Nic Junius

Narrative Designer
CCP Games

Pronouns: they/them

About

I'm a storyteller, system designer, and engineer. I design and develop computational systems of character interaction and theatrical practice, building interfaces and interaction models to facilitate new kinds of expressiveness between players and AI driven characters. My primary inspiration for the approaches I use comes from my time as a playwright and lighting designer on theatrical productions, formal acting practices, and computational caricature. From this confluence of influences, I create approachable, customizable systems for interactive narrative projects. Please visit my itch.io page for the official pages of my released games.

Currently, I'm a narrative designer at CCP Games where I am helping craft ecologically inspired character interaction and a world which pushes back against players. I hold a PhD in Computational Media PhD from the Interaction Dynamics Lab at UC Santa Cruz. I previously received an MFA in Digital Arts and New Media in 2021 and an MS in Computational Media from the Expressive Intelligence Studio in 2019, both from UC Santa Cruz.

Selected Projects

animation of the two characters in Tracks in Snow acting out part of a scene
Nic Junius, others (forthcoming credits list)
An interactive drama Ren'Py game using Puppitor that follows two young women on a road trip. It is a digital play about insecurity, communication, and the complexities of relationships as well as the nature of ghosts and golems. The MFA version of the game can be downloaded through its itch.io page.
Papers: AIIDE 2022, MFA Thesis
code snippet of the Puppitor update_affect function
Puppitor is a theatrically inspired digital game interface written in Python designed around giving players and AI behaviors control of a character's physicality during a conversation. Its core features revolve around mapping buttons to different designer authorable actions and the creation of character specific rules governing how performing each action changes a character's currently expressed emotional state. This emotional state and set of actions can then be used to alter the character's gestures, facial expressions, color palette, background music, and other in game elements. My C# port of the library can be found here.
Papers: AIIDE 2023, AIIDE 2022, FDG 2019, MS Thesis
That was a good one, how do you think it's going up there? Gamma puts the reader he was holding onto his exposed chest. We'd probably know if it was getting bad, besides, all the sounds are the same as they've been for the last day. I pull myself into a sitting position. Bets on when our new admiral is going to come see us? Delta's feet patter against their armor.
To Beseech Old Sins is a Twine project in the Mourner's Kaddish for Golems series, featuring the recurring characters of Gamma, Delta, and Epsilon. Set after Unto the Night and significantly before Homeward in the Roil, the plot is centered on an admiral, the same admiral as makes an appearance in the latter story, asking the three golems to deliver her a victory to avoid further loss of life on both sides of the battle. I'll just say that things turn out unlike anyone, especially the golems, expect. This Twine was a part of the main festival for Spring Thing 2024.
space ship flying through a tunnel, gathering orbs, and launching a bomb to blow up a door
Nick Junius, Joe Rossi, Joseph Bernay, Patrick Russell, Yasha Taylor, Camellia Boutros, Matthew Dunlap, Nicole Maines, Chris R. Rodriguez
Inure is a fully 3D, six degrees of freedom, bullethell game built in Unity as my undergraduate senior thesis project. The project draws heavily from the mid to late 1990s era of science-fiction shooters for its narrative design, told mostly through radio chatter between points of action, and shmups like Ikaruga for the bullet absorption mechanic. Screenshots of the game from prototype to final version can be found here.
Produced in the 2016 Chautauqua Festival, Dir. Nick Whitlow
One of my small cast, near single setting stories that centers on a group of soldiers trapped in a building and forced to reckon with their identities as tensions mount. One of my main interests in writing this script was the responses different people have to their perception of self being challenged. Sometimes we embrace this and sometimes we violently push back and in doing so reveal more about ourselves than we normally would.

Selected Publications

Nic Junius, Elin Carstensdottir
AIIDE 2023
Isaac Karth, Nic Junius, Max Kreminski
ICIDS 2022
Best Student Paper Nominee
Nic Junius, Michael Mateas, Noah Wardrip-Fruin, Elin Carstensdottir
AIIDE 2022
Nick Junius, Max Kreminski, Michael Mateas
FDG 2021
Best Paper
Nick Junius, Michael Mateas, Noah Wardrip-Fruin
FDG 2019

Teaching

ARTG 140: Writing for Interactive Narrative
Graduate Student Instructor Summer 2020, Summer 2021
I created this class and added it to the Games and Playable Media catalogue to help undergraduate students practice their writing skills with games and other interactive media in mind. The structure was mainly focused around a bi-weekly writing workshop style classroom where students would bring in progress work to be read out loud by their peers or myself followed by a discussion and critique of what was read. I also scheduled time for group playthroughs of narrative focused games to give students a better idea of some of the variety in kinds of projects they might find themselves on.