For all of my reader, wanted to make a quick post to apologize for the dearth of updates.
I’m moving cross-country, so I haven’t had time to get situated and get posts done. I’m hoping to return to a regular schedule come the new year, though there may be some posts before then.
Cheers!
I’ve talked thus far about the Medium, tailoring your experience to use the strengths of the medium it’s being presented in, rather than wasting effort and fidelity to struggle against your own presentation medium. A movie that tries to actively engage the audience tends to fall flat, whereas a stage production that ignores the audience entirely from curtain up to curtain drop is missing out on a strength of theatre as a medium. Mostly straightforward, hopefully.
Here, I’d like to talk about another important meta-concept for an experience: the Message. At a really high level, all entertainment is communication, and much like talking to someone, simply using fancy words or complex sentence structure or dramatic tone without any substance simply makes the audience confused at best. I find it very important to be aware of what I’m communicating, and how that message is coming through at any given point in the experience.
This isn’t necessarily about a moral, or a political statement, or any larger concept, although it can be. More often it’s about something much simpler — “this guy is the bad guy”, “this landscape is beautiful”, “this city is corrupt”. Often, there are several messages occurring simultaneously, and balancing them is important. You’ll occasionally see stories where the overarching “world is ending” plot is so overwhelming that it devours any other side-story that might occur, making those seem trivial. Alternately, when faced with a world-ending crisis, investigating a couple of people having a clandestine tryst seems trivial and unbelievable. Scale and pacing are important.
I like to establish messages on the Chapter and Moment levels, figuring out what (usually more complex thing) a Chapter is saying, and peppering Moments with simpler, more direct messages.
As an example, returning to the modern-supernatural mage gangs concept, and the Chapter I described, I might have messages that look something like this:
“There is a significant divide between trained, ‘official’ mages and the unlicensed hedge mages that make up mage gangs.”
“In the world of mage gangs, power is everything, and the power structure is volatile and prone to disruption.”
“Mage gang members tend to resent ‘official’ mages because their world revolves around power and is volatile, and the comparatively high power of trained mages to their untrained magic puts them at a severe disadvantage (and the rejection of their power-based structure by more powerful mages is akin to a rejection of their worldview).”
“Nonmagical people have a variety of effective means to deal with unlicensed, potentially dangerous untrained mages, which the mage-gangs have become more or less adept at avoiding but which remain a constant issue.”
At the Chapter level, these are fairly complex statements, which a variety of resources would be bent towards communicating. In some cases, actual NPC dialogue might communicate these, and the twists in the story and behavior of the opponents/environment might reinforce it. Others might simply be hinted at, if they’re not plot-centric, and left for the player to consider and discover on their own.
I’ll talk about Moments next, and the next in this series will talk primarily about crafting Moments, and the messages are an important part of them. The Moment I’d like to make is the point at which the player catches up to their target, the former licensed mage, gone rogue, who has thrown in with the mage-gangs. There are a variety of things I want to have communicated by this point:
“The rogue mage is highly dangerous and seemingly unpredictable.”
“The rogue mage’s gang is very powerful, but not the most powerful.”
“The rogue mage’s gang is the most organized of the powerful gangs, reflecting her background.”
The Moment relies on these messages being communicated properly, and understood by the player. In the moment, I want to communicate a few important details:
“The rogue mage is powerful and well-equipped, but desperate in the face of the opposing gang.”
“The rogue mage is reasonable, can be negotiated with, and has sensible motivations, but is entirely uncompromising on certain key points.”
“The rogue mage is very attached to Atlanta and is defending it from a greater danger that won’t be addressed by official channels.”
I’ll return to the Moment next time, and actually walk through constructing it, using everything I’ve set up thus far.
A little break from the How I Design series.
I had a conversation with a friend recently who had a hard time understanding the difference between different classes in MMOs, and why some people so heavily favored one class over another when they appeared to be very similar.
He’d played the Gladiator in FFXIV and found it interminably boring, and asked if anyone liked “pressing 1, 2, 3 over and over again”. The answer, “yes”, baffled him, and I think convinced him that MMOs weren’t for him, though I don’t think that’s necessarily true.
In an MMO, specifically the ‘traditional hotbar’ MMO, there’s generally a bit more nuance then “press buttons in order” or “hit all the buttons whenever they’re available”. Most of the time, any classes that use those mechanics exclusively are considered extremely boring. The concept boils down to the class’ feedback loop, or the thing you’re doing when fighting in order to win.
There are a few different types of feedback loops that are popular in MMOs:
The Availability System
This is the oldest MMO class design, and is the simplest. It’s often criticized as “all MMO classes”, although it’s notable that very few such classes exist in modern Western MMOs.
Availability System classes have a variety of abilities that take a certain amount of time to become available after using, called “cooldown” time. A pure Availability System class will press every button as it becomes available, and cooldowns will determine how often they’re available. No secondary resource is required, because time is the only resource used. A common twist on this concept is a passive ability that refreshes a cooldown whenever certain criteria are met, such as a critical hit refreshing a powerful attack. It raises the skill cap of the system slightly, but this is still a fairly old, little-used design concept.
These have fallen mostly out of favor (largely due to the low skill cap), though players will occasionally opt into classes like this when ability systems allow a lot of customization.
The Rotation System
An evolution of the Availability System, a rotation-based class generally has fewer cooldown abilities and usually has a secondary resource. These classes can use abilities far more frequently, but there tends to be an efficient order that is repeated. Skill in this system is determined by completing the rotation in a timely, efficient manner and not losing opportunities to continue the rotation.
A common added feature of rotation-based classes are what are known as “off-GCD” abilities. Essentially, there is a mechanic called the Global Cooldown, abbreviated GCD, that is the minimum amount of time between actions. It exists essentially to prevent key spamming as a successful strategy and maintain the desired pace of combat. An ability that’s not bound by the GCD can be used between other abilities, allowing quick reactions even if the standard abilities are still unusable. Abilities like interrupts are often like this, or certain temporary power boosts. Juggling these in between standard abilities allows a perceptive player with quick reactions a higher skill ceiling.
The Priority System
Priority systems have mostly been relegated to healing classes until recently, but they have had increasing popularity among other class roles in the last few years. The general concept is that for a priority system class to achieve maximum effectiveness, it needs to use abilities both proactively and reactively, so that whichever ability is needed at any given moment is based on the current situation. Generally speaking, this revolves around either maintaining self-buffs, applying and maintaining layers of debuffs on a target, or using/consuming said buffs for a power spike.
Early concepts of the priority system were the purely reactive healing, where there is no set “rotation” and the unpredictability of encounters means that a cooldown-based availability system is less functional. The spell needed by the healer was then applied to the situation at hand, on the fly. This has bled into other class roles, most often tank classes but occasionally damage classes as well.
These sorts of systems tend to be less complex but require more situational awareness, in the case of damage classes often reducing the risk of tunnel vision that rotation-based classes often have.
Feedback Loops
Each one of these types of systems have a built-in feedback loop that appeals to a different sort of player. Rotation systems are favored by players who enjoy memorizing a pattern and then executing it with precision. Availability systems are favored by players who enjoy having a broad selection of abilities to use, and don’t like hitting the same buttons repeatedly. Priority systems are favored by players who are less interested in memorizing patterns and prefer to react to the moment.
For any game featuring classes, where the core gameplay requires a lot of one or a small number of verbs (usually, “fight”), it’s important to develop a functional, fun feedback loop, which requires some understanding of the above systems, or any new system that’s devised.
Without a core feedback loop that works, your class won’t be interesting moment to moment, and while you may have larger systems that make your game fun on a macro scale even if the basic gameplay loop isn’t interesting (EvE Online is a very good example of this), it’s important that this design choice is a conscious one.
I’ve talked about Worldbuilding, the Chapter, and the Moment, the last of which I’ve got more to say about, but I want to talk about the other end of the bridge a bit first, for context. The Moment is really important, it’s what gets built every day and what you play and remember, so building a complete moment, that center point of the bridge, requires building from both ends.
If Worldbuilding is the big idea about the setting and the fantasy, the experience, the extreme other end is the medium itself. The other end of the bridge takes a big fantasy and breaks it down into smaller and smaller chunks, this end of the bridge looks at a big task and breaks it down into smaller and smaller chunks. The biggest chunk here is what I call the Medium.
Like Worldbuilding, the Medium is a big, equally important concept that says a lot of important things about the experience. The Medium is quite simple– how is the experience going to make its way to the audience? In what way am I going to deliver the content I’m going to make? What are the strengths and weaknesses of that choice?
Different media are good at different things. Video games are great at delivering a personalized, interacive experience, but they necessarily sacrifice some elegance of storytelling, pacing, and cinematography in order to allow control and choice on the part of the audience. Without incredible advances in technology (and possibly not even then), you won’t be able to say the exact words you’re thinking to an NPC in an RPG, or be able to lean around a corner to blind-fire a gun in the exact way you’re envisioning. A game has to put a veneer over that limitation and convince you that no, it’s okay that you can’t quite do that because either the line you’re going to see delivered is better than the one you thought of, or the tactic you wanted to use isn’t as effective as the one you can use, already built into the game.
Similarly, a movie is great at delivering drama and a crafted cinema experience, but isn’t very good at answering “what if”, and isn’t going to change much on the second, third, fourth, or fifth watching. A novel lets you get into the characters’ thoughts a bit more, but you rely on the imagination of the reader to fill in the visual gaps left by pure text.
Even subsets of a medium can have important distinctions. A fast-paced action game has to be a bit lighter on the deep, forward-thinking strategy, because juggling moment-to-moment demands and difficult strategy simultaneously can quickly become stressful and not fun. A fully-voiced, story-heavy game is less likely to have total freedom to roam and do outlandish things (or heavily compartmentalize those two things). A masterful experience knows the limitations and strengths of its medium and plays to them, rather than trying to shoehorn in features that simply don’t work as well– particularly if there isn’t a solid plan for making those features fit within the game. Consider Skyrim vs Call of Duty. Call of Duty delivers voiced lines on the fly, with no interactive options for the player, because there’s generally first-person action happening the whole time. Skyrim is also first-person with a lot of action, but dialogue with NPCs pauses the entire game world for you to speak with them, allowing you time to listen and make choices. If the game didn’t pause and accommodate that feature, the experience would quickly become unplayably chaotic as you desperately try to make important dialogue choices with some buttons while shooting arrows into a dragon and eluding pursuing guards with others (to say nothing of contextual buttons, which are necessary for complex games).
I spend a lot of time thinking about what works well in the medium, or even with the specific mechanics I’m working with. Any story I tell or feature I include needs to fit within the medium, and some things just don’t flow well over certain media compared to others. It’s important to me to know what I can do well, and really push those things as standout features of my experience.
I’ve talked about Worldbuilding and the Chapter, and we’re drilling down into the fine details. I mentioned that my process operates from both ends, and this is the central point. I wanted to drill down from top to bottom first, before I explain how all the pieces become my process.
Experiences are made up of moments. A moment is a flash, a single fragment of an event. It’s a witty bit of repartee, a dramatic line, or a masterful bass drop. It’s the thirty seconds or so it takes to walk up and pick up the Master Sword at the end of The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past.
Movie trailers are made up of moments. If you feel like you’ve seen an entire movie after having watched the trailer, it’s likely because the moments selected to show off in the trailer give you all the context you need.
Sometimes a moment is external to the production, but still part of the experience. While the statue of limitations is up on Bioshock, I’m still going to be oblique. If you’ve played the game, you know what I’m talking about here. For everyone else, this paragraph should be spoiler-free. There’s no particular *moment* in Bioshock, if you actually look at events that unfold, but nearly everyone who’s played it remembers a moment, that moment where all of the context they’ve been presented at that point crystallizes into something that makes sense. It’s powerful, and part of the expert craftsmanship of that game is that the moment can occur at different times for different people, and the game allows it. For some, Bioshock’s moment is revealed a few moments prior to the confrontation, and the confrontation is merely confirmation. Either way, the moment is equally powerful.
The key to a successful Moment is context. I differentiate the capital M this way: an experience is made up of moments, but a Moment is the one you remember. The battles against orcs in the Mines of Moria are moments, but Gandalf falling to the Balrog is a Moment.
Let me go back to the Master Sword example, in A Link to the Past. Here’s a video (main part starts at about 45 seconds):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0C6SVPVvVsk
You’ve spent some time collecting amulets from dungeons, then you’ve worked your way through a haunted forest in order to reach the Master Sword, which you need in order to break a magic barrier preventing you from reaching Princess Zelda, after you took up your uncle’s sword to stop an evil wizard. Drawing the Master Sword is a key moment of the story, and it’s what you’ve probably spent hours working up to. The game shows you the barrier straightaway, and it will zap you if you get too close. The amulets all have dungeons, with bosses, and the events leading you to collect them all involve their own Moments, whether those are the boss fights, the brief transition into the Dark World, or discovering new, exciting items. The Master Sword has been set up as a key item in the game, and collecting it is, appropriately, a Moment.
You’ve made your way through the Lost Woods, the haunted forest full of baddies, dealing with the maze and some annoying and dangerous enemies. Note the swooping raven-bird that attacks the player partway through the video. It takes a hit, but keeps on coming. We’ll get back to that later.
When Link enters the last section of forest, with the Master Sword, it’s a haunted section of forest, but unlike the rest, it’s full of forest creatures that run around as you approach, unlike anything else in the game thus far. It’s different, and marks that this section is special, somehow. When Link approaches the Master Sword, it’s on a fantastic pedestal, with an inscription that can be read if the player so desires. When Link steps up to take the sword, it’s not a simple “open chest, get item” moment, the amulets float around him, then grant him the power to draw it as the music rises. With a flash, the sword is drawn, it glows with power, and the Lost Woods goes from being haunted and misty to bright and green, which lasts for the rest of the game. While simple, it’s a powerful Moment that sticks with you.
The Master Sword scene is a giant payoff for the entire first section of the game. It’s a Moment an and of itself, but the game continues to emphasize the Master Sword as important for quite some time. First, extremely notably, Link gets the ability to shoot spinning blade beams from it while at full health, and the sword hits harder– those birds that were so annoying in the previous forest section now only take one hit. The payoff is immediate and lasting, and more than simply a neat scene that doesn’t alter gameplay.
I’ll talk more later about building a Moment, and talk about the kinds of things I’d look at building for the setting and chapter I spoke about previously, but this has gone on a bit long. More next time!
Taking a break from the “How I Design” series to talk a bit about today’s FFXIV patch, which introduced the Rogue/Ninja.
I’ve talked about how important player fantasy is before. It’s neat seeing it have an effect on me in action.
Today, the Rogue/Ninja class dropped in FFXIV. I got up about four hours early so I could spend as much of the day as possible (that wasn’t already booked with work) playing it. It’s exciting for me, and it’s been a blast.
In the meantime, my pugilist is stalled out and my lancer is barely level 5. You’d think, looking at my class list, that I just don’t like physical DPS classes. What’s the difference? Let’s rule out some stuff, first.
There’s an argument to be made for the “new” factor, which plays a role, but honestly stuff like the lancer and pugilist are new to me also and I haven’t delved into them.
The ninja’s abilities are pretty standard fare. I have a 1-2 combo, which will presumably become 1-2-3 at some point, much like the paladin I already have and both the lancer and pugilist. This is the bread and butter of my class thus far, and it lacks the buff-stacking dance that I find interesting about the pugilist. I’ve got an additional DoT, just like the monk, and a toggle “poison” stance, that gives me a (relatively boring) 5% damage increase. I’ve got an execute ability, for targets low on health, and a ranged knife throw. As far as bread and butter goes, nothing terribly fancy or even different from what I’ve played already (or could have been playing for months).
The ninja’s secondary, “utility” abilities are slightly different. I have a “dodge next incoming physical attack” button, on a fairly long cooldown, that’s mildly interesting. I have Mug, which is probably the most interesting skill thus far, that causes a mob to yield additional loot if I score a killing blow with it. Interesting, but the health-regen version that lancers get is more useful and gives me the same skill-reward feeling. Stealth makes for some neat quests, but I honestly never cast it outside of the required quest situations; there are no stealth-specific abilities that I’ve seen thus far.
So, why have I spent the entire time playing it, putting it well ahead of extremely similar classes that I could have been playing since launch?
Animations. I love them. Finesse weapons, not a great big spear or blocky fist weapons. The whole roguey aesthetic, from the stances to the ability concepts to the questline. The stuff that the ninja gets to do later, with elemental attacks, I get my mage-assassin!
It’s totally fluff, but it makes a huge difference. A bit of an aside, but it’s striking to me how much of a difference player fantasy makes in giving me something I want to play.
I talked a bit last week about worldbuilding, and how I start building a setting from scratch. All of that is the background, it becomes my notebook of details and concepts that inform the actual experience but is (usually) never exposed to the audience. It’s a very important part of things, but it’s important not to dwell on it– spending too much time fleshing out the background leaves little room for maneuvering when you get to the actual experience. As an example of what I mean by “maneuvering”: Wynne left a comment in my last post that I’m going to use in here– an idea that didn’t initially enter into things but is really interesting can and should be able to be incorporated, if it fits with the concept. Today I’d like to talk about what I call the “Chapter”. The Chapter is a single arc, a series of events for the audience to experience that, while not necessarily discrete, make a fairly complete chunk. I use the term “chapter” for my own personal use, when a whole studio is proving out the kind of concept I’m talking about, it’s often called the Vertical Slice, and elsewhere it’s called storyboarding. It’s different from medium to medium, but the concept is similar. A Chapter isn’t necessarily a single quest, or mission, or level, or scene. It’s far more often a collection of these that all come together in a particular way. It’s a focused experience that has a number of moving parts, all working to a particular set of goals. The Chapter is the story arc, the questline, the portion of the story. In a game like Dragon Age, I’d consider each of the separate locations Chapters. In a traditional three-act structure, each Act is akin to a Chapter, the way I think. Building a Chapter is the first thing I try to do once I have a good handle on worldbuilding. Note that I didn’t say “finished worldbuilding” here, because all of that is likely to change. Here’s an example of my process, using my setting example from yesterday: the near-future supernatural world with mage-gangs, territorial graffiti, and ubiquitious magic-suppression technology. One question I didn’t answer is how long magic has been around, other than “a while”, which may come up here. For the Chapter, I start with a few questions:
These questions are absolutely vital, and the pacing of the experience is hugely dependent on how and when I answer them. An experience that starts in media res may skimp on the details of the setting early on and bring them in later, once the audience is hooked. A very unique, very strange setting may need some setup early on to explain motivations and the setting itself before the actions of any of the players make sense. Similarly, characters are important here, and how much agency they have at what points in the story is important. A character who starts off with very little agency in the events of the setting and ends with a lot of agency, or noticably more than they started with, creates an opportunity for character growth. This goes both ways, of course, and a character losing agency can be a central focus of a Chapter. Enough abstraction, here’s a Chapter using the worldbuilding from before, and assuming a video game as our medium:
Chapter 3: Finding the Rogue Mage This chapter focuses on locating and contacting a rogue wizard who’s gone to ground among the mage-gangs in Atlanta. The player is a low-ranking member of an “established” mage organization that’s dealing with some kind of internal difficulty that the sought rogue wizard is somehow related to.
The player will need to track the rogue wizard through the gangs. One of the goals of this Chapter is scene-setting, showing the world off to the audience. Finding the way into and around the gangs is important here, as it puts the player at “street level”, to see the everyday world and the ways in which it’s similar and different from what they might expect. The player is relatively unimportant in the grand scheme of things, but is competent and recognized enough to be given a nontrivial role, likely due to having proven themselves earlier. There’s not a major power shift going on here, because we haven’t established the status quo enough for major shifts to matter. We want the player to feel a bit constrained; they’re working for powers greater than they are and we want to establish a reference point for their rise in power. Major players will likely include one or two authority figures (who directly command the player), at least one of which is recurring, as we want the player to develop a relationship for later. Other major players will be the rogue wizard (who the player will get to know over the course of finding them) and the player themselves.
A central focus of the Chapter is the sense of investigation, and seeking– the mage-graffiti will play a central role in that. We can express that visually in gameplay, and conceptually the player is seeking out gangs based on power, working under the assumption that a trained wizard gone rogue and her cabal will be more powerful than a ragtag band of untrained mages.
This is a good start for our Chapter. It gives a broad arc, a sense of where it fits into the bigger picture, and a vague sense of direction. That last part is where we’ll focus next. Once we have a broad arc, we can focus on individual segments: “quests” or “missions”.
The Chapter will be broken down into a series of missions:
Getting situated in Atlanta. This will focus on finding local contacts, standard resources (whatever those might be in the game), and introducing any local NPC authority. This will likely take the form of meeting a contact or going out into the city to find an information drop, possibly both.
Investigating the gang presence. Should be hinted at in the previous section, with some mage-graffiti made evident and possibly witness to some minor gang activity (loitering, posters, etc). This is mostly going to involve more moving-about and exploring, this time looking in out-of-the-way places for mage-graffiti and potentially gaining the attention of gang members. I really like the idea of the gangs all having uniquely enchanted graffiti, that someone with magical senses can focus on to get an idea of the power and focus of the mage that left it. This can be reflected in color and glow intensity, which also gives us a good way of finding it and allows us to establish “mage-sense” as a game mechanic, if we’re using something like that. This should segue neatly into…
Establishing the gangs’ personalities, as friendly, neutral, hostile, or some combination of the above. Their motivations and how they fit into the world is important here too, and we can start hinting at how the rogue wizard is making waves. This is the point where I’d normally start to introduce a bit of unexpectedness– two very powerful gangs, for example, that are the major players in the area, either one of which could house the rogue mage. This will involve getting in with one gang or another and getting embroiled in local conflicts.
Introduce the rogue wizard. The player’s done investigation and gotten their hands dirty a bit, and is a powerful and effective enough agent in events for the rogue wizard to make an appearance. She can be hostile, if the player has sided with the wrong gang, or she can be friendly, seeking the player’s help. Either way, the player will wind up working with her to drive out the other major gang. Her importance to the larger narrative arc is less important here than establishing her character. Here we’ll focus on her ties to Atlanta, why she (initially) doesn’t want to leave. This portion of the Chapter likely involves a bit of legwork before the final face-to-face, giving some time for the player to find audio logs, journal entries, other gang members, etc. I particularly like the idea of staging a raid on a location, uncovering this information, and then directly facing the rogue wizard (who may be furious at the raid).
The rogue wizard’s task. Whatever the wizard needs the player to do to convince her to help the player out. This should be something that either wouldn’t be possible without the player’s help or would have taken an extremely long time, and the player allows a more direct route. I prefer the latter, as it throttles back on the player as the only agent of change in the status quo. The rogue wizard would have won eventually, but with the player’s help she can win tonight. Our final encounter cripples the opposing gang and the player and the rogue wizard evade reprisal effectively.
Denouement, lead in to next portion of the narrative. We don’t want an abrupt stop to our story, we want to see the aftermath, we want to see how things changed, etc. I like to have this mirror the first segment, debriefing with any local authority content and moving through Atlanta back to the airport or train station, wherever the player entered from and likely hasn’t been back to. We can see both subtle and overt changes here, like a change in the brightness and ubiquity of mage-graffiti, and the overall sense of danger vs safety in the area.
This is a pretty good breakdown of a Chapter. It’s fairly basic, but gives you an idea of flow. There are a number of things missing here, such as specific details or the kinds of spaces the player is moving in. Details will come a bit later, in the next section. They’re important for what I call Moments. Spaces are vague partly due to space (this is already really long) but also because you may need to be extremely flexible with the spaces you’re working in, and if something has to change, you need to be able to change the space it happens in without it being a disaster.
These are long, hopefully they’re still interesting to read. The next entry will be about Moments, the little details in a Chapter and the parts you’re most likely to remember. They’re the little sparks that ignite the imagination, and they’re (to me) one of the most fun parts.
Thought this might be an interesting series. I’ll cover a few different things that I’ve had come up, share my thought processes.
Worldbuilding is, broadly, the first step of design. I don’t mean the art term, though that’s crucially important, I mean the process of coming up with a setting from scratch. I tend to have a meet-in-the-middle approach to this, where I take both really big picture concepts and really fine details as opposite ends of the spectrum and build towards the center.
Here’s an example of the process. I’m coming up with this from whole cloth as I type, so it’s going to be half-baked. I just want to give a sense of the process.
First: what genre? For this example, I’m going to go with near-future modern supernatural. Magic in a modern setting. New York warlocks and Texan sorcerers. Gritty spy themes– the Bourne Identity with wizards. I like to define the concept in three or four different ways in my head in order to get a more three-dimensional high concept and not get stuck on a single thought.
Next, holding the genre in my head, I want fine details. I envision trailers when I think of this, what are the little unique details that will pique people’s interest? Magic as zero-sum energy manipulation, requiring a power source to function. Fonts of power all over the world, waiting to be tapped by world travelers. Mage-gangs in cities, leaving territory markings disguised as graffiti. Magic is commonplace enough to be recognizable. Ethereal dampeners scattered through major population centers, built into ubiquitous fixtures like lampposts, power lines, and roads, to suppress magic and keep people safe. Supernatural Crimes Divisions in major police departments. I come up with tons of these, little flashes of concept, the kind of thing you could flash in a trailer or make a quick sketch of.
When I’ve got the two extreme ends of the spectrum created, I start figuring out how the audience is interacting with the world. This is really a question of medium more than anything. Is this a short story? A movie? A tabletop RPG? A video game? I save this for a little later, because occasionally I’ll come up with setting ideas that don’t have a specific medium, and I can set them aside until I have a use for them. Once I know how I want to use the setting, I can pare down the genre and the details to better fit the medium I’m working in. I used to think of the medium first, since I figured that was the most important piece, and I’ve wound up feeling like I tend to give the genre and the details short shrift when I’m already thinking ahead to how my audience is going to react. I narrowly focus my concepts too much, and I think the end result is weaker for it. Going into the process expecting everything to change is important, but making changes before anything can crystallize is like stirring the cake batter while the cake is in the oven.
As an example: In the above idea, if I started the process by thinking “I’m making a video game”, I would immediately start thinking of spaces to move around in and flashy spell effects, and interactive details like gameplay. I would tend to skip over some of the scene-setting stuff; certainly having a bunch of gangs putting up territorial graffiti wouldn’t really surface, or would be quickly dismissed as “too complicated” or “not enough gameplay”.
On the other hand, fixing on that concept, I can now imagine a stealth game, where the player plays an undercover wizard who is either a member of a gang or is investigating the gangs, and who has a lot of subtle and not-so-subtle magic to find contacts and manipulate the environment. Overt magic use (where the public can see) is verboten, but subtle magic can be used. A mix of mundane and supernatural elements on the player’s side, along with some environmental concepts. The magic suppressors make for both interesting obstacles and traps for enemies, letting the player fight more powerful, less inhibited enemies in public spaces on more even footing.
In a similar vein, if I’ve come up with this concept and it’s being used for a tabletop game, I’m looking at paring back the details in a different way. The graffiti is a way of collecting information for my players, though the suppressors allow the same tug-of-war between obstacle and opportunity, and vary the encounters significantly. Subtlety in magic use would play a much more significant role with farther-reaching consequences, whereas in a video game the consequences will likely be more localized, more immediate, and more directly remedied.
I’ve now answered the three main questions:
With this, I can start working towards the middle. The mage-gangs need to have started somewhere. If they’re gangs, we’re talking about magic being broad and poorly-controlled, not necessarily a mark of privilege. Enough magic users slip through the cracks for territory to be claimed. Is there a “legitimate” mage organization? How do magic users learn? Perhaps mage-gangs are more numerous, but “legitimate” mages are better trained and more powerful, but largely uninterested in the workings of the gangs? How do these two classes interact, if at all?
The suppressors came from somewhere. Magic researchers coming up with technology to suppress magic, with the influence to have their designs installed ubiquitously? How ubiquitously? Is there a secretive, far-reaching cabal, like Vampire: the Masquerade, or is magic known to the populace and the suppressors a tool to even the scales so there isn’t a panic? This neatly fits the Supernatural Crimes Divisions into the concept, as a governmental agency.
How long has magic been around? With cultural and technological emplacements like police forces, gangs, and installed magic suppressors, we’re talking about decades at least. What kind of history do we have here? This is the point where I start drilling down from the high concept to the ground, using the details as anchor points. Each detail has to fit into the world and have a history, or it’s going to feel tacked-on. These histories are what will shape my characters. If I’ve had a character concept spring up, the histories help shape that character and flesh them out.
It’s from here that I work out the day-to-day existence of the world.
I have a new set of questions, now:
These all help shape the setting, and start looking forward to the narrative. I also want to know, at this point, what the setting will do if the audience never interacts with it. Events will play out and either continue as-is or change significantly, which gives me a starting point to determine what sorts of goals the audience should have. Is the audience rooting for the status quo, or are they advocates of change? How resistant is the world to being changed?
All of these help build the world, and give me a foundation for a narrative. The fewer of these questions I’ve answered and fleshed out, the more plot holes I’m going to find later and have to patch. From here, I can start working on the next step: the Chapter.
I played a whole ton of Borderlands 2. More than I have multiple MMOs. The writing was fantastic, it made me laugh, and while the gameplay started frustrating me, I loved the game enough that I didn’t care.
All that said, I was lukewarm on Borderlands: the Pre-Sequel, and I have a hard time putting my finger on why. By rights, I should have been ecstatic and incredibly excited for it. After all, I put more hours than I care to admit into the previous game, and it meets my perfect checkbox for a game: fun, well-written, co=op, my friends are interested.
Except… we weren’t. I’ve been trying to put my finger on why, and the only thing I can come up with (in conversations with Ash) was that the trailers were awful, and it seemed indicative of the fact that the Pre-Sequel was the B-team’s project. At some level, the poor trailers managed to make us lukewarm about a game that would absolutely have been an auto-purchase in the absence of any marketing at all.
I’m fairly sure that myself, Ash, and Kodra would have bought the game, day 1, if there had been no trailers at all. Rae even told us she was preparing to buy the fancy edition but heard that we weren’t that interested and didn’t bother. Somehow, “made by the secondary team” quickly morphed into “not going to buy the next in a beloved series” due to about six minutes of internet video.
And we’re supposedly resistant to that kind of advertising. We like to claim it doesn’t affect us.
It obviously does.
I can’t help but wonder if it works the other way– bad trailers nearly lost my purchase of a game whose predecessor I adored, but I have a hard time thinking of games that I would never have purchased had I not seen a trailer. They certainly exist, I just can’t think of them. Even browsing my Steam library, I can’t immediately bring one to mind.
At any rate, the Pre-Sequel is fun in the first 20 minutes we played of it, and while it very aggressively finishes what Borderlands 2 started in terms of telling me outright that snipers aren’t welcome, I think I’ll still have fun with it.
Someone was killed at a dinner party, one of the hosts, the body left draped over the dining room table.
As one might expect, the guests at the party erupted in chaos. Everyone had different thoughts. Other hosts worried that they might be next, and worried amongst themselves that there was a danger at the dinner party, but there was a mess to clean up and they set to it. Many of the guests had seen this sort of thing before, and set to blaming each other. This quickly became arguments with acrimonious accusations, and the guests took sides, locking themselves in different rooms. Some of the hosts, and some of the assistants tried to make sense of what was happening. One group of guests expressed their worry that one of them would be the next on the table, and the other eyed everyone else suspiciously– perhaps that other group of guests staged the body! Perhaps it’s not really a body! Look at how the assistants carry their serving trays, there’s something suspicious there! The hosts and their assistants have been planning this!
The arguments ran through the night, and in the night, knives were found embedded in the doors and walls. Someone put them there, and each side was convinced it was the other. The suspicious group of guests, already suspecting foul play, ignored their knives. The worried guests took it as a threat.
The neighbors heard the commotion and looked inside, seeing the situation through windows. A suspicious group of guests behind locked doors, a worried group of guests eventually unlocking their door and working with the hosts and the assistants to make sense of the mess. These neighbors took pictures of what they saw, the knives in the walls, all the noise and anger, trying to make sense of the chaos. Eventually the neighbors knocked on the door to sort things out.
They asked everyone what had happened:
Some hosts spoke up, though many were still worried that they could be next, and everyone was working to clean up the mess.
Some assistants spoke up, wondering aloud whether the dinner parties were such a good idea after all.
Many of the worried guests spoke up in their own defense; others, fearful for their safety, stayed silent.
Many of the suspicious guests shouted through their locked door at the rest, accusing the assistants of trying to ruin the fun of dinner parties, accusing the worried guests of being too concerned, accusing the hosts of being tacitly involved in everything.
The neighbors, hearing all of this, wondered if the suspicious guests were responsible somehow, and their doubts drove the suspicious guests into a frenzy, accusing even the neighbors of being in on the plot.
…
I’m not sure how this one ends. The suspicious guests are still locked in their room, shouting at those outside who are still trying to make sense of the mess. Very few people’s hands are clean, and they’re mostly the ones who weren’t paying attention.
Meanwhile, two houses down, no one has any idea that any of this is happening, except that they heard THEIR neighbors talking about something wrong. A street over, it’s business as usual, no one the wiser until a thrown knife shatters a random window, surprising everyone inside, who comes to see what happened and sees a house in chaos.
If you find out how it ends, let me know.