NARRATIVE, QUESTS & DIALOGUE
This page explores the background narrative of the game, how we came up with it, the process to designing the quests, and a breakdown of how the dialogue was made
Background Narrative
From the beginning, we had decided on pursuing a game with a cyberpunk setting, as we felt there were numerous themes we could explore, and it enabled us to have to explain very little when it came to the time loop happening, and what caused it.
We initially wanted to explore the theme of class disparity more, involving the player character making the chose to assassinate a wealthy man on the upper level of the train. However with our limited scope, it wasn't feasible to use it, and we thus simplified the narrative to a man stopping the train he's riding on from exploding, which is the trigger for the time loop to happen.
We took notes from other time loop media, such as Groundhog Day, Edge of Tomorrow and Source Code, to determine how we wanted to approach the loop, as well as select our character's motivation and the steps he would take to end the cycle.
CHARACTERS
We knew we wanted fun and recognisable characters from the get-go, as it would help market the game, and ensure that players would remember it long after they played. This is something we actually managed to achieve, as some players did recognise the characters immediately if they had seen the game before, and it allowed our university to make standees of some of the characters to market the university and the game.
We wanted to have at least one character to have a strong and memorable personality, which we decided on being a small robot named Robert, who was abandoned in the back of the train, among the garbage. The remaining characters were created either as part of questlines to hide or be an obstacle for gameplay and progression (Nikita, Guard, Rocco), or came up out of necessity for the space (Bartender).
We would then expand the details of the characters, deciding on their personalities and the tone they would take when speaking, and flesh out their background narrative slightly, answering questions such as: What are their names? What they do? and finally, What brings them on the train?
We then moved on to detailing the steps of the quest, as the outlines of them were made simultaneously as the characters came to life.
QUESTS
We started with the first quest (and room) the player would encounter (the garbage room) and used it as a control and benchmark for feasibility testing, and to make early adjustments to things such as animations, room size, UI, and time loop duration. We started with this as it was the simplest room to decorate, and for the most part the quest stages were isolated to a single room, which prevented the need for making multiple rooms and increasing workload early on.
We then worked backwards starting from the final loop, and what actions and items the player would need/need to do in order to complete them. From those items, we expanded on them, figuring out how to hide each of them in the different rooms of the train, or behind gameplay sections and interactions with characters. Then we determined what actions the player would need to perform in order to obtain everything. These would make up the quests the player would have to complete. As a general rule of thumb, we determined that the player would have at least one quest in each room, and one key item as a result.
After that was determined, we moved to making flow charts and related diagrams, to flesh out how each quest would play out, and what the player had to do to complete them. These were then brought to the team to determine their viability, and to tweak anything necessary. Once that was completed, we would then write the dialogue for the quests, for them to be added to the game.
DIALOGUE
The responsibility of writing would be split amongst the designers, and for the early dialogue we would each initially write all of it in Google Docs, as one would write a script for a play. Once we were done, we would consolidate it to check for errors, inconsistencies in information, and to make sure the tone was similar across the board. We would then hand it off to the programmers to import into the game.
Once it was set up, for later dialogue we would directly write using Visual Studio into a file type unique to a program called Yarnspinner, which we used to import dialogue directly into the game. During the early stages it hadn't been fully set up yet, hence the need for the Google Docs. The file type had its own syntax, which all the designers had to learn.
Using Yarnspinner significantly reduced the programmers workload, as the files could directly be put into Unity, saving the need for any transcribing and syntax adjustment by programmers. It also sped up the pipeline significantly, removing the step of Google Docs entirely, as the Yarnspinner files could also be read in text programs and through Discord, allowing for review and feedback to come at the same rate.
GALLERY
Screenshots of the Yarn files used to make dialogue, and some flow charts and other diagrams used for quests
