Kognito

As a subsidiary of Ascend Learning, Kognito is a Unity studio which builds dialogue-tree-driven games intended to teach players a wide variety of conversational skills that they can take with them into the real world.

During my time with the team, I was a staff Writer who worked on many different projects, generating thousands of lines of dialogue for all kinds of scenarios.

Writing on these projects involved more than developing characters and scripting voice-overs. Each conversation was an intricate machine of variables and branching possibilities behind-the-scenes which required design and iteration to ensure authenticity, fun, and execution of the learning goals.

While working as a writer at Kognito, I identified several inefficiencies in the pipeline for crafting these complicated scripts, and I took it upon myself to code new tools for the writing team which cut our import / export time in half. On some large projects, this meant saving weeks of debugging human error and data entry.

Although I contributed to many projects, I led the narrative development on three projects specifically:

• Provider Education for Mental Health Care of Cancer Survivors for the CDC
• VISTS (Smoking Cessation) for the US Department of Veterans Affairs
• Resilient Together: Coping with Loss at School

Public demos are available for two of these projects at the links above.

In 2018, I left Kognito to pursue traditional console and PC gaming with Defiant Studios.