Over 20,000 words of interviews with leading game writers about different genres and topics

How do you get your ideas?

Featuring answers from Tameem Antoniades (Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice), Emily Short (Galatea, Failbetter Games), Gareth Damian Martin (In Other Waters), and Kaitlin Tremblay (Grindstone, Watch Dogs Legion, A Mortician's Tale).

  • How do you come up with ideas? It’s a common question for sure. The “Eureka!” notion that ideas appear out of thin air hasn’t ever happened to me.

    I see myself as someone who aggregates disparate ideas into a cohesive whole and that’s probably true of everyone. Usually I start with a core feeling that has impacted me greatly, perhaps from film, a song, a play, news or lived experience. It doesn’t matter where it comes from but if it is something that takes hold and doesn’t go away, then it is a sure sign that this core feeling is important.

    From there, over a period of months, I start throwing concepts and ideas at that core to see if it enhances it and makes it feel more tangible. These concepts could be visual ideas like art work, scenes from a film, storylines, characters from other mediums, or thematic concepts. Mostly this occurs in my head before I put anything down on paper. Weak ideas tend to just fade away whereas stronger ones stick and I keep building from there. I’d say 95% of ideas don’t stick and sometimes the core idea just doesn’t grow and disappears.

    But if the core idea survives, perhaps even a year or more later, I might have enough to create a concept for a game but even then, the process doesn’t end there. It keeps snowballing throughout development especially as the team start adding their own ideas to the core concept and it becomes my job to filter, reject or add to these ideas to protect and enhance the core concept.

    We think of creativity as a romantic artistic magical process beyond logical comprehension. I see it very much as a methodical and logical process of aggregation, filtering and connectivity with the goal of creating an original interpretation or concept that gives new insight. To me at least, that is the creative process.

  • Where do you get ideas? Well. There are several questions here.

    Maybe the question is "how do you come up with some premise to get a story rolling? How do you get a push for a game that you might like to write?" Here, I think, the answer is most often "by playing other games or reading other stories... and wishing they were something they're not." That sounds mean-spirited, but it doesn't even mean I didn't like the original material. Good work often spurs me with ideas for a somewhat-related project, but tackling some other topic close to my heart, or with a different gameplay mechanic, or a different approach to narrative causality.

    But that's not the same thing at all as "how do you start on a commercial project?"! Commercial projects seldom start with a blank slate. Maybe I'm writing narrative to accompany particular gameplay; maybe I've been asked to fit a format, or a genre, or even teach a lesson, if it's an educational game.

    In that case, the constraints are the groundwork for everything else. If the gameplay is already established, I ask things like: what kind of character would be doing these actions? What kind of world would they live in? Who would care about the outcome of this kind of gameplay, and why? ("This whole scenario has been set up to test the protagonist" is a weak answer, by the way — I dislike that trope almost as much as I dislike amnesia.)

    If genre is already established, I look at the norms of that genre — what is the player going to expect to do, and what do they expect to accomplish? — and then think about where I can tweak those expectations... or else deliver on them even more strongly than expected.

    Wherever I start from, I also know that the process of actually writing the game is going to transform the concept, often completely beyond recognition.

  • You would be surprised how many of my ideas arrive in my dreams. This isn't because they are flashes of inspiration or transmitted from a higher power, it's because they are organisms that, when steadily fed, have a tendency to grow in dark places.

    There are definitely stages to this process, ones I've slowly learnt how to encourage, if not entirely control. I tend to believe ideas are pretty common, we have them all the time, the trick for me is isolating the good ones. I tend to read around the ideas I like, do little bits of research, get a few books from the library, idly doodle sketches of them in quiet moments. Eventually they'll take up root, and start occurring to me at random times without me trying. Things in my life will remind me of them. Once an idea reaches this point I usually make some notes on it and file them away, then I slowly move on. If its a good idea it will come back, make itself apparent. Each time it does I do a little more reading, a few more doodles, edit my notes, then leave it to fade again. Eventually these ideas start turning up in my dreams, they start combining, getting confused, dying off. And then one day they make themselves suddenly, unavoidably present and compel me to make them. And if I have time I do.

    I like the fluidity of this process, it points to a truth for me - you can't force ideas, but you can foster them. It also means I never worry about forgetting a good idea, in my experience they always come back. In Other Waters, for example, may be an idea I trace back to time spent swimming in the sea in Northern Greece, but just the other day I found a drawing of a futuristic diving "loom" I had done months before. And once I started thinking I was suddenly reminded of a story I wrote as a child about a biologist studying whale sharks who was led to the ruins of an ancient civilisation by tracking them deep under the sea. Ideas come back, even if we don't recognise them, even if they've changed. After all, they come from us, and we don't stay the same, so why should they?

  • For writing games, whether it’s AAA or indie, there are always two main elements I try to pin down while brainstorming ideas: what do I want the player to do and what do I want the player to feel?

    I write games because I’m interested in how interactions can inform or elicit emotions, and all of my ideas grow out of this intersection. I don’t want to just tell cool stories or create compelling characters (although I do want to do that); I want to create a story, no matter how big or small, that only can be told in a video game.

    For my horror game Say When, for example, I wanted to have the player attempt to make someone feel better by offering advice. In order to provide a space for players to realise that giving advice to people with mental illness involves needing to actually know and understand the person as a person, the advice the player offers these people would often backfire in unpredictable ways. I wanted them to feel frustrated and uncomfortable when they failed so they can begin to understand this concept. It’s about thinking about a core action and how an emotional response naturally grows out of this action. Then, what’s a story that can be believably told about this action/emotional state? Coming up with ideas becomes more productive when I set these parameters for myself of player action and desired emotional response.

    This method scales up to my work at Ubisoft, as well. I want the player to do something and I want them to feel a certain way when doing it. So when I try to come up with a story to tell, I think about how interactions mix together to create the chemistry that I want. It’s always a process. The first idea is rarely ever the one that sticks. It’s about finding the right combination of character motivation and world consequence that doesn’t create a disconnect with what action the player is going to be performing.

Writing romance in games

Featuring Samantha Wallschlaeger (Guild Wars 2, Mass Effect: Andromeda, Star Wars: The Old Republic), Ben Gelinas (Gotham Knights, Control, Speed Dating For Ghosts, Dragon Age, Mass Effect), Ed Sibley (miniLAW, Love Island), & Jared Rosen (League of Legends, Dream Daddy).

  • I grew up on older Japanese visual novels, which used romance solely as a form of fantasy fulfillment for the player. Audiences expected each romance arc to follow an existing trope, and the games of that era were happy to oblige. And there’s nothing particularly wrong with that, but it frustrated the hell out of me, because it was fantasy fulfillment at the expense of character development. A romance should reveal character depth, not hinder it. So when I began writing romances for games, I made a conscious decision to approach the process differently.

    An NPC-player romance arc is always going to be a form of escapism, but I don’t think it has to give players absolutely everything they want. It’s important for me to follow a character’s truth, and really dig into the unique way he or she feels and expresses love. When I wrote Avela Kjar’s romance for Mass Effect: Andromeda, I knew that despite being kind and expressive, she would never allow herself to fully fall for anyone. And I stuck to that, even though it would mean letting the player down in the end. And that’s just it—it’s okay to break the player’s heart a little, if it makes for a better character experience. Injecting that kind of nuance into a relationship makes it feel more real, and lets the player become more immersed in the experience.

    That’s not to say I don’t use tropes when I write romances. I think they’re an excellent starting point—people like them for a reason, after all (enemies-to-lovers is my particular weakness). And in order to provide a new spin on classic tropes, you need to be a practiced study. I make a point to grill my friends and colleagues on why they enjoy particular kinds of romance arcs, and what they’d like to see done differently.

    Even if a certain kind of romance isn’t my personal preference, it’s important for me to understand why it’s appealing to other people. It’s my job to provide every type of player with the experience they’ve come to love—injected with a little freshness to surprise and delight them, of course. Because being committed to realism in game romance also means being committed to inclusivity, and celebrating the myriad types of relationships that exist.

  • When writing romance, I start with everything but romance. Strong stories spring from stronger characters, who in turn spring from the strongest setting I can muster as a “writer” of “video games.”

    So I start there. With the setting. What’s compelling about it? What haven’t I seen before... or more realistically, what’s a weird way to bounce around concepts that've been otherwise done to death?

    What are the rules of the setting? The inherent conflicts? By answering these questions, I start to understand who would call the setting home. Paragraphs, sometimes entire pages, follow that only my collaborators and I will ever see—exploring who the characters are, where they came from, where they’re headed, and the roles they play in the game world.

    By then answering these questions, story beats and even entire arcs are much easier to see. And while I’m doing all this, I absolutely flee from the question: "Why would a player want to bang my characters?”

    Starting with THAT question only ups the risk of a character feeling two dimensional. Anything that would set up a romantic interest as a plot device or reward, rather than a wholly-realized individual with agency, needs to be avoided like dang proximity mines in GoldenEye 007.

    I also remind myself that I don't have to like my own characters. More than one player (hopefully) will be playing whatever my game ends up being. I’ll have at least three. Those three players also aren’t going to like everyone they can ultimately romance. And that’s great, so long as they find at least one character they think is worth getting to know.

    If I can write characters who don’t even hint at a potential romance and some players end up crushing on them all the same, I know I’ve done something right. Only then will I add the mushy stuff.

    I’ve used this approach even when writing a dating sim. Speed Dating for Ghosts is set in the afterlife. The ghosts in the game exist because they have unfinished business, something common in ghost stories. Most are not conventionally attractive. Some don’t even resemble humans. They’re spirits of mischief, compassion, and despair…spectral weirdos with all sorts of issues to work through and tales to tell. They have goals. They have regrets.

    And when I sit the player down opposite them for a couple rounds of speed dating, they have plenty to talk about. Because really, what’s more romantic than flirting with a spirit of vengeance named Gary while helping him solve his own murder?

  • We're used to thinking about game design in terms of the player's agency, and most game designs start by identifying the kinds of interactions a player can have with world. The world of most games is a reactive one - static until the player arrives and starts flipping over tables and kissing everyone.

    This is a problem if you’re trying to represent romantic relationships because romance involves the agency of two people, not one. In reality, potential romantic partners aren’t just sitting around waiting for you to arrive. In relationships, both parties must make tough decisions. This is why it's so impactful when Tali’Zorah takes off her mask in Mass Effect 3. This isn’t something the player has asked her to do - it’s a decision that she’s made of her own volition, despite the fact that it will make her fall ill after your night together. The gesture is touching because she’s making a sacrifice to be with you, but also because she’s exercised her own agency to make that sacrifice.

    This is where a lot of the drama of real relationships comes from - commiting to someone is a gamble, a leap of faith. Both parties are vulnerable when they make themselves open to each other. Games that portray romantic relationships effectively find ways to foreground this. They must find narrative (and mechanical, ideally) ways to embody uncertainty, nervousness, the tangible threat of rejection. Romance is a two way street, and it’s only convincing when you feel as though the other party has exercised their agency in picking you.

  • HOW TO APPROACH WRITING ROMANCE WHEN YOUR SEXY EVIL PRIEST IS SUPPOSED TO KILL EVERYBODY

    If we're being honest, this writeup has been a long time coming. With that in mind let me get the first part out of the way, and MAJOR SPOILERS if you have not played Dream Daddy and then spent sixteen hours scouring the internet for the draft script and junk files containing an ending that never actually shipped: No, canonically Joseph of Dream Daddy is not the leader of a Philistine death cult. He doesn't murder spouses or collect negative emotional energy to raise the the apocryphal sea god Dagon from the bottom of the ocean. He's not a cryptid. Or maybe he is, I don't know. I haven't really talked with the team since ship, and don't own any of that stuff regardless. Nowadays I write about leagues and legends and a space murderer who murders you.

    You know, normal games stuff.

    Lost in the shuffle, of course, is how to write a convincing romance about a supposedly-evil-sea-priest and an everyman quasi-hipster player dad. Not exactly a common narrative project, but I recently played a game where I romanced a horse with a human head -- so we're all riding hard in the year of our lord 2018.

    Approaching it was easy enough to begin with, as I write a lot of LGBTQ-themed horror for magazines. The trick was making Joseph's occasionally odd behavior seem believable in a world where you can date a guy who has extremely strong negative opinions about the mothman. Essentially you're humanizing a monster, but approaching it in a very endearing way that would make a player overlook small red flags -- or dissuade them from breaking into the code/looking up a playthrough video out of suspicion.

    I had a couple options. The first was painting Joseph as a not-so-closeted bisexual man. The second was seizing on the near-universal fear of being trapped in a loveless marriage, sequestered away from the life you wanted to live out of some deeper commitment to family and god.

    I chose both.

    Throw in a verbally abusive wife, suspicious former lover, and four (originally five) nightmarish hell children who at one point in early development were supposed to transform into literal eldritch horrors and... boom. The recipe is there. Now all you need to do is find your execution.

    As it turns out, I was once a not-so-closeted bisexual man (now openly bisexual man), hailing from a very strict family in a very small city where being gay was tantamount to throwing a child in front of a street mapping car. I know what it's like to not be able to kiss boys and feel trapped in situations that don't feel like they're really you -- sort of like you're stuck in a small, nicely decorated cell, and can see the life you want to live passing just outside the window. Having spent a good chunk of my childhood listening to my dad talk about "touring with Metallica" (he toured with Metallica), I also had a good sense of what an older Joseph would feel like once he popped out a quartet of children and his life stopped being an adventure.

    Suddenly you, a strange dad in a strange but not in any way paranormal town, show up and are met by this handsome, stoic, somewhat reserved father trapped in the tattered painting world of a life he believed he wanted. He can't even do gay stuff! Gotta emancipate him from his marriage. With your mouth. I mean, come on.

    Joseph was written believably sad and gay, of course, because in the original script he was tricking you and everyone else in town. In the unreleased final draft of the secret ending he would break the fourth wall, speaking directly to the player as a fellow 'vessel in a dad's body controlled by a third dimensional outside party,' imply he was often pretending to be Amanda, explain why every guy in town but himself was miraculously single, and throw the entire canon of the game (as well as all your decisions) up in the air until he was defeated by the weight of his own stereotypes and you were saved by the (drumroll) strength of the gay community. And also his wife stabbed him. That was Leighton's idea. It was awesome.

    But that never happened. Now he's just weird. And sometimes people reference a death cult. Small towns, am I right?

    In the end, I guess, I'd say your goal when writing romance is to seize on the humanity of the characters. They aren't just props, because in an age of online engagement your players are going to want way more than a random jpeg of their otome dreamboat redrawn with three different sweaters. They need the world of the game to breathe, and to be interconnected in a way that dating games haven't traditionally been known for. Your dates can't exist in a vacuum any more than a real world romance can -- which is why Joseph had to work even without the horror elements being present.

    That's the ultimate goal of a good horror story anyway. Even when you take the monster out, it still feels scary. And you can kiss it on a boat. And it leaves you for its wife.

    Fucking dad games.

How do you write history games?

Featuring Pete Stewart (Respawn, Total War: Rome 2, Attila, Total War: Warhammer (1&2), Total War: Three Kingdoms), Victor Ojuel (TemTem, 1958: Dancing with Fear, Ariadne in Aeaea, Pharaonic), Kate Watson (Everwild, Total War: Rome 2, Total War: Shogun 2, Napoleon: Total War and Empire: Total War), and Alain Mercieca (Assassin's Creed: Origins)

  • I would say there are, chiefly, three considerations when working in history: tone, accuracy and sensitivity.

    Firstly, tone: from a technical standpoint, you have to consider how you’re going to write; the style and tone. Writing in the ancient Roman period? Then you’re going to have to work on your pomp and ceremony; writing grand, almost arrogantly, to best capture the idea of the ancient world, in all its narcissism and overwrought majesty. Yet slide sideways to somewhere like ancient China, and the rules change – now we’re dealing with romance, we’re dealing with duty and ideals greater than any one person. This is about honour and personal integrity – the measure of a life, and the span of time beneath the heavens.

    So, tone is important. It’s a fundamental requirement for writing, certainly, but doubly so when stepping so entirely out of not only your own understanding, but the understanding of your audience, too. You’re creating the atmosphere and tone of the historical era they’re inhabiting. It has to be convincing, and it has to be unique.

    So, beyond tone? Accuracy. The civilisations of our history were all a little bit (a lot) vain, and so helpfully they mostly recorded their histories in vast detail, so obsessed as they were with their legacy. Whilst we don’t have a complete account in all cases (pour one out for the Library of Alexandria…), you have to nevertheless strive for historical accuracy as much as possible. Sure, gameplay considerations may require you to bend, or massage, the facts, but whenever you can you have to keep accurate. It’s not only your history you’re dealing with, it’s someone else’s. Which brings me to…

    Sensitivity. Finally (but by no mean least importantly), the idea of being respectful and sensitive to the culture you’re writing about is too important to ignore. The examples from my first point paint in very broad strokes, but the reality is you’re dealing in cultures often not your own – cultures that, although in many cases long dead, still hold huge significance and importance to people. It is a fine line to walk between honouring the culture of a people’s forefathers and painting the time in as truthful a light as possible.

    (The British Empire, for example, was generally awful, and the writers of Empire: Total War would be doing themselves a disservice if they had attempted to show it otherwise.)

    It can be as simple as what words cultures don’t like, or inappropriate metaphor or symbolism, how certain leaders or deities must be styled, etc. It’s about respect, ultimately; showing respect to another culture that you would expect to receive for your own. In some cases, this means consulting with experts, academics or leaders of certain cultures, to ensure you’re being both as honest and respectful as possible.

    And that’s it! History is fascinating and nuanced and complicated. We have to tread carefully when handling it because, beneath our feet, the bones of our forefathers are ultimately very brittle.

  • As with any other game writing, how I approach historical settings varies wildly depending on the project. As a freelance writer/ND, the main factors are how much leeway do I have, and at what point in the development I jump onboard. Let me explain that with those different examples.

    Arriving late, leaving early – the “Parachuted Writer” case

    With fighting RPG Pharaonic, I was brought into the project post-alpha, just a few months before release. Scenarios and enemies were final. My brief was to provide lore and background the “Souls way”, by means of short NPC snippets and item descriptions.

    So in this case the starting point was low-level (we had the actual game assets), but I insisted on starting with a high-level approach (back to the historical drawing room, as it were).

    I started by skim-reading through some three thousand years of Egyptian History to see what general period was better suited. Wikipedia is actually a pretty good resource at this initial level, since it provides a quick overview. The Hykso invasion grabbed my attention, so I focused on it and drilled down before settling on the reign of Pharaoh Ahmosis I, credited with repelling the Hyksos and restoring Egyptian rule around 1565 BC. Three centuries later, the enigmatic “Sea Peoples” tore through Egypt and most of the eastern Mediterranean – a time of strife and societal breakdown always makes for good drama. I based my lore on the idea that Ahmosis had sealed an unholy pact in order to perpetuate himself in the throne, a rule disturbed by the arrival of new gods. At this point I knew I was going for the Egyptian New Kingdom, circa 1200 BC, framing the Sea Peoples’ invasion as a religion war. Then it was time for more in-depth research, mostly two-pronged – mythological material to pad my religious conflict and some microhistory to create plausible NPCs. I found plenty of sources for the former at the British Museum, and for the latter in the Set Maat texts.

    This is the point in the process in which general concepts should start to trickle down into specifics – the unnamed Egyptian city overrun with sea-creatures became the Hykso capital Avaris, teeming with the spawn of Oannes, a deity related to Dagon (a god I wanted to avoid because of its trite Lovecraftian associations). A desert village became Set Maat, its villagers and their mundane problems inspired by the real legal cases of the Deir el-Medina texts. The “Black Pharaoh” (another Lovecraftian remnant) became the Red Pharaoh – because the colour black was associated with the fertile, life-giving Nile mud, as opposed to the red of the desert, the realm of death and demons, more fitting for a cruel, undead king.

    At this step, each element of game lore needs to click in with the others, forming a little microcosmos of internal coherence, if not always complete historical accuracy. It is more important for the player to identify a khopesh as a standard issue in the Egyptian army (“yeah, that’s what a soldier would wield”) than to ensure this particular model was used in this particular war. My main regret, however, is not having had the time to learn more than just basics about hieroglyphs – I would have loved to customise inscriptions to particular objects and locations.

    First in, last out – the “One Man Army” case

    1958:Dancing with Fear is an interactive fiction set in a Caribbean republic on the night before revolution. It ranked among the top ten at the prestigious Interactive Fiction Competition 2017 and was praised for its sense of place and historical credibility.

    In terms of creative freedom it is a diametrically opposed example, since I could choose my setting, protagonist and plot (a faded showgirl trying to navigate a deadly political plot). That means I did start with a pretty good idea of why I was using that moment in History, and what I wanted to do with it.

    The process was somewhat similar, in that I started with high-level historical concepts and narrowed them down to a particular date, region and scene, but the crucial differences lay in the greater leeway when writing it, and the special issues of choosing a recent past, which cuts both ways.

    On the one hand, the player just knows more about this time, so mistakes and inaccuracies are easier to catch. Hence, expectations are implicitly higher, so it requires more in-depth research – unlike that khopesh, if we have a gun it needs to be the right model – no Walther PPKs before 1935. If we are going to mention the Vietnam War, we need more than a passing knowledge of its causes and social repercussion, beyond mere dates – what it meant within the broader political and ideological conflict, and the stakes for each NPC. Language and characterisation can also be more demanding – we do have a wealth of films and music from the 50s, which means you have plenty of sources to catch slang, manners and turns of phrase, but also players will come with more definite expectations of “how people talked back then”.

    On the other hand, two positives. Chances are any moderately educated writer already knows a lot about the recent past, though often it is a case of sorting what previous assumptions are applicable and which ones are not (yes, they had TVs, but only for the affluent, especially in the Caribbean). The second positive is, the player is usually much more receptive to things they are at least passingly familiar with. Put it another way, if your audience hasn’t heard about the Cold War *at all*, chances are they are not going to be interested in a game about it. The recent past has much in common with our present, so it can be easier to create characters and situations with which the player can empathise.

    Ultimately, it comes down to how you use historical research to inform characters and situations. While with Pharaonic those were a given that I had to justify with an historical veneer, in 1958 the setting came first, with characters and scenes flowing from it. Two completely different jobs, using the same tool in different manners.

  • My answer is a rather unsurprising and slightly obvious one; research, research, RESEARCH. If you only read, watch or listen to the bare minimum, it will be obvious in your work.

    When working in ancient time periods I find it really helpful to immerse myself in myths and legends. They tell us a lot about a cultures ideals, fears and desires and are often an inexhaustible source of ideas. They are particularly useful in helping to banish your own prejudices so you can get into the mindset of someone from the time. Something we would find repulsive or shocking could have been a day to day occurrence for a barbarian or a samurai. Equally, an outcome that is desirable to us may not have been to them. Shedding your own cultural bias can be tough but it is entirely necessary if you're going to create a believable world.

    Any book that you read for research, post-it note the hell out of it! If a snippet of information catches your attention when you're reading, chances are it's going to interest a player. The same goes for web pages, I always create a folder of useful sites in my bookmarks when I'm working on a project.

    If it's possible, I like to go to museums with relevant exhibitions or displays. When I started work on Total War: Rome 2 I actually went for a long weekend in Rome, but that's not something I'd advocate! Getting to see items from the period in real life will, if nothing else, fire your enthusiasm for the setting. You may also find a little snippet of information that you later use in your work.

    Once the project is well underway I like to listen to music of the period, if that's impossible or in some cases painful, I look to movie soundtracks. I find that music really helps fix my mind in a place or time.

  • Writing for a specific time period is an impossible task, but like many impossible tasks, you feel helplessly obsessed by completing it despite the futility of its completion. The obvious fears enter the writers' hearts: is this boring and stale? Does it feel like I'm force-feeding the gamer documentary-style history? Is this no longer a video game and an act of pedagogy? And worst of all: AM I BETRAYING HISTORY? It is hard to disappoint fans or history buffs and it happens more than you'd like. This often has an irreconcilable tension -- if you please gamers and fans you often disappoint history buffs; or vice versa. It can feel like an unwinnable war. The more you focus on one, the more the other suffers.

    I love them both so very much, so in the end, well hell: my advice is just leave your blood, sweat and imagination in the history books, read until your eyes bleed, but at the end of the day make sure the game is fun, and if the history has swallowed you whole you'll be decent. That's it: try to make the history swallow you whole first. Because regardless you will stress out that someone will notice an error in a side quest's flavour text but then you head to the bar.... After 5 beers a designer pats you on the back: "We are making a game..." Yet the game is an art form. And the fans expect perfection. As they should.

    Another debate is whether you let history do the writing or do you impose contemporary human emotions upon the research? Which one comes first: the history or the contemporary human relevance? There is no magic bullet. You search desperately for original anecdotes that contain the universal human condition and then you tear your soul asunder trying to seamlessly massage it into the research you have cobbled up. As Martin Amis said "avoid cliché". Though the flip side is that we do have expectations. And some clichés have been formed based on true, historical fact. Yet which stories did the annals and the historians leave out? How to imagine history that is true but undocumented? Make inferences, jump to conclusions, imagine untold history.

    Considering how many stories are oppressed and hidden in our contemporary age with all of its mediums of communication that are available and permanent, imagine how many stories are buried in those great deserts when there is no internet hyper-eternity?

    When have you read enough pages on a subject to be considered an authority?

    I remember many years ago before Origins reading about ancient Egypt and learning that they invented the streets, the sewers and pornographic derogatory graffiti and thinking: What I wouldn't give to be able to spend a day with these fine people? They were just like us, but yet not at all like us. Threads unite us.

    Authentic immersion would involve many impossibilities and the player essentially not understanding anything at all because ancient egyptian is spoken by very few people.

    History should be written by losers, give the prisoners in all the jails the authority to write our histories.

    When do you stretch history to fit? As we did with Bayek being the Last Medjay. We posited that because he is so far away (in Siwa), that he maintained a tradition that had stopped for 300 years (but who is to say it stopped fully?). This helped clarify his role but did we stretch it too far? Liberties need to be taken in order to create an entertaining game. You have to love history and the time period you are writing about, you have to also to love video games and yet, you will not please everyone.

    When an Egyptian gamer tweeted that they cried when they were playing Bayek and his buddy Hepzefa I also cried. We're all humans, history is a social construct. With Origins I always felt we shouldn't have had the pyramids. They aren't historically accurate. They were created by aliens. I fact-checked this on a couple sites.

    Let's just put it this way: I have regrets. But history moves on and those regrets are ancient history now.

Writing supernatural games

Featuring Hazel Monforton (Destiny 2, Dishonored: Death of the Outsider), Danny Wadeson (Duelyst, Röki, Abandon Ship), Rebecca Haigh (Fable, Du Lac and Fey: Dance of Death, Atone, Sundown), and Cash DeCuir (Disco Elysium, Fallen London, Sunless Sea: Zubmariner, Sunless Skies)

  • Dishonored: Death of the Outsider is the entry in the series that deals most explicitly with the supernatural underpinnings of the Empire of the Isles. Since the first game in 2012, the Void was a mythical otherworld which showed us glimpses of power and machinations beyond our control. But in the close of the series, we are sent to confront the Void itself. What’s left for us to write, when the mystery of the unknown is stripped away? But the first question we have to ask is: what is fear without a pounding heart, tense muscles, and short breath? Any exploration of the unknown must begin with an exploration of our own emotions. Without those comprehensible feelings and embodied senses, the unknown can’t be reached at all.

    As such, Billie's descent into the Void is a descent into her own emotional life. When she says “There’s a darkness at the center of all things”, it’s as much about herself as about the Void. And when Billie asks Daud what the Void is like, just before reaching it herself, he answers with something both personal and emotional: “It feels as if you called for help, and no one answered.” It is only natural that when we find him there, lost and confused, he is asking for the comfort of his mother.

    In the Void, the writhing horror from another plane that Billie reckons with is her own past as a murderer, her relationship to Daud, and her relationship to the kind of violence that produces people like her. What she confronts isn't something unknowable or strange, but rather something painfully common. Something she, herself, once was: a lonely, helpless person, “at the mercy of bad people”. The Outsider might have been changed by the Void, existing for millennia in a supernatural state, but his fear, pain, and curiosity are what make him affecting. And when he’s released, he is overwhelmed by the physical sensations of his own emotions, where the taste of blood or a dead man’s voice are more frightening than the endless dark.

    We use the supernatural to make metaphors from meaning, and, in turn, literalize the language we use to talk about the world we live in. Exploration becomes introspection. The Void isn’t something beyond us, but inside us. And when we wander into that darkness, we don't face things beyond our comprehension; we face the things we carry with us.

  • In general, I try and follow a rather classical approach to writing. That is, to be truthful and concise. And the truths I’m usually drawn to are ones about human experience. Don’t we all dream, fantasise or panic about The Other, about escaping the physical confines of our bodies and the rational confines of our minds?

    The chance to write about, or around the supernatural then, is a gift. Going beyond what is natural is a chance to contrast human truths with utterly non-human ones, and the starker the contrast the more clearly we see them.

    So far, I’ve written for three games that deal in supernatural elements. Duelyst, a tactical, science-fantasy CGC, is rife with arcane rituals, strange specters and otherworldly magic – usually wielded by the monstrous Abyssian faction or the mystical, transhuman Vetruvians. The object with my writing here was to contextualise the unit abilities, while giving identity to the faction itself. So the Abyssian’s sense of supernatural is that it’s something from the void, something menacing, a force of entropy and decay. For the Vetruvians, it’s something more noble, although perhaps equally unknowable and volatile. The way in which each faction sees and manipulates the supernatural informs their abilities and says a huge amount about their philosophies and civilisations.

    In Röki, a dark fairytale adventure game, the supernatural is expressed through folkloric characters and superstitions made flesh. It’s all loosely based on Scandinavian myth, so there exist a certain amount of (inspiring!) boundaries. My approach has been to draw out the element of each myth, or character, and make them really grounded. Most of the game takes place in a magical forest, so protagonist Tove quickly becomes accustomed to the supernatural – it’s that or become a gibbering wreck – and must learn to play by their own rules. It’s fantastic fun to write low-key supernatural too, there’s something peculiar and satisfying about mischievous and begrudgingly helpful spirits and ghosts that you don’t tend to be able to draw out from epic gods and world-ending supernatural forces.

    In Abandon Ship, the supernatural is somewhat Lovecraftian. There are lots of tentacles. It’s a mode well represented in games, so obviously I wanted to avoid it being too trope-y. In the game, the supernatural (and the cult that worships and engenders it) is very real, but again it’s a very personal thing: The Captain (whom you play as) has a strong link to the game’s dominant supernatural force, and engages in a constant mental tug of war with it. So yes, it’s a threat, an unknowable old and infernally powerful threat, but it’s one you also have a kind of dialogue with. It hopefully takes the old ‘when you gaze into the abyss…’ idea one step further.

    The supernatural that I grew up with was Greek and Egyptian mythology, Asian horror and dark fantasy literature. So I’ve always loved the idea that, while powerful, whatever lies beyond the veil can be reckoned with by peeking behind it, parsing the internal logic of it – as long as your own psyche is up to the task. I suppose I approach the supernatural from a direction other than the ‘sheer horror of something like Magic: The Gathering’s eldritch-inspired Eldrazi. Although that unknowable power is alluring – one of the examples I’m drawn most to is the Chandrian from The Kingkiller Chronicles: humanoid but never fully glimpsed, sung about by children but never whispered or written about by adults who value their lives. They are clearly terrifying, but one feels their greatest mystery is anonymity and mystery. The protagonist (and unnecessarily tongue-twistingly named) Kvothe hunts for knowledge about them, he seeks them, and that collision course is an inestimably tense thread running through the series. It’s that kind of feeling I think I’m interested in exploring.

    One day I’m sure I’ll want to write about murderous, terrifying ghosts and Stranger Things style gross-out horror, a supernatural that is the complete antithesis to human nature, but for now my approach to writing the supernatural is to ask: how can we reconcile ourselves to it? And what parts of ourselves gave birth to it in the first place?

  • I have put a lot of (shower) thought into this, and the metaphor I always come back to is a Mylar balloon. The supernatural aspects of your lore / world / idea are the balloon itself. The little weight at the bottom is what anchors it to our understanding. Without a human connection to the strange and wonderful, it’ll float out of reach and your reader / player may struggle to connect with the narrative you’re peddling. After all, we should be able to see something of ourselves in amongst the ectoplasm!

    Du Lac & Fey: Dance of Death is a good exercise in the supernatural, as it draws into question our own myths and the way they have been represented throughout our histories. Does legend count as supernatural when it is rooted in living history? Or does it only become supernatural when it is removed from its original context? These are questions I don’t actually know the answers to, but they are fun to think about.

    Fey provides us with a unique pair of eyes through which to peer, and I feel as though she is a good representation of what the supernatural can be – a lens through which to view the human world. It is an opportunity to look at ourselves and the rules we’ve created in a mirror – be it one tainted with magic and the impossible. A legendary sorceress trapped in the body of an animal allowed us to explore feelings of mistrust, frustration, and crushing alienation. We contrast her with brave Lancelot, the Victorian ideal of chivalrous masculinity, and we begin to understand her trajectory through the game; how painful it is to be invisible and unheard when you have so much to say, and a plight she shares with the forgotten masses of the 19th century.

    Atone is another foray into the history books, this time Norse Mythology. The task was to take non-human entities and create for them relatable personas, closing the gap between the ‘them’ and the ‘us’ by rooting their arcs in human emotion and experience.

    At the opposite end of this spectrum sits Sundown; a short-form narrative experience where you must help a young WW2 soldier (Private William Harris) come to terms with his own death. Where Du Lac & Fey and Atone allowed us to explore how to make the supernatural human, Sundown was a lesson in making the human supernatural. In order to follow William on his journey, pesky Father Time had to be removed from the picture. The supernatural allowed us to deliver this story of loss, much in the same way Ghibli seeds a human message within their weird and wild worlds.

    I’ll conclude with stating the obvious – there are no rules to follow when approaching the supernatural. Don’t let that balloon full of ideas fly away, but, by the same token, don’t let that human anchor limit your concept. Have fun with it! I couldn’t possibly leave without mentioning the show, but Supernatural took the supernatural and poked holes in it. Hell – Twilight did things to vampires we’ll hopefully still be talking about many years down the line!

  • The supernatural is never unnatural. It is real, if not realer, than the natural: hence supernatural.

    Though the supernatural is typically outside of human experience, it is not outside of reality. Nothing, by definition, is outside of reality. Every universe, fictional or not, has its own reality; and every reality has its own rules. And everything which happens in a reality does so within the context of those rules, even if those rules are unknown or incomprehensible to humankind.

    Before I was a lead writer at Failbetter Games, I was a Fallen London player. For me, the best part of the fun was uncovering the truths of that deep, dark, marvelous universe – a sentiment shared by many players. Of course, the joy of this discovery wasn’t accidental. It was, and is still, facilitated by the careful curation and cultivation of the world’s lore.

    Everything in the Fallen London universe – whether in the titular browser game, or Sunless Sea: Zubmariner, or the upcoming Sunless Skies – has an answer. The rules are set; how everything tied together is known, though there always remains enough room to discover new connections.

    The glimpses players receive of greater truths are carefully considered. Hints and clues are sprinkled with care, to create an evolving sense of discovery and understanding. Whether this is in the origin of the Clay Men, or the nature of the Sun or Death, it’s closely tracked what information is available at what stage of play. As players advance, we seed answers, which bloom into new questions. Because everything has an answer, the writers can keep the mysteries alive and consistent. Better still, they can write with certainty, which is integral to writing the supernatural.

    No matter how bizarre, everything in the Fallen London universe is presented as plain fact. Even if the player doesn’t understand what they’re seeing, they know they’re really seeing it. And if they see it – if it’s true – they believe they may be able to learn more about it. This creates its own kind of speculative play, which bubbles away as the player goes about fulfilling their other goals.

    In my estimation, the plainness of the Fallen London universe is one of the setting’s greatest strengths. The hopeless, grasping philosophies of the last millennia all suggested truths of the universe – truths which now, in the Neath, are at hand. London’s transplantation underground is a breakthrough of knowledge. It is as if there were shapes on the horizon, shrouded in a mist that was suddenly lifted; and though the giants on the horizon are still too far to understand, we now believe we one day might. An initial revelation promises future revelations. The revelation of Fallen London’s devils, for example, promises future revelations on the nature of Hell.

    This also enables one of Fallen London’s greatest charms. There is always a relationship between the human world and the supernatural world – in the Fallen London universe, that relationship is a comedy of manners. Because fantastic is commonplace here, it becomes banal. London’s descent into the Neath was, at first, a thing of fantastic horror. Over the last thirty years, however, everyone has rather become accustomed to the bats. The abduction of your Aunt by the devils of Hell is an afternoon distraction.

    When writing the supernatural, you must understand the supernatural. When you know what you’re writing, you may write with greater intentionality; when you write with greater intentionality, you write better. Your audience will know when you don’t know what you’re talking about. The public’s pallet is sensitive to the half-baked. Make no mistake, you don’t need all the answers – your game needn’t include a treatise on the nature of ghosts and other dimensions – but you need to know enough about what the answers are to know what the answers are not.

    I’d like to leave you with a quotation from the philosopher Thomas Burnet, English theologian and cosmologist. It comes from his Archaeologiae philosophicae, wherein he questioned the literal interpretation of the Fall of Man.

    A good question. Not a wise one.

    I easily believe that in the universe the invisible Natures are more numerous than the visible ones. But who will clarify for us the family of all these natures, the ranks and relationships and criteria and functions of each of them? What do they do? In what places do they dwell? The human mind has always searched for the knowledge of these matters but has never acquired it. Meanwhile, I do not deny that it is from time to time useful mentally to picture in the mind, as on a tablet, the image of a larger and better world, so that our minds, preoccupied with trivial matters of everyday life, does not shrink excessively and subside entirely into petty ideas. We must however be careful about the truth and keep a sense of proportion, so that we may discrimate between the certain and uncertain, day from night.

Writing Telltale Games

Featuring Eric Stirpe (Fortnite, Minecraft: Story Mode S1-2, Batman, Tales from the Borderlands, Walking Dead S2), Lauren Mee (Ratchet & Clank: A Rife Apart, The Walking Dead: The Final Season and Batman: The Enemy Within), Mary Kenney (Miles Morales, The Walking Dead: The Final Season, lead writer of episode 2), and Stacey Mason (Lead on Telltale's cancelled R&D project) .

  • “Silence is a valid option.”

    It’s a piece of tutorial text that was in the first episode of every Telltale series post-Walking Dead. A reminder that, during tense situations or awkward moments, choosing to say nothing is just as valid as opening your mouth to chime in. When I first started writing at Telltale in the fall of 2013, it was one of the toughest things for me to wrap my head around - How do I make being silent, doing nothing, feel good in a conversation? The lazy version is writing a scene in which the player is an optional part - A scene that will play out even if the player wasn’t there. It should go without saying that this… doesn’t feel great. It looks like a big group of NPCs having an argument and coming to their own conclusions as players say things like “I agree with [x]” or “That doesn’t sound like a good idea.”

    To ensure that silence actually is a “valid option,” you need to construct your scenes in such a way that silences are active and really noticed by the other characters. It doesn’t mean that every choice needs to be the player character answering direct questions or making decisions for a group, but the silence has to have active emotions tied to it. It needs to be Bigby Wolf choosing to silently glare as Mr. Toad blathers at him about his problems. It needs to be Batman looking away and saying nothing when he’s asked about someone he wasn’t able to save. You need to plan for the worst case scenario: What if a player chooses to say nothing through this whole scene? Or even through the majority of the scene? It’s a little more work, but having a different ending, or a few different choices throughout, to react to those edge cases can go a long, long way towards helping the player feel like silence really was a “valid option” and that their silences were noticed by the world.

    This is knowledge that took me a couple episodes at Telltale to really absorb. I wrote quite a few early scenes that I look back on with embarrassment; Scenes with NPCs flapping their gums as the player character - the character who should have been the most interesting and dynamic one in the room - could just lean back against the wall and observe. But over time I learned that checking your silent options can actually be a great barometer for the agency and player involvement in your scenes. If a scene can keep going unimpeded, whether your player is pushing buttons or not - when your silent options are just “[Player character] says nothing” and no one reacts - it’s typically a symptom that your scene might need to go back to the drawing board to make sure that the player is a key, well, player.

    Even though I didn’t always “get” silent choices at first, I’m really glad that I got to spend 5 years working on stories that had them. It was an extra challenge for sure, but it was a challenge that forced me to really think about how the player was involved in scenes and it made me admire people who could pull them off really well. I highly suggest trying out out silent playthroughs of Wolf Among Us. Or Tales from the Borderlands. Or either season of Batman. All of those games have some of the greatest silent choices I’ve ever seen. Check ‘em out, and then pour one out for the awesome folks who made sure that when we said “Silence is a valid option”, we really meant it.

  • I’ll never forget the first time I cried playing a game.

    I stared bleary-eyed as Clementine sat beside Lee, her hands and mine both shaking as she held the gun. The choice hovered on screen, and I remember thinking -- “I don’t want her to live with the guilt of having to kill me.”

    And that’s where the magic starts. Because, while there are a lot of things that make Telltale games special: difficult choices, dramatic deaths, moments that make you laugh out loud or fall in love with a fictional character… What really makes Telltale games shine is much like what made Telltale as a company shine: the people. The characters you interact with. They’re not just pixels on a screen, they’re your best friends, enemies, partners.

    Working on the final season of The Walking Dead, a major focus was: who are these kids? Not only to Clementine, but to each other, to themselves. What do they want? What are they afraid of? Do they have a favorite food? How do they spend their free time? They all had difficult, storied lives before she got there. The player should feel that and, more importantly, they should have the opportunity to earn moments where they can learn about that history, themselves.

    The joy of a Telltale game comes from choice. Do I want to play into his joke or tease him about how lame it is? Should I share my food with her, or eat it in front of her? And what does that mean for our relationship from then on? How do they perceive me and what does that change about how we interact with each other? I know it can be tempting to mainline what you think are the “best” or “most interesting” parts of the story, but fight that urge. The best part of the experience is knowing that you had control over it. Don’t rob the player of that.

    All that said, I’ll never forget the first time I cried writing a game.

    It was late at night during the final stages of Episode 3 and I was finishing up a scene where a character who means a lot to me opens up about a heartbreaking moment in their past. They’re vulnerable in a way that they haven’t been in a long time. And what made this particularly special was knowing that not every player would see it. Only the ones who had earned this person’s trust.

    I guess what I’m trying to say is, the best way to write a Telltale game is to just… Do it. Be fearless, be genuine, and be open to all of the roads a player could want to take. Share the stories of the characters buzzing around in your head. You’ll be surprised how many people are excited to be a part of it. I know I was.

  • A great way to start a Telltale story? Character.

    The characters in a Telltale game are often the biggest factor that brings players back, and they’re the most memorable part of a Telltale story. They ground the setting, establish the stakes, and reflect on the choices the player is making.

    The people around the player-character have their own lives, issues, and needs...

    Every character needs to be just as nuanced as the player-character; without that depth, the entire game feels flat. People need to have beliefs they adhere to, sometimes betray, fail to keep hidden, or shout from the rooftops. Those beliefs need to influence how they view the player-character’s choices throughout the story. The goal should be to make NPCs believable; not just to make them likable.

    … but the player can’t be the most boring person in the room.

    I love narrative games, and I play a ton of them. Console, computer, mobile, doesn’t matter— if it’s got a good story, I’ll get hooked. But a major problem I see in a lot of narrative games, and one that often happens when there are more writers than narrative designers on a team, is the Bland Protagonist issue. That is, the player-character is the most boring person in the room.

    It’s an easy trap to fall into, particularly when writing a blank-slate player-character, or one with a wide array of roleplaying rail. You want to create a character who has enough flexibility, or “blank spots,” that the player has room to roleplay and make decisions. But when all the NPCs have complex backstories, emotions, and tie-ins to the plot, it can be easy to create a player-character who is comparatively dull— so blank and uninvolved, the player is left wondering, “Wait, why am I the protagonist? Why not one of these way cooler people?” Telltale devs used several tricks to avoid this.

    Give them a job! Bigby Wolf was the Sheriff. Lee was Clementine’s protector. Bruce Wayne was Batman. By giving the player-character a clear role with action behind it (investigate, protect, bat-grapple, respectively), it made sense that NPCs looked to the protagonist for leadership.

    Build relationships. By surrounding the protagonist with NPCs who had opinions about them and their choices, the player-character was clearly part of and influencing the world.

    Separate roleplaying rails from “critpath” personality traits. Some personality traits were chosen by the players, through dialogue and action; others were part of the protagonist’s personality and couldn’t be changed. Take Clementine in season 4 of The Walking Dead as an example: Clementine could be compassionate, fierce, or sarcastic, depending on player-choice, but she was never cruel, vindictive, or bloodthirsty. Those options weren’t offered in choice spaces, because that would’ve betrayed her character. Having those distinctions creates a stronger protagonist.

  • As the creative lead for the R&D team at Telltale, part of my job was to explore new forms of interactive storytelling and figure out how to integrate them into the story and gameplay paradigms that Telltale fans know and love. The last project I was working on for Telltale was in pursuit of that Holy Grail of reactive storytelling: procedural narrative.

    “Procedural narrative” has become something of an industry buzzword. Lots of companies think it’s the future, even if they’re not sure what it means. It’s used to refer to lots of different storytelling paradigms, and often two people claiming to work in procedural narrative will actually mean very different things. How someone conceptualizes what procedural narrative means will naturally have a great impact on the kinds of stories they’re able to tell with it. I tend to think of it like this:

    All interactive narrative is comprised of units of content and some way to get from one unit to the next. We can think of interactive narrative as a spectrum: on one end, we have more “authored” narrative, in which an author has specified how the player will transition from one bit of content to the next. But as we turn those decisions over to a computer to decide what the player sees next, the work becomes “more procedural”, that is, the story is increasingly a result of the system’s rules (procedures) and less a result of the author’s direct influence.

    Sort of.

    In practice, as work becomes more procedural, we need to give the computer more rules to ensure that the things it selects produce something coherent or dramatic or emotionally impactful. As a creator, you start to think of your story less as THE (one, true) story and more as a system of rules that produce the kind of story you want. At Telltale, a lot of my job was training writers and designers who were used to thinking of stories in lines or branches to think of them instead as LEGOs.

    Writers will already be familiar with some of the ways we do this. We might know that we need, for example, a dramatic climax between our protagonist and our villain. So maybe we have bag of “dramatic climax” scenes, which we can think of as interchangeable LEGOs. In a procedural system, rather than trying to come up with the best climax, we would instead write a bunch of dramatic climax scenes, specify the conditions under which the system should select this one over that one--select a skyscraper scene if our player has indicated the PC is afraid of heights, select a bombing scene if the player saw bomb foreshadowing in scene 2--and let the system decide which scene is the most impactful one to choose for a given scenario. Thus our story is built from grabbing scenes out of a bag, and assembled like LEGOs coming together to make a whole.

    The real trick becomes doing this in a way that scales without our authors having to hand-write 50 dramatic climax scenes. So then, what if our climax LEGO could itself be made up of different pieces? Let’s think about how we write this. Suppose we write a confrontation with our villain. As an opening line, our confident villain says something like:

    VILLAIN: Ha! I knew you’d turn up! Don’t even try to stop me!

    But wouldn’t it be cool if our villain weren’t necessarily confident? Maybe we don’t even know who the villain is! As a writer we want to break the line into what narrative purpose it’s serving. So we could also look at this line as:

    VILLAIN: [ Expression of key character trait ] [ Implicit threat ]

    An unsure villain might express that character trait differently. Maybe an unsure villain might react with fear at seeing the player character. Maybe their call to action would be different.

    UNSURE VILLAIN: [(hands shaking) Please! Don’t come any closer.][ I’ll do it, I swear.]

    Now rather than writing our LEGOs at the scene level, we’re thinking of them at the line or sentence level. We could abstract this further and combine these two legos into the more abstract [opening beat]. We could even write the whole scene abstracted to the function each line serves, while filling in the actual content of those beats with LEGOs based character traits, flags set by things the player did earlier, or other things about the world state. Our climax scene might now look like:

    VILLAIN: [opening beat]

    SIDEKICK: [witty quip]

    VILLAIN: [reveals unknown aspect of the plan]

    [Imminent threat demonstrates urgency]

    SIDEKICK: [offers context-specific clue]

    VILLAIN: [calls player to action]

    We can continue to make our LEGOs as small as we want them to be, and each of these LEGOs might itself be made up of several LEGOs. In general, the smaller your LEGOs become, the more variation you get out of the narrative, but the more rules you have to put in place to smooth things over so that everything comes out coherently. It’s a very different way of writing than thinking in branching.

    The upside is that with the right balance of LEGO size, number of variations, and variations that can only be specific to certain conditions, we can really get narrative magic--scenes feel incredibly tailored to choices the player has made, and choices really, deeply matter to the way the narrative is constructed on nearly every level.

Writing horror games

Featuring Cassandra Khaw (Ubisoft, Sunless Skies, TSUYB), Doc Burford (Adios, Paratopic), Sam Riordan (Cthulhu Chronicles), Kevin Snow (Pathologic 2, The Silence Under Your Bed), and a bonus piece by Trevor Henderson, artist and scary friend designer.

  • Be conscious of timing - both in regards to the pacing of the story, and the pacing of the player's internal narrative. Having worked primarily with linear fiction before this, that was something that I had to internalize. With short stories and books, you're the only one responsible for building tension. But games are collaborative. This is both terrible and wonderful at the same time. On one hand, it's easy to misjudge and have comedic situations, where the monster leaps out at you, and the player's nowhere in sight. On the other...

    Frictional Games' Amnesia burned itself into my memory with its best trick: it told you to run and hide, to crawl into closets and stay there. The gimmick's since been repeated in a few other places (Hello, Alien Isolation!) but I will always remember my first experience with it. Amnesia placed the burden of its pacing into my hands: I was responsible for the jump scare, I was responsible for the action, for if the world would explode into terror or subside into a quiet tension. The seconds I spent hidden away, panting as I tried to figure out when to escape - they're powerful.

    We see this again with games like Alien Isolation and in a way, with titles like Silent Hill 4: The Room, which didn't quite work that way, but kept you at a remove, listless and unsure and utterly able to do anything, always on the summit of that rollarcoaster, sure it'd get worse, sure this is the moemnt when it all collapses.

    I've used some of this in my work on Worlebury-Juxta-Mare in Sunless Skies, which is described as a 'Faberge egg,' filled with glittering people and beautiful buildings, but there are little things spaced throughout: the smiling, always smiling security detail. The Couturier and the prosody of your interactions with him. The tea houses, the stalls and their strange souvenirs. The fact that there's always sense that you're not quite clued in on the story and you know that's a bad thing, because sooner or later, what you don't know is going to eat you alive.

    (Failbetter Games did so much to teach me how to build dread without the advantage of motion, while still relying on the clicking of the player. So, please go play their games for a masterclass in the topic.)

  • Horror is, in some ways, the easiest genre to write for. On a horror project, everyone’s on board, everyone knows, emotionally, where you want the story to be. The programmers, artists, animators, and musicians are all on the same page. They understand the tone. It’s an important first step for any project, so starting with a genre that’s emotionally driven, as opposed to most game genres, which are mechanically driven, is a great start.

    Like a good chili, everyone’s gonna have their own recipe for horror, and this one is mine: two parts terror and one part horror. Feel free to mess around with the ratio, but always keep in mind that one moment of horror is only as good as the time you spent setting it up. Just like an emotional reunion between two characters means nothing to an audience to an audience who has just met them, or a punchline is nothing without a joke, you’re going to want to spend time on the terror before it leads you to the horror.

    Some folks have argued that the best horror is all creeping dread and nothing else, but that is false. We call that sense of creeping dread--the what ifs and unknown things that get the mind racing--terror. Horror is the startling, disgusting, horrific revelation that all your terror has led to, the steel trap snapping shut in your mind. A story with nothing but disgusting and horrifying things isn’t a true horror story, it’s simply pornography. Getting your audience on edge, then toppling them off it is where you want to be.

    Once you’ve got the terror and horror ratios worked out, you’re well on your way to telling a great horror story, but there’s a third element you need to make it all work: uncertainty. A story where every character has no hope of escape and simply suffers until their inevitable demise is unlikely to appeal to anyone because at that point, it’s simply torture porn. It’s cheap, it’s miserable, and it lacks the richness of the tension and release that the best horror stories provide.

    One of my favorite horror games, Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth, send you to the town of Innsmouth early on. There are no monsters or grisly murders present, just you, exploring a run-down town as the not-currently-hostile townsfolk regard you with suspicion. Being uncertain about their motives is a key part of this scene. As you play, the game opens up, revealing increasingly horrific things until you find yourself running through your hotel, locking doors behind you as the townsfolk demand your head. Walking through a town aimlessly might seem slow and boring, but the chase later on wouldn’t carry any emotional weight otherwise. It’s the setup that matters.

    There comes a moment where you’re given a gun.

    Some horror fans will argue that giving the player a weapon of any kind is empowering, which is fundamentally anti-horror. This is incorrect. Some of the best horror stories introduce weapons. Quincey Morris and Jonathan Harker murder Dracula with a Bowie Knife and a Kukri, respectively. The crew of the Nostromo hunts the Alien with flamethrowers and cattle prods. Dark Corners of the Earth gives you a handgun… and tells you not to use it, because if you do, you will be overwhelmed. Suddenly, the gun in your hand becomes a thing to be frightened of. In a shooter, a gun gives you confidence. In Dark Corners of the Earth, or any good horror game with a weapon, weapons introduce uncertainty.

    Will this gun actually defeat the monster? Will it alert more enemies to my presence? Do I have enough ammo? What if I miss? Will it even work?

    Alien: Isolation’s flamethrower scares off the Alien initially, but over time, the Alien grows bolder and less resistant to its use. You need more ammunition to scare it away, but getting that ammunition means playing in increasingly risky ways. You might have stayed to the shadows before, but now you’re darting out of cover into the middle of the room, hoping against hope that the Alien doesn’t spot you. In horror movies, we ridicule characters for making poor decisions, but as narrative designers, we have the opportunity to encourage players to make those same poor decisions. When a player takes a risk, and we reward them with a scare, they end up loving us, even if the decisions that led them there were foolish.

    Great horror creates tension through hope. You get the ammo because you hope you can kill the monster. You use the flare because you hope it will keep the darkness at bay just long enough to escape. There is always a cost (in many great horror stories, the majority of the cast dies by the end, or the protagonist loses something dear to them), but there is always a hope. Even the protagonists of Lovecraft’s stories, doomed to madness and death, hope for something, whether it is the solution to a mystery or simple survival. They might not always get it.

    There’s no one right way to tell a horror story, but the best ones all seem to have the same things in common. Characters hope for things, but are shaken by uncertainty. Be patient with the slow burn. Get the audience to worry and overthink. Make them ask questions. When you’re ready, serve ‘em up a good helping of horror.

  • Cosmic horror is about the unknown; the unknowable. So how do you communicate that? How do you convey something that can’t, by its nature, be fully conveyed? Something that should warp the mind by sheer virtue of its existence?

    There’s a reason there are so few (good) Eldritch films. Film is a visual medium, and it’s very hard to properly depict a mind-warping intergalactic entity through celluloid. If approached without caution, the whole premise of cosmic horror collapses. As soon as a viewer can see and understand your supposedly-incomprehensible monster, you’ve lost the game.

    Writers have a slightly easier time of it. Without visuals, the burden of creation is shared between author and consumer. As writers, we can provide the framework, the skeleton, and leave the rest to the imagination. But we do have to provide enough of a skeleton to hold the meat of the story up. We need to meet readers halfway, to give them something to build off of.

    The tried and true “show, don’t tell” rule is key in all writing, but especially horror. We can’t just tell a reader how they feel. We need to make them actually feel it, and we can do this by immersing them in sensory details. Snapshots, visceral glimpses of the whole.

    Summaries are the enemy of immersion; they add a buffer between the reader and the fiction. Don’t allow your readers that distance. Simply telling them a monster is incomprehensibly terrifying or otherworldly isn’t enough. It gives the reader nothing to work with. What about the monster is terrifying? What about it is otherworldly? How do you convey this information in a way that elevates the drama and immerses the reader?

    My methodology while writing Cthulhu Chronicles: Isolate and exaggerate key details. Use active language. Describe the way fangs “drip with strings of spit” rather than just saying that “the creature has huge fangs.” Walk the fine line between grounded, vivid details and the incomprehensible whole.

    The tension comes from the reader’s efforts to string these isolated sensory experiences together. Dripping fangs, oozing pustules, one giant lumpy arm with chapped knuckles that drag on the ground? How do these come together to form the whole? If this much about the monster is known, how much must still be unknown, and what horrors could that vast unknown contain? The reader’s imagination will string together something worse than you could ever describe. Leave some mystery, and trust your reader to fill in the awful, awful gaps.

    So many horror movies take place in the dark, or use shaky-cams or skewed perspectives or found-footage camera filters. It’s a visual method of abstraction, of obscuring the otherwise bald truth an image would provide. As viewers, we need to see just enough to get our imaginations going. This is especially true in the cosmic horror genre, which lives and dies by its consumer’s imagination. When artfully wielded, mystery is worth its weight in gold.

    So: Engage your readers through abstracted detail. Force them to see the reddened sweat that collects in your monster’s many sagging wrinkles. Describe the harsh scrape of the monster’s dragging footsteps, uneven and rasping against the stone floor. Make them smell the mold and musk coming off its crooked hide, a scent thick enough to choke on. Carve rusty symbols into its skin that stretch and crack with each movement, slowly working wider and wider to expose raw flesh.

    Make it awful. Make it hover just at the edge of their understanding. Make them feel it all.

  • Tens of thousands of hearts beat faster. Tens of thousands of bodies stretched and strained and sweated as the twin cities took their positions.

    There's a long, sprawling paragraph early in Clive Barker's In the Hills, the Cities that reveals the monstrous image at the story's heart: Every citizen of two cities, Popolac and Podujevo, preparing for ceremonial battle in the hills.

    It reads, at first, as the description of a coming skirmish — previous moments in the story alluding to a puzzling construction of some human artillery. But as the paragraph unravels, the descriptions of the armies become odd, then uncanny. By paragraph's end, the reader has passed through a threshold, the image of a skirmish has metamorphosed in their mind into a different image, an image that it was all along: the emergence of two behemoth bodies made up of entire cities, "the hills echoing with the booming din of their steps."

    When I read short stories, I think about the techniques used to communicate dread in that medium. Sentence and paragraph length, the structure of the story, the way the placement of a word can make it linger in the mind. How a familiar description of a battle can mask something stranger, the words sneaking inside the reader and festering.

    Then, always, I think about game design. How do I take the way a book, a film, or a play made me feel and accomplish something similar with the vocabulary of games? I work with text, so the connection is more direct. But the principles are the same with everything. It's studying how a work accomplished a mood; then, giving it a shot myself.

    With The Silence Under Your Bed, that meant using hypertext techniques to emphasize prevalent moods in horror stories: shock, disgust, fear, anxiety, melancholy. These techniques include timers, choice text, CSS and HTML customization, and more — a wide range of options. What matters is that their use is deliberate and in service of emphasizing the tone and feeling of the text. So much can be done with the fundamentals.

  • When making a monster i try and avoid features like sharp teeth or angry brows. Trying to make something traditionally scary is the easiest way to make it not scary to me. Something that looks angry is far less scary to me than something that is giving either contradictory visual cues, like a sad or happy or confused facial expressions, or no visual cues to it's intention at all, paired with aggressive and hostile body language. Pyramid Head from Silent Hill 2 is a great example of this. He has no face to read, no clue to his emotions or intentions.

    Also, anything that reads as human adjacent, or close enough to human to hit that uncanny valley sweet spot is always good! Limbs that are slightly (or not so slightly) too long, a human face on an un-human body, gives the impression of something wrong. Your brain sees elements that it recognizes, but in a context that it knows is wrong, so on some level alarm bells go off.

    I don't plan monsters beforehand, but try and do them without a lot of pre-planning once i pick the photo i want to use, and then make up a context and a story blurb at the end.

    An example: When i was making Sirenhead, which is a 40 foot tall emaciated human skeleton with two pole-mounted loudspeakers for a head, it was a combination of unnatural proportions with identifiable human features, but no head to look at, just a seemingly random piece of technology. Hopefully this really hits that uncanny valley sweet spot of combining stuff the brain is used to, with stuff it isn't.

Writing Space Games

Featuring Heather Antos (Editor at Valiant and Image; Former Editor at Marvel Comics for the Star Wars franchise and other comics); James Swallow (NYT Bestselling Author of Star Trek, Stargate, Warhammer 40,000 titles & more); Michael Moreci (Writer of Comics (Wasted Space, Star Wars) and Novels (Black Star Renegades)); Gary Kings (Once Upon A Crime In the West, 2001:1: A Space Felony, Murder on the Disorient Express, The Vortex)  

  • A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away…

    Little did I know when I first read those words on the silver screen that my life would be forever changed. At five years old, my obsession with Star Wars opened my eyes to, dare I say it, a brand-new universe full of familiar tropes that somehow just…worked. It was groundbreaking, yet comfortable. Revolutionary, yet relatable. And it sparked one of the greatest debates to ever exist in geek history:

    Star Wars or Star Trek?

    Except there’s one very small problem to that very popular debate. Though both extremely innovative franchises in the storytelling world, both set in space, both with the word “star” in the title, the two stories couldn’t be more different. It’s comparing apples and oranges…or should I say Vulcans and Wookiees?

    The main difference? Genre. Star Trek is a science fiction story, whereas Star Wars is fantasy. Though often grouped together, the two genres are, in fact, quite different at their core.

    Or, to break it down further: science fiction deals with scenarios and technology that are possible or may be possible based on science. However, fantasy deals with supernatural and magical occurrences that have no basis in science. Both genres require rules, though, and just because fantasy isn’t based on scientific fact doesn’t mean that “anything goes”. The difference with fantasy is the author makes up the rules.

    “Space” in and of itself isn’t a genre, despite what those posing the above debate might argue. It’s a setting. And when writing stories set in space, that’s a key factor to remember. But it’s that particylar setting that can open whatever story being told to never-before-seen technologies, cultures, creatures, and of course drama that COULD be possible because there’s so much left to discover among the stars. It’s out there. Just waiting for us to discover it.

    After all, space IS the final frontier…

  • The thing about writing stories in space is, for the most part they’re just the same as stories set anywhere else. Out in the inky void, character is still character, action is still action, drama is still drama – even these things are floating in zero-g around a planet in the Epsilon Eridani system.

    Space – and by extension, the kind of science fiction that exists in that vast realm – is just your setting. It’s (infinitely) deep and wide, big enough to accommodate any kind of story you might want to tell, from something small and space capsule-size intimate to an epic tale with galaxies like motes of dust. Love and war, comedy and tragedy, you can do it all out there in the big dark. But just don’t forget to bring your spacesuit.

    What falls short in this arena are works of narrative tourism. Too often, writers with a low knowledge base of science fiction tropes and themes use space as a backdrop for a story that doesn’t really need to be there. Don’t set your story in space just because you think it might be neat. Use it. Embrace it! If you’re going out there, make the journey worthwhile. Employ the setting as something more than window-dressing. Use the emotions instilled by the setting and the scope of it to help tell your tale. Weave your narrative into it, not over it.

    Imagine two lovers orbiting that planet I mentioned, each on a different spaceship, conducting their relationship over the radio. That story doesn’t need to be set in space; it could take place at any point in human history where a form of long distance communication exists. Taking the plot of You’ve Got Mail and putting it in orbit? A wasted opportunity.

    Now imagine those two lovers on those two ships are both traveling at different relativistic, near-light speed velocities, and time is passing at different rates for each of them. Think of a love story where every second passing for one character is a month for the other. Now you have a tale you could only tell out there in the dark between the stars.

    But equally, it’s important to remember not to let the technology and the vista get in the way of actual narrative. Great science fiction meshes its two component parts (both right there in the name) to tell compelling stories. Space is so vast and enigmatic – and yet, at the same time measurable and scientifically quantifiable - that it can function dramatically as a reflection of anything you want to put into it; it’s an incredible stage upon which to mount your stories.

    And it’s important to remember that space is without doubt the most hostile, most inimical environment known to humans. We’re just not meant to be out there, we’re not made for it. So immediately, any story you tell there is one unexpected explosive decompression away from destruction. Just the simple act of existing in space is fraught with dramatic possibility, and how could any writer resist a setting with that built in? If drama is locking characters in a box and shaking it up, drama in space is that with the added imminent threat of solar flares, micro-meteor strikes, alien encounters, and more!

    The dark and distant unknowns out there can traverse the spectrum from terrifying to inspiring (sometimes both at the same time). We can tell stories of exploration and discovery, of challenges both technological and spiritual. Alien worlds and alien life hold up a mirror to humanity through which we can better know ourselves – and as noted above, all these things can blend with more common, earthbound themes or particular stylistic tropes.

    For example, the “first contact” tale – of humans encountering alien life – is largely seen as a “space” story. But it could be one of horror and dread (Alien), intellectual and technological themes (2001: A Space Odyssey) or centred on humanist and social impact (Arrival).

    For me, what makes space stories enthralling is the great mystery of it all. What’s out there? What can we learn from it? What will we discover about ourselves along the way? That incredible challenge of seeking out strange new worlds entices me as both a reader and a creator in a way that’s almost primal. It’s the desire to reach for the sense of wonder that such stories can instil.

    Here’s some inspiration: http://erikwernquist.com/wanderers/film.html

  • The thing about writing in space is that you’re automatically saddled with the whole notion of “world-building.” Now, don’t get me wrong—I think world-building is crucial. But I think story is even more crucial, and world-building is meant to serve the story; it gives context to the plot as it unfolds, it gives it texture and character. But the thing is—what can you really done that hasn’t been done before? In Star Wars, Star Trek, The Expanse, Mass Effect, countless paperback sci-fi novels from the ‘70s and ‘80s, and so on. Now, this isn’t an endorsement not to try to break the mold; far from it. But, there’s something to be said, when writing about space, about where you put your focus—and when I talk to young writers, I often hear them put a lot of importance on world-building. Lengthy bibles on the world, pages of narrative dedicated, and so on. Again—I’m not saying this isn’t a worthwhile pursuit. But I am saying it is a matter of priorities. Because, to me, story will always be king. It’s story that makes something shine. Story. Story. Story. And while the world is part of the story, same as character and theme, it’s only part. Story, laid bare—meaning, what is this book/game/comic/etc. all about—is the heart of your work.

    Let me give an example, and forgive me for going outside of space. I recently read a terrific fantasy novel, Kings of the Wyld by Nicholas Eames. Now, there’s no shortage of great things I can say about this book. It’s so good for numerous reasons. But what I love is how much Eames clearly knows the conventions of fantasy—then he throws them all out the window. He plays with the conventions, he turns them inside-out, he takes old tropes and makes them new in a rich, compelling, and fun way. And how? Because of his story (and his writing voice, which is remarkable). Eames wasn’t interested in creating his own fantasy world or breaking the mold of the epic quest; he doesn’t let himself be encumbered by that. Instead, he acknowledges everything that’s come before, he acknowledges how thoroughly the ground has been covered, and that frees him to do his own thing. And the results are spectacular.

    What this all is meant to say is that, as Solomon said, there’s nothing new under the sun. Yes, that’s proved wrong occasionally, but very seldomly. And if you’re writing in space, it’s good to acknowledge what’s come before—be aware of what’s already been done, and instead of encumbering your book/comic/game/etc. with trying to create a new world, create a new story. Space is, to me, the best place to tell countless stories; it’s where I live, creatively, and I love it there. I love the possibilities, I love the imagination. But, again, what matters most is the story—tell your story. That’s what interests me most in a work. Your world can be big and great, but without a great story, you won’t travel far—and isn’t going to the greatest lengths the point of space?

  • The trick to telling a story in space is to ground it.

    That was a joke, but it’s also the truth.

    It’s important to set the rules. Even if they’re far from the rules of reality, establishing them clearly is incredibly important for a space-based story. For us at National Insecurities, we settled on something close to reality, but made concessions where necessary.

    2000:1: A Space Felony is a sci-fi murder mystery courtroom comedy set in space. An interplanetary ship loses contact with earth, and you are sent to find out why. Upon arrival, you find everyone on board is dead, aside from the AI, and it’s your job to investigate, snap pictures of evidence, and cross reference the AI as the lead suspect for these murders.

    You can get the game here, it’s pay what you want, and around an hour long. The rest of this piece contains spoilers for some elements of the game’s mystery.

    One of the first pieces of art I ever sketched for the game, back when it was just a daft joke I’d never sink any real time into — It depicts two things that would become key to the final version: a man hanging by his neck in space, and a giant wheel shaped ship. I didn’t know it at the time, but these two elements would become fundamental to establishing the rules of our game’s reality.

    Let’s start with the simplest of the two, the hanging spaceman.

    The imagery is a contained mystery in itself. In zero gravity, how does someone get hung by the neck? Well, if the door to your spaceship opens, you’re pulled out at great speed, as if falling. If there’s a rope around your neck, space becomes your gallows. This is a simple application (of my basic understanding) of how space works.

    Where the game deviates from reality is in its presentation. It’s been a year since it happened, but the rope is fairly taut, the astronaut striking a pose that implies struggle. If this happened in reality, both the rope and its victim would likely both have quickly settled into a more relaxed position. So why didn’t we do that?

    For a start, it wouldn’t have looked half as good. But much more importantly, it wouldn’t have communicated the events anywhere near as clearly. Our game is a murder mystery, which means that we not only need to tell a story the player understands, we also need the player to be able to tell the story back to the game. Ambiguity needs to be applied very selectively here, or the game doesn’t work.

    Now let’s look at the other thing in that original sketch, the big wheel.

    Though many familiar with the science fiction genre (or just science) would be quite aware of this method of approximating gravity in space, it’s not exactly common knowledge. So when factoring it into the mystery, we had to assume the player wouldn’t know it.

    The concept is introduced to the player via narration as soon as they first enter the wheel for the first time. It doesn’t explain everything, but does let them know the basics - as long as you’re in the big wheel, there is gravity.

    After entering the centrifuge, the game then introduces a new mystery to you: there is a dead person at the bar with an overturned glass. There is also a puddle of an illicit liquid way across the room.

    This person was poisoned. But deducing this depends on two factors:

    Identifying the substance on the floor as poison.

    Identifying the substance as having originated from the dead woman’s glass.

    The first, we communicated to the player by making the puddle and a nearby container of poison be the same colour, and reinforcing the obvious connection through the narration. The player can’t mess this up.

    But connecting the poison puddle’s origin to the glass in the dead person’s hand is less obvious, and unlike the hanging man, this does not operate by rules the player is likely to be familiar with before playing the game. And so the game has to introduce the player not only to centrifugal force, but also to a side-effect called the Coriolis effect.

    Although a spinning wheel can approximate gravity to anything placed on its inner surface, there will always be a slight sideways push in the opposite direction to which the wheel spins. This wouldn’t make much difference to solids, but it can affect liquids in perceivable ways. The water in a fish tank might lean a little left, and any spilled illicit substance might slowly make its way along the concave floor and settle in a corner somewhere.

    The above is quite a lot to explain to the player without giving away the answer, which is no good for a game about deduction, so we decided on having a very literal demonstration of the coriolis effect in the form of a fish tank on board. The distinct lean in the water is very visible, and when you snap a photo for documentation, the Coriolis effect’s impact on the water is explained through the narration, without its connection to the dead person’s glass or the puddle on the floor being made explicit. It is then for the player to take this newly learned rule and apply it to the other pieces of the puzzle.

    In this way, 2000:1: A Space Felony establishes rules specific to its setting, and then has those rules play a role in the game’s mystery and deduction mechanics. The rules are scientific, but we are not scientists, we’re storytellers. It’s unlikely our game accurately depicts the correct amount of lean in the water for a centrifuge that small moving that fast. But it doesn’t matter. We based it upon reality, then shaped those rules to our needs so that the player could learn them, apply them to their deductions, and express their findings back at the game.

    In the end, clarity was more important than the rules themselves.

Greg Buchanan is a Senior Narrative Designer and writer for BAFTA-award winning games such as NO MAN’S SKY. He has worked for over 20+ studios across AAA and indie from Activision to Supermassive to small experimental projects in-between. Greg is also a TTRPG creator for DARK SOULS and several unannounced projects. He is a veteran academic/teacher, having led multiple game writing workshops over the past two years.

Born in 1989, he studied English at the University of Cambridge and completed a PhD at King’s College London in identification and ethics (looking at the nature of choice in novels/games). Greg is also a bestselling author of crime fiction and a volunteer socializer with Cats Protection.

Interviews by

Writer of BAFTA-winning games and bestselling author,

Dr. Greg Buchanan

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