Posts Tagged setting
The Witcher and Fisstech
Posted by The Management in design, games on December 31, 2011
The Witcher treads a lot of common ground when it comes to RPGs, but it does so with a distinct swagger. To illustrate this, here’s a quick story.
Early on in the game, the protagonist Gerlat can accept a quest to deliver a package into a quarantined city. When he finally makes his way in, he’s arrested and his possessions confiscated.
He eventually recovers them all, except for one: the mysterious bundle he was asked to smuggle.
Jethro, the city jailer, non-chalantly informs Geralt that he’s lucky not to be in more trouble. The package contained fisstech, an illegal drug similar in properties to cocaine. It quickly becomes obvious that Jethro himself is an addict and the confiscation wasn’t exactly legal.
Geralt can get his hands on more fisstech by dispatching Salamander troops, henchmen of main antagonist who tend to carry the illegal substance. The drug can then be used to bribe more information out of Jethro, shedding some light on the local crime syndicates.
Eventually it’s revealed that the Salamanders were trying to squeeze out their competition by framing Ramsmeat, a local crime boss, in hopes of Geralt going after him and the two sides weakening or eliminating each other.
Following a clash between the religious Order of the Flaming Rose and the Scoia’tael, a terrorist group (or a freedom-fighter one, depending on how you look at it), the Salamanders expand their operation into the swamps.
Various factions Geralt had dealt with in the past are affected by this: the woodcutters are slaughtered, numerous brickmakers are kidnapped and put into slave labour, and a large Salamander band move into the former Scoia’tael encampment.
When Geralt rescues the brickmakers, he discovers they were made to gather plants for fisstech production. The Salamander’s treasures even contain a book on swamp plants, the very same book Geralt had to have read in order to loot local flora.
Back in Vizima, Jethro requests that Geralt follow a lead on a fisstech pusher under the guise of cleaning up the streets. In reality, the jailer simply wants to secure the source of his addiction by cracking down on its suppliers.
The trail eventually leads Geralt to the sewers and an abandoned crypt where the Salamanders produce fisstech. Among their servants he finds a frightened alchemist who rewards Geralt with a potion-recipe if he promises not to report his slacking.
When the hideout is cleaned out, the crooked jailer and the city guard storm the area in order to secure the contraband. It’s at this time that Geralt bluntly tells Jethro that all the drugs better stay confiscated or he’ll come after the jailer next.
Finally, the documents Geralt retrieves from both the Salamander cells point him to the ultimate stronghold. As Geralt storms the base, a cutscene plays out showing a Salamander leader requesting more money following the group’s recent failures.
All these events make perfect sense from gameplay, plot, and setting perspectives. The slaves need proper skills and instructions, the bad guys require funding for their operations, and powerful factions constantly vie for supremacy.
Every element serves as a gear snugly connected to another, and when the switch is pulled, the machine doesn’t grind to a halt.
What’s more, the game itself is not homogenized. Fisstech doesn’t come across as a bullet point on a worldbuilding checklist that needs to be adhered to at every turn. It’s just part of the tapestry, and there’s a lot more of it to experience.
Trudy’s Language
Posted by The Management in projects, writing on May 6, 2011
JRPGs, and by extension SRPGs, have an unfortunate tendency to use text as filler. Even with numerous types of fast-forward buttons — something of a band aid solution — their dialogue sequences are often very lengthy.
Luminous Arc starts off with roughly 150 text boxes. Such quantities are pretty common throughout the entire experience.
Verbal diarrhea is never necessary, though, and with Trudy’s Mechanicals we’re taking multiple steps to avoid it:
- Dialogue sequences are often optional. If the player doesn’t want to listen to a character, he can simply choose not to initiate the conversation.
- Colourful tid-bits are non-blocking. This means that if an enemy or an NPC wants to deliver a bark-style one-liner, it simply fades in and out. The text itself is aesthetic and doesn’t hijack the player’s interface, leaving him free to navigate the UI or issue battle commands.
- Cutscenes are short and to the point. Characters don’t prattle on if they don’t have anything interesting to say, and the player never needs to wait too long before he’s back in the “driver’s seat”. A skip option is also implemented as it’s an expected standard for those who are not interested in the story or might be replaying the game.
This less-is-more approach means that our script is much, much smaller than that of a typical tactics game. As a result, we’re taking extra care to make sure the language itself feels unique and interesting.
Here are some examples:
Slang
Planescape: Torment is famous for its cant, Victorian slang that adds personality to its setting. Seeing as Steampunk has its roots in a romanticized Victorian era, we decided to take a similar approach with Trudy.
A few examples of facial expression that accompany the text of Trudy's main characters.
Although it’s tempting to go overboard with jargon, it doesn’t help if the script can’t be understood by most people. Consequently the use of slang is somewhat conservative and the words we picked often have current-day connotations.
Here are some examples:
- Barker – A gun. Not immediately obvious, but easily grasped given proper context.
- Nibbed – Arrested. As in nabbed, or kidnapped. The word doesn’t have a strict association with the police, but its sentiment is easily understood.
- Lushery – A public drinking den. Lush isn’t a common term for alcohol, but this one was just too amusing to pass up.
Names
Naming characters in a fictional setting is a bit tricky. You typically want to steer clear of popular current-day names that might break the suspension of disbelief, e.g., Mike Smith or John Brown. On the other hand, something truly alien might prove too difficult to vocalize internally, while symbolic names like “Black Lightning” tend to come off awkward and hokey.
Of course we could’ve simply used Victorian era names, but I wanted to differentiate Trudy from typical Steampunk pulp.
Unlike the lead stars of the game, NPC dialogues are not accompanied by "talking heads". This is to save on production costs as well as prevent NPC barks from taking up too much space on the screen.
Our solution was to use old Greek and Slavic names.
The result is not entirely alien, but it’s enough to stand out. Characters are given names such as Renatus, Tatjana, Darko, Milos, Daria, etc., which keeps the naming conventions consistent and adds a bit of flavour to the world.
Proverbs
Finally, proverbs are my favourite trick for imbuing a setting with a sense of culture and history.
Proverbs are usually quite short, but they convey words of wisdom that often speak volumes about an entire society. In keeping with our naming approach, I picked out a couple of Greek and Slavic proverbs suitable to our script:
“Gray hair is a sign of age, not wisdom.”
“As long as a child does not cry, it does not matter what pleases it.”
“Eat and drink with your relatives; do business with strangers.”
About
Hi, my name’s Radek Koncewicz, and I'm the Creative Lead of Incubator Games, a small development studio I started with a few former coworkers.
I think a lot about videogames, and when I find the time, I post those thoughts here on this blog.
