Game Story Dev

High time for an update on the Co-Signers!

Engineering progress is going very well, AJ is particularly on top of the scrum process. Today was definitely a success, all the things we'd planned to do were accomplished, and we're moving right along to sprint 2.

In class we took an hour to listen to Craig Caldwell's--one of the EPs in the program--presentation on story. He spent a lot of time talking about good story arc design and different ways to keep an audience captivated and interested. Although most of what he said related to movies, we managed to start talking about how his presentation could relate to the backstory of the Co-Signers. As of now, our backstory is pretty weak.

I feel like I'm significantly stronger at making enjoyable mechanics for a game, but the farther I get into this program, the more I realize that thats a relatively small portion of video games. Style, story, charm, and feel appear to really make a game stand out, regardless of mechanics used. The mechanics probably have more significance in video games than I'm giving them credit for, but they're easy, and thus easy to dismiss.

Thus, after Craig's presentation I again embarked on a task that I feel I'm relatively poor at: making a cohesive story within the constraints. This time, things were a lot more successful than creating story for Ludology, and we had probably 5-6 interested people all pitching in ideas. Additionally, we were armed with different story arc construction tactics that made our job easier as well.

As of now, we're thinking about having the Hacker be a long-term, middle-management employee who worked at the DoE but was fired after blowing the whistle on long-term ongoing corrupt policies that happened to take advantage of a student who would eventually become the Thief. When the Thief is faced with mountains of debt and no diploma, the Hacker calls the Thief and convinces him to break in. Throughout the game, the Thief discovers that these practices have been ongoing, and the Hacker was aware of both the practices and the Thief's plight. The game ends with a prisoners dillema, where both players choose to either encarcerate or side with their companion without knowledge of what the other is choosing.

The thesis of the game is to promote trust between two players, and so far this story does just that. Regardless of the final story that we end up with, we're still struggling with how to convey this information to the players. The team we were talking with were kind of split between text files found in-game and intra-level cutscenes. Personally, I'd like to go for in-game voice-overs that explain what the Thief or Hacker character is thinking and communicating to the other person.

One thing that I got from Craig's presentation was that good stories come after quite a few iterations, so I'm prepared to think about this quite a bit.

That is, quite a bit before the remaining 3 weeks of the semester are over...

GDC

Five weeks!!

Holy guacamole, time flies by really really fast.

Last week I attended GDC, and it was pretty incredible. I learned a lot, like what kinds of things game companies expect in producers, what kinds of things make you stand out, and how to carouse with important people without compromising my personal values.

All in all, it was a great trip.

A particularly great aspect of the trip is the reaction we got to the Co-Signers. Nearly everyone we talked to about it thought it was an incredible concept. Before the trip we had a mid-production crisis on the team, where a lot of the engineers wanted to switch the game to UDK instead of Unity. We had the entire team talk to engineers and designers while at GDC, and the feedback that we got isn't only that UDK was a bad idea, but that Unity is a great idea.

Thus, we're going with Unity.

It's full-steam ahead on the Co-Signers, and we only have four weeks to get to alpha. To be blunt, this would be a lot simpler if every class period wasn't chock-full of sharing time by the EP's.