NarraScope 2026: Building the Spaceship as We’re Flying It

Building the Spaceship as We’re Flying It: Flexible Narrative Design for Young Suns’ Evolving Needs Presented by Jenna Yow and Marcela Huerta Sunday, June 14th 2026, The University at Albany, NY Description: We’ll dive into the ongoing production history of Young Suns, an early access multiplayer life-sim. Young Suns is our biggest game yet, and its scope has brought with it a bigger team, unexpected design challenges, and a new world of decisions to align on. Our groundwork of modular systems has enabled us to preserve the majority of our written content, even as Young Suns’ production has gone through major hiccups and creative pivots. From early-stage worldbuilding strategies to systems built flexibly enough for multiplayer, we’ll share lessons and collaborative approaches on our voyage to ship this post-revolutionary space adventure. Speaker: Jenna Yow is an American-Lebanese narrative designer and illustrator from the Washington, D.C. suburbs. They graduated from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2021, and have worked at the worker-run video game cooperative KO_OP since 2022. At KO_OP, they have written for Goodbye Volcano High and Young Suns. They have spoken at NYU, the Pratt Institute, and the American University of Beirut’s SAIL For Change Gaming Academy. Marcela Huerta is a Chilean-Canadian poet based in Tiohtià:ke (Montreal). They are the author of Tropico (2017), a collection of poetry published by Metatron Press; their work has been published in Peach Mag, Leste, and Maisonneuve, among others. They’ve been at KO_OP since 2020, first as the studio’s community director on Goodbye Volcano High, Winding Worlds, and Dépanneur Nocturne, and now in the narrative department, writing for Young Suns and Ridiculous Fishing EX.