Arden Osthof

I’m a narrative and game designer with over 9 years of experience across AAA, AA, and Indie.


Game Projects

Mars Vice

Mars Vice is a narrative adventure game set on a distant and futuristic Mars. Follow two civil investigators, Dax and Anaya, as they root out deep-seated corruption in the Martian city of Pavonis in this biopunk-infused story.

My responsibilities:

  • Production: Sat down with the team to create our task lists for all disciplines and project road map, managed narrative pipelines and milestones.
  • Oversaw the narrative: Plotted out the story, scripted ink logic, wrote dialogue with a focus on character, comedy, and drama.
  • Drove team collaboration: Established and maintained the pipeline for game locations, from narrative brief to kick-off meeting to gameplay implementation.
  • Managed a junior writer.

Find the Steam page here.

Morbid Metal

An upcoming dark sci-fi action roguelike about escaping cycles of violence.

My responsibilities:

  • Creating the foundations: Worldbuilding and character creation.
  • VO system design: Designing a flexible and powerful bark system.
  • Writing everything: From dialogue to lore codex entries to UX writing.
  • VO casting and directing.

Watch the Triple-i Initiative trailer here.

Tom Clancy’s The Division 2

The old order descended into chaos six months ago and people are trying to make sense of their new world. A live open-world 3rd person looter-shooter.

My responsibilities:

  • Narrative ownership of missions: Collaborated in cells of level designers, level and vfx artists to deliver main and side missions.
  • VO writing: Pitched mission plots, wrote voice over dialogues, and implemented voice lines for a seamless player experience.
  • Close collaboration with narrative designers and writers in a remote co-development production.

Watch a short sample of my work:
American Sign Language Scene

See longform gameplay videos of my work:
Main Missions:
Lincoln Memorial
Camp White Oak
Manning National Zoo
Side Mission:
Rescuing Curators

Girl Hate

A 30 minutes interactive novel about being a teenaged girl struggling with what girls should or should not be.

A Solo project built in Twine and playable in browsers. It’s an older work, but near and dear to my heart.

I focused on:

  • System design: Synergized the mechanics with the narrative theme.
  • Creating a solid thematic foundation: Research into internalized misogyny, both academic and anecdotal.
  • Rapid prototyping & user testing.
  • Writing: Created a complete story with a 10k wordcount.

Play it in your browser here.

Anno 1800

The German cult classic strategy series takes on the industrial revolution.

Being part of the project since the start, I could help lay the foundations for its narrative content and features.

My responsibilities:

  • Character creation: Conceptualized strong, vibrant characters based on historical archetypes.
  • Designing & writing barks: Redesigned the complex VO system that drives the game’s interactions.
  • Narrative voice for feature designs: Provided design input and content for the diplomacy feature and newspaper feature.
  • Overseeing & improving the text pipeline: I owned all texts, created style guides and glossaries, and liaised with localizers.
  • Main narrative contact: If the team had questions, I had the answers.

Anno 2205

Anno takes to the moon in a utopian optimization dream.

I joined in time to help launch the base game and I single-handedly carried the narrative side through three DLC development cycles.

My responsibilities:

  • Supported the main launch: Wrote quests, barks, and UI texts.
  • Launched three DLCs as sole narrative designer: Created main quest lines and filled them with life.
  • Documentation: Maintained lore guides, style guides, and glossaries.

Writing Samples


About Me

Arden Osthof is a non-binary narrative and game designer. They have worked on well-established franchises at Ubisoft Reflections and Ubisoft Mainz; shipping Tom Clancy’s The Division 2 and helping the Anno strategy series break into the international market through their multi-lingual expertise. Now they work as a freelancer for indie teams to deliver gripping stories together.

A storyteller at heart, they believe narrative is an interdisciplinary effort to create context for what the player does, why they do it, and why they should care about it.

Arden lives and works in Cologne, Germany, but their heart is forever in northeast England.


Contact me

Find me on LinkedIn

← Back

Deine Nachricht wurde gesendet

Achtung
Achtung
Achtung
Warnung!