I’m a narrative designer and game writer with 4+ years of experience in the games industry!

You might know me from my Twine work, including Jagged Bone (2019), I Knew You Would Find This (2020), and Welcome Back (2021). I was also Lead Writer on OnlyCans: Thirst Date (2021), which was featured in a Game Theory video! I was also sole writer on Endoparasitic (2022), which was featured in a series of Markiplier playthrough videos (he loved it)! I am currently working on Star Trucker (2024), a very cool trucking sim game that takes place in space and has been featured in PC Gamer, Destructoid, and Aftermath. I also worked on Borderlands 4 as a contract writer at Gearbox Entertainment, and I was thrilled to write and VO direct on Endoparasitic 2 (2024)!

I love video games and have a special passion for nonlinear/branching narrative structures. I’m an IGDA-F Velocity and Next Gen Leaders recipient, and I was also lucky enough to work with narrative designer Greg Buchanan as part of his Games Writing Mentorship. In 2023, I was selected for the Amplifying New Voices workshop run by the AIAS!

I was selected as a speaker for GDC 2024, where I talked about different types of branching narrative and strategies for creating agency efficiently, and I was on a Q&A panel focused on helping new narrative designers! I also organized, participated in, and edited two PAX Online 2020 talks - Chess To Cults: How Life Experience Shapes Narrative Voice and The Narrative Design of Midsommar: What Horror Games Can Learn. I was invited to speak as a guest lecturer for Interactive Fiction classes at both CSU Los Angeles and Northeastern University.

In 2020, I ran a discord server called the GDC Ice Cream Server - bringing together hundreds of people to network and bond at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. I was a project organizer and writer for A Compendium of Lesser-Known Cryptids, a horror anthology that raised 200% of its fundraising goal on Kickstarter!

In the prose world, my short story Roadkill was published in the June 2024 issue of The Horror Zine!

When I’m not writing, I’m usually watching horror movies, petting my dog Ougi (pictured below all the work stuff), at the gym listening to Live and Learn on a loop, or playing Sea of Thieves.

Testimonials

“Nessa is a diligent, thoughtful, and flexible writer who can handle longform quest writing (~4K worlds per quest) with aplomb. Our project required a knowledge of an established world (including a sizable internal wiki), rewriting quests for characters who were at different stages of development and voice, and adapting to a house style for both language and syntax. Nessa handled all of these challenges incredibly well, and fleshed out established characters in ways that surprised and delighted me.”

— Suriel Vazquez, Big Blue Sky Games

“Nessa is an absolute blast to work with! She's sharp with worldbuilding and character voice, quick on revisions, and deeply funny. Hire her before she's out of all of our price ranges.”

— Sam Winkler, Gearbox

“I asked Nessa to help me write my speech as host of the Game Developer Choice Awards and she exceeded my wildest expectations! Not only do I still get praise for the speech to this day, people are shocked to learn that some of their favorite parts were written by someone else since she captures my tones and style perfectly! She's also an absolute pleasure to work with, taking the time to research and understand exactly what's needed for the assignment. I highly recommend working with Nessa under any capacity and without reservation.”

— Osama Dorias, Blizzard

“As a new indie team, we weren't sure of all the factors to consider when beginning to craft the narrative of our exercise mobile game. Nessa helped us strategize on how to build a gameworld without the need of unwanted lengthy dialogue and developed the founding cast of characters that will be loved for years to come.”

— Alina Matson, Fitment

“I hired Nessa after she was referred to me by Xalavier Nelson Jr, to write the story for Waves of Steel. This amounted to about 30k words over the course of a year and a half. She has a good sense of story structure, writes effective dialog, and made sure that everything came together well over the course of the story. Most importantly, we worked well together!”

— Chris Weisiger, TMA Games

“Nessa Cannon is among the most inventive, versatile, and brilliant narrative creators in games. Like, it's not even fair.”

— Xalavier Nelson Jr., Strange Scaffold

Public Engagements

about ougi

Ougi (aw-gi) is a very strange little dog with no profession or employment history. We believe he’s some kind of Shih Tzu mix. He is roughly 13 years old, but even that is up for debate. There is much we will never know about Ougi, but what we do know is he loves peanut butter and apples. He enjoys tiny, squeaky tennis balls and face rubs. He has approximately eight teeth.

I adopted Ougi in 2015 from a rescue, who said he was brought to them in poor condition after being attacked by a bigger dog or a coyote. He wandered the streets of Venice, CA until someone scooped him up and took him to the vet. Now, he sleeps on big fluffy pillows, has his own heated blanket, gets fed twice a day, and has more toys than he knows what to do with.

Ougi is very supportive of my gamedev career.