During one project, I worked with a team of all programmers. I was the only designer assigned to do narrative work, which meant writing barks and designing how players would understand what they were doing and why. 

In short, while this was the best time I've had writing content for a game, it was one of my biggest failures yet. It was a failure because while I was understanding the ideas I had and the content I was designing, I didn't communicate what I needed or wanted the programmers to do. 

As a result, much of my work isn't seen and what is there, isn't understood well. I didn't speak up when the meetings veered from "how should we implement these narrative iterations" to "but what about that bug with the camera?" (we had many bugs on the camera, and shout-out to my team for figuring out every single one). 

This wasn't my team's fault either. But I should have recognized that trusting my co-workers to "just get what I meant" isn't enough. I also didn't check in with them about my content or what the status of the pipelines was for getting the content in the game in the first place. These questions are what a narrative designer should do, and while it was my first attempt at it, it was a colossal failure. The game has barks from four characters, yes, but the text doesn't interface with the player or the environment well. 

The story is also lost due to combat and lack of art assets, which was a limitation for the academic nature of the project and not anyone's fault, but this meant whatever I wrote was going to have to cover all bases. It didn't, and it's obvious when players play the game (Homeward Bound), and seem confused about what they're doing, what the goal is, or who they are. 

Another issue was that I worked mostly on barks and dialogue, which while that's easy for programmers to implement, doesn't account for the other methods a story can be told: the environment, enemies, or style of the world around the characters. I had an imbalance of tasks and things that would take longer to test and implement weren't things I worked on until the end, which didn't make it into the game.

If I could redo it, I would jump into a production-role first, organizing a better timeline and system for communicating these narrative changes, then work on the narrative content that the team could easily implement or test first. I would regularly discuss how the story works within the game and make sure the team was on the same page about how we "saw" the product, not how we saw it "at the moment". 

While this is production-related work, I could have used those skills rather than relying on my team to just align their thoughts with mine.