Play it here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/53/firelore-first-fate

Here are some thoughts about creating my LD53 entry.

I recently made a game called Robotherapy and realized that I don’t enjoy writing branching narrative. The game came out very linear, so I wanted to explore branching more.

The problem is that I just don’t feel motivated to write multiple branches. I end up with a favorite one and I neglect the other branches. It also bothers me that some percentage of players will never read a lot of the content. It feels wasteful.

So I wanted to try solving that problem with this prototype.

Thesis

Things I wanted to try out:

• ALL the content is mandatory in a single playthrough. This way no writing is ever wasted, and I don’t have to worry about the player picking the “bad”, boring path.
• Roleplaying is not too important. You don’t get to roleplay a character, you just explore interactions between multiple characters. There’s no main character, and no dialogue choices.
• You can still pick an ending, so there is a choice.

I knew this was going to “fail”, I just didn’t know where and how. That failure would be my learning opportunity, so that's not really failure, right?

Before I get to what I learned, I’d like to say a couple of words about each character and what function they have in the game, what problems they solved, the process of writing them and where they came from. You can skip this if you don't care about the writing process and want to know more about the design only.

Characters

I used a random generator I made in Google Sheets to give me some ideas about the characters. First line is the Painter, then the Soldier and the Elder.

The Fater

If there’s no main character, and all content is mandatory (thus no choices, except for the ending), then who is the player? The Fater came in to solve this. A good old silent protagonist who could stand outside the story. All characters are referred to by their professions inspired by Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker, with its Writer, Professor and Stalker characters.

The Teacher

The Teacher is a tutorial turned character. Rather than talk directly to the player as the developer, or as the game, I could use a more immersive voice, which was the Teacher. He definitely grew into a strong character in his own right, I think. And some of his lines were the most fun to right. Which is good, because he has a lot of them, way more than any other character. His sass was inspired by Cormo from Where Birds Go to Sleep.

The Painter

Hey, that’s me! Well, they’re all me, I wrote them, but the Painter is the character that’s most personal to me. He was the easiest one to write, but he also ended up a bit boring and hollow, since he didn’t have to work very hard for his place. Unlike the next character!

The Soldier

I struggled with this character, but I think they pulled through. I remember a moment when I was trying to write their scene with the Elder, and I thought “damn, they’re just not as interesting as the Painter”. But that’s what gave them a much deeper backstory than the Painter in the end. The Soldier needed to become deeper, and he did, and this newfound depth also gave depth to their first scene with the Painter. Instead of just a boastful, aggressive soldier, he became someone in denial and in pain.

The Elder

This character came straight from a Dostoevsky novel I’m reading, The Brothers Karamazov. But he’s also a distillation of Russian literature, and it’s no coincidence that he has Tolstoy’s long beard. There’s also a mix of Buddhist wisdom in him, as I was doing a course with Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche, a Tibetan monk, during the jam.

Generating ideas in the trusty notebook.

Antithesis

Things to try for the next time, based on what I learned:

• Focus on immersion over anything else. That’s what’s really important for a game like this. Immersive audio, visuals, writing and pacing are what the player interfaces with. The branching is secondary. You can’t solve lack of immersion with a unique approach to branching.
• Start with the music. I’ve been listening to a lot of podcast interviews with game directors and one thing that struck me is that games can start with the music. What a wild concept! I usually make the music last, and it was the case for this prototype. But starting with the music gives you a tone from the start, and creates immersion from the get-go. Maybe.
• Write as if everything will be read, but do not show everything to the player. Unfortunately, I don’t think you can tell the player “yes, you saw this scene, but it didn’t happen”. If they saw it, it happened, in a way. Players want to be locked out of content. That's how they feel that their choices matter. This was a surprising discovery to me. If you show them all possibilities in a single playthrough, they feel like they had no choices. And the only way I see of solving that is to not show some of the content. I'm curious if others have different solutions, though!

The non-branching branching.

Conclusion

There are two directions I could see me taking this prototype:

• Go all-in on the parallel timelines design. Use meta-narrative extensively, set up and break expectations, add more meta-characters such as the Teacher and so on.
• Pull back from the innovation and try something more traditional, allowing more time to focus on immersion instead.

I’m leaning more towards the second one. It’s not that I hate the first, but there are just too many complications there. It triples the work: there’s the story, the meta-story and also the relationship between those two. And that takes away focus from what’s really important: immersion. In the world, the story and the characters.

Well, those are all my reflections for now.

Thanks for reading!

Or, as the Teacher would say, thank you for seeing.

If you haven't yet, you can play & rate Firelore here!