat was occurring at all. This led me to reconsider the approach: instead, we chose to preserve the brutality of the raid while making Ademar reluctant and vocal about his moral quandaries. This also served as a great excuse for a bit of much needed exposition dumping at the start of the game – having to carry out something so unjustifiable would make it natural for Ademar to ruminate and express a guilty conscience through inner monologue. Assuming that the player would accept morally questionable behaviour if it is sufficiently motivated, the narrative repeatedly emphasised that Ademar was acting under coercion in order to save his imprisoned brother (sister). The Seneschal was correspondingly depicted as manipulative, pompous and morally repulsive, which also helped frame Ademar’s subsequent emotional tirade and betrayal as relatable and morally sound. According to Blake Snyder’s genre categorisation in Save the Cat!, our game thus became a “Dude with a Problem” type of story.

Originally, we wanted to reveal this context (that this is a setup to make the Seneschal appear like a saviour to bolster his political claims) only after the raid on the monastery, but upon playtests, this proved to be an ill choice: playtesters had absolutely no idea why they were raiding the monastery and killing people, and when they finally got to the dialogue with the Seneschal, they were confused by the enormous info dump that was present in the dialogue; many hadn’t even realise that they had a sister to save until that point (“oh, I have one of those now?”). This made us revise the dialogue in the first act, realising we needed to spell out the “dude’s problem” right at the start of the game, and reiterate it several times.

Yet even after revisions, the opening remained structurally overcomplicated. Players had to simultaneously learn mechanics, understand the setting, and follow a politically convoluted plot involving coercion, hostage-taking, and a staged (yet violent and deadly) raid. This is also visible in the objective diagram we used, where the tutorial section (MQ1) is much bulkier and more complex than the remaining two acts:

In retrospect, the game would have benefited from an entirely different and much simpler first act focused primarily on tutorialisation and player motivation. For example, we could have gone full-on Medieval Mad Max: at the start of the game, Ademar is being held in the Seneschal’s castle and made to slaughter other prisoners in an arena for the Seneschal’s amusement. Ademar would have faced the same moral quandaries but would have been motivated by the threat of his sibling being hurt until, at one point, he broke free and decided to take matters into his own hands. That way, we could have a similar tutorial section (attacking defenceless enemies), a similar relationship dynamic and character motivations, yet with much fewer plot points and thus less need for exposition. Just like characters may be introduced using familiar tropes as a shorthand, which can later be subverted, one can “start the story with a cliché and then turn it on its head”, as I was advised by instructors at my former film school (FAMU). Regrettably, I ignored this advice and went on to do the exact opposite.

To avoid repetition and confusion, we focused on giving each secondary character a distinct relationship dynamic and speaking style. One major late-stage change which I proposed involved turning Ademar’s imprisoned brother into a sister, hoping to reduce the “dude fatigue” of only facing armoured men with obscured faces in short succession.

We decided to go forward with this gender swap, with the understanding it would lead to changes in character dynamics and tone. The Seneschal would appear more overtly villainous for imprisoning a woman rather than a fellow knight, and Ademar’s McGuffin would now be, quite literally, a “damsel in distress” – a trope as old as storytelling itself. We entertained the idea of subverting this trope, but realised that “the princess who needs no man and can save herself” had become a rather tired trope in and of itself, and a part of mainstream culture at least since the first Star Wars.

There was no easy fix to this problem; it could only be addressed through nuance and characterisation. I used what little dialogue was available to hint that the sister possessed some political agency and had her own plans, which Ademar had just disrupted through reckless violence.

Dialogue in Knights of the Open Road features “fake branching”: player choices altered tone and characterisation, but did not meaningfully change the plot. This decision was largely driven by production constraints and the exponential complexity of branching dialogue systems. Below is a screenshot of the dialogue tree with the Seneschal – notice the linear nature of the dialogue, despite player choice:

However, I did not view this as merely a compromise. The dialogue system allows players to shape Ademar’s personality through his responses even without systemic consequences - such small behavioural decisions can meaningfully define characterisation even without major branching. Playtesting proved this design choice to be successful, as players remained engaged with the dialogue despite the lack of branching outcomes. In retrospect, I believe that the dialogue would likely have benefited from even fewer seemingly impactful (and mutually exclusive) dialogue choices and more optional flavour dialogue as opportunities to convey some extra unintrusive worldbuilding to those who are interested.

One major compromise was the removal of ambient dialogue as a feature (combat barks). In an action-oriented game such as ours, dialogue exchanges should be kept as short as possible – thus, whatever information can be carried this way would have been preferable over long, semi-branching dialogue exchanges. With only four months to complete the vertical slice in a rather small team (who had to juggle other academic responsibilities), some compromises had to be made. 

Knights of the Open Road demonstrated to me both the strengths and limitations of narrative design shaped heavily by gameplay constraints. The project succeeded most when narrative and mechanics reinforced one another directly: the worldbuilding justified mounted combat, learning curve and tutorialisation emerged naturally from the story structure, and the player’s progression aligned with Ademar’s escalating conflict. At the same time, the project revealed how difficult it can be to balance narrative complexity with gameplay onboarding, especially within the limited scope of a vertical slice. Many of the game’s structural issues stemmed from attempting to introduce mechanics, setting, character motivation, and political context simultaneously during the opening act.

Due to production constraints, a lot of compromises had to be made and features sacrificed. Since we didn't have any 3D artists or animators on our team, we had to rely on 3rd party assets. We were able to record some homebrewed voice acting, but not for the entire game – the 3rd act thus relies on AI-generated placeholder voice lines. Very simplistic (or rather non-existent) NPC behaviour is a major eyesore in the monastery section, and the missing barks don't make a great impression either. The final dialogue exchange is rather long and anticlimactic: a cutscene would work much better as the game's epilogue. To really have a presentable vertical slice, we would need a couple of extra weeks, possibly months – there's quite a bit of polish to be added. Still, as an exercise in quest/mission design and narrative design, the experience was invaluable.  

Working on Knights of the Open Road was certainly the strongest and most valuable learning experience I've ever had on any game project. I had had a fair bit of experience with designing story arcs, developing character conflicts and writing dialogue thanks to my filmmaking background, but it was my work on this vertical slice that made me realise how differently narrative functions in games compared to film. Unlike film, where structural issues can often be addressed during editing (restructuring the plot, adjusting the pacing, etc.), game development tends to lock important narrative decisions early in production – as a result, many of the project’s first-act problems could be improved through iteration, but not completely solved without redesigning the narrative structure itself. Even still, if the vertical slice were to be developed into a large game, a fundamental redesign like this would be in order.

Overall, the experience reinforced the idea that game narrative cannot function independently of mechanics and systems, and it made me view the job of a narrative or quest designer differently: as a game designer who happens to write, rather than a writer who happens to be working on a game.

Other credits:

Péter Gáspár: Creative Director, Art Director

Krystof Marásek: Producer, Level & Environmental Designer

Albert Erik Dyekjær: Game Designer, Programmer

Adam Nellemann Hansen: Sound Designer & Composer

Andrei-Catalin Mataoanu: Programmer

Marius Stokkebro: Programmer