About the game, and influences
I had a question the other day over on my curiouscat and it made me realise that even though I've been putting up posts containing art and characters and so on, I haven't actually yet put up a post explaining the game proper. I tried to summarise it over there but I think a post dedicated to it, and the ideas behind it, might be better.
There's a few pieces of media – both film and games related – that have inspired me throughout the creative process and writing of this game, and as I detailed in a past post visiting the real-life locations of Pawys Mountain also proved massively inspirational.
There are a few other real-life locations that have also proved inspirational, from Carding Mill valley in Shropshire to Tintagel Castle in Kernow: the latter of which I spent countless hours siting in the grass atop the cliffs sandwiched between a blue sky and a blue sea, simply taking in the location and feeling the place inspired in me. There's no one real word for it, I cannot think, but it was a mixture of awe and comfort. I have no idea why the castle nestled atop the cliffs and mired in Arthurian legend felt so comforting to me, but something about it felt immeasurably so.
One of the games that I took inspiration from was Shadow of the Colossus which I'm sure is familiar to most people who play video games, it being something of a cult classic and that's putting it mildly. I spent countless hours simply exploring the map in that game, atop Agro. Questions spurred my exploration: “what was this place?” “what was this ruin?” “what was the function of this land” and this is something the narrative neither encourages nor explores – exploration within the game exists purely for the sake of exploration. There is no concrete answer, no text-log detailing the history of the land, you are simply left to explore myriad ruins and come up with your own answers; while the developer may have intended certain forms and functions for specific areas they do not spend time elaborating upon this. It is left entirely up to your own speculation and ideas. As you travel the land hunting down immense beasts, devouring glow-tailed lizards and uncovering every shrine, there are clues and you can follow these and be lead towards a general idea but ultimately you have to fill in the blanks.
Another game that in my opinion does this well is Dark Souls – so much of the games narrative, history and culture is shown to the player instead of told. You go to a ruined city drowned in water and come to your own conclusions as to what happened, maybe spurred on by an item description or NPC interaction but ultimately it is you who has to build up the mythos of the game and piece it together. Part of the appeal lies in simply not knowing for sure; all that exists are theories. There is no concrete evidence.
What ties these two games, conceptually, together is the idea that you give the player things to discern and unpick for themselves but leave the extraneous storytelling to the player. These games both have a narrative that we follow, but within each there are hints to a larger story and world that is entirely optional to discover or unpick. You can go with the face value of the items and ruins we see, or we can read into it as much as we want. We, as players, go through a game world and discover certain ruins or items and they give us breadcrumbs that hint at a wider overarching narrative and on the whole, I think, give a much better impression of a world that would exist without your interaction that goes wholly against how many games deal with player characters [or avatars] and story interaction.
This is all the game does. It fires up the audience with speculation, theory and ideas and so as we go our experience of the game becomes a very personal tailored experience to each person playing it in a different way to a game that becomes a personal experience because of player interaction with major events within the game. Maybe what is a ruined temple to one player is a ruined home to another, is a ruined library to another, is a ruined village to another. Of course it is not often this varied as we get the general idea from a piece of environmental storytelling but sometimes stuff is vague enough that it can inspire multiple readings.
In my mind, none of these readings are incorrect either; video games have the potential to allow for multiple readings to exist, especially games with multiple endings or ambiguous visuals. And yes, whilst many cinematic experiences also do this, I feel that because of the intrinsic personal touch of a player playing and influencing the game, of putting themselves into the shoes of the character, of playing a game because more often than not they are invested on a more personal level than passively watching a narrative unfold in a film. After all you control every aspect of the game- the main character lives or dies based on your actions and this experience is unique to games: I am not saying it is more or less effective than cinema, or that cinema is not a wholly engrossing experience – it is – but, in many ways, games have the ability to become even more personal. Whether or not they cash in on this aspect is another question entirely.
Primarily it was this aspect of Dark Souls and Shadow of the Colossus that informed my design decisions within the game. Having said this several other things inspired me as I wrote. I think, too often in games a player is spurred on to complete actions because it will give them EXP or a unique-looking item and in many ways this fosters an almost entitled audience who do things in game because they expect to get something out of it. In wider gamer culture this creates problems but, this is not the time discuss that. I wanted a game where, perhaps, you did things and wandered and explored and maybe you found a character or an item but, it also might not be yours. Where the journey was its own reward, where you wanted to explore not because you would get a unique looking armour set out of it but because exploring was interesting, or you were building up a story in your head as you went on lead by visual cues and hints strewn throughout.
Finally, my last inspiration for an aspect of the game I wanted to include was the idea of small, unique experiences happening throughout. Studio Ghibli formed the basis for this idea; the small scenes in Ghibli films that exist for no reason other than to exist: the train scene in Spirited Away; the bus-stop Totoro scene in My Neighbour Totoro; the scene in Princess Mononoke where Ashitaka shares a bowl of noodles with Jiko-Bo. In some ways, yes, perhaps these scenes tell us things about the characters they concern but in many they exist just to exist. And for many they are some of the most memorable scenes in animation. I think, perhaps because these scenes are unique experiences within a film that feel at once familiar and bizarre; this mixing of esoteric and normal. Who doesn't love the sound of rain on an umbrella? But when it is a strange totoro, it becomes something magical. We've all, likely, been on a train in our lives and there is a strange serenity to riding a train for a long while – but when the train is filled with faceless shadows? It transforms at once from something familiar and mundane into something magical.
Thus, I decided I wanted to fill my game with experiences: share a bowl of noodles with a priest; help an outcast build up his camp; deliver letters between two lovers. These are just some of the ideas and I've no idea which will or won't make it into the final game as of right now, but I spent a good long time sitting and writing, thinking of memorable cinematic and game moments that had truly hit home with me and left an impression. And, not all of them entailed the players' direct interaction – in The Witcher 3 when you listen to Calonetta's song, you are a passive participant in someone else's story; in Shadow of the Colossus if you fall asleep at a shrine Agro goes off on her own adventure for a brief moment -. So as I was writing I kept this in mind.
Having said all of that, none of that yet describes just what my game is about. Up to now, it has just been a description of inspirations and feelings and ideas I was aiming for, but I mention them because I think they're an intrinsic part to writing and experiencing my game, and an important context to add.
At its core the game is about a young woman eloping to an ancient land long thought cursed by her tribe, to run off with her lover – in doing so she leaves behind family, her past, and an entire culture. But in running she discovers a land flourishing with life and with death, a land that goes against every preconception she had going in. There are spirits, old gods, strange new animals and, yes, there are people too, as well as humanoids. There are ruins next to crumbling structures next to villages bursting out of older architecture.
Most of the game is the player exploring this new land purely for the sake of exploring; there's no real questline or objective beyond just experiencing. Go and talk to an old priest and hear his story; bring a witch her letters and perhaps learn something about her; share a drink and a fireside chat with a hunter at night. I want the overall feeling to be that the world is bigger than just you as a player, that these things and people would exist without you, that you are perhaps not the centre of this world and partaking instead in a personal story. I want the game to feel at once comforting and surreal, bizarre and familiar, like a fairytale come to life.
Because of this it is rather hard, admittedly, to summarise what my game is about. Because at its core, it isn't about any one thing specifically as it is about, hopefully, evoking emotions and telling snippets of multiple stories that you can stick together or not. Not every one of my games will be like this, and as a concept I chose it to be simple and still -still- it is complex and challenging to me in ways I could not imagine. But at its core I want it to be about the player forming their own stories as they explore a vast, desolate land and share in experiences with NPCs and to evoke a sense of, perhaps, smallness.
