Over the course of last weekend, the core Wayward Strand team got together for TIGJam Australia 2017. The five of us have been collaborating on Wayward Strand for about a year, and while that’s been going well, we thought a jam would be a great chance to make something from start to finish together. But as the the date of the jam grew nearer, we had no idea what that thing should be.
Once the jam had officially started, our ideas jumped all over the place - from making something using only existing WS assets, to making something totally new and different. However, as we chatted we agreed that we all wanted to make something that explored the history of some of our characters from a different perspective.
The next step was to figure out what that perspective was; ideas that came up included the first day of work aboard the airship for one of the characters, Casey decorating her room at home, and uh, bicycle races through the bush against Australian animals (which, I’m just saying, should definitely be made into a game by someone someday).
We ended up with something that was a mix of a few ideas and which revolved around exploring how time passes for different characters, and what that passing of time means. We decided to explore this through a series of vignettes, selecting three of our characters and a moment in each of their lives where they were doing some kind of work in their personal spaces. We made lists of the interactable items in each of these spaces as the core elements that we’d develop around.
Once a jam kicks off, it’s hard to keep track of everything that’s happening moment to moment (especially because throughout so much of it I was racing through my bits of implementation in Unity), so I asked some of the team members to describe how they were feeling at various stages throughout the jam, starting with Friday night when the jam started.
Marigold (Goldie) Bartlett, art:
I was excited to be at TIGjam, and excited to be working with the Wayward Strand team. We worked so well straight away- and at the end of a brainstorm and discussion of our ideas, we were able to combine parts from almost all of our brainstorms into what looked like something which could be an achievable game. It was also great to be making something new with existing Wayward characters- some of whom we have worked with but not yet built in game, or finished exploring. So it was good for all of us I think to get into these characters a bit.
My mind was at how to keep the plan within a good scope for the next 48 hours. I also wanted to write an articulate plan up, so I found the closest whiteboard and went to town with lists and thumbnails and detailed it all to see whether it was going to be achievable. The art style was very basic as it always is in a jam, but not too dissimilar from the technique we will be using for a lot of environment art in WS.
Georgia Symons, writing:
I was really curious to see how we would build an idea from scratch as a team. Wayward Strand began with an idea between Russell and Jason before the rest of us were engaged on the project, so the idea of making fundamental creative decisions as a group was actually kind of new to us! But it quickly became clear that we were able to bounce off each other and connect each other’s ideas to form a cohesive vision in a really exciting and organic way.
Maize Wallin, sound:
A highlight was that we managed to think about accessibility just four hours into our discussion. I also hope to improve on this point, but it meant that our control scheme was heavily focused on that, and that our game was free online to be played on computer. (Though I still think we should make a VR game EVENTUALLY.)
This is what the game looked like on Saturday night - the hand was a stretched polygon that we affectionately referred to as the fence post, and the one space we had fully implemented was Margot’s office. However, we had gotten a first pass of the voice-over in for inspecting items, which gave us a glimmer of what the final experience would be like.
Maize:
Where was I at Saturday night? Dealing with mental health! A lot of my work was emotion driven this time. I couldn’t be demanding on implementation, because it was a jam! But, also I have been adulting pretty hard this month and my body was gonna make me take a weekend whether my brain wanted to or not. This was very annoying to my brain, but my heart made some really nice material, still.
Goldie:
It’s hard to know how the game is going when you’re not the one programming it or building it in engine, but the art was progressing nicely. I knew by Saturday night that I would have plenty of time on Sunday to add colour to an entire level I had done in black and white, which was a precautionary step. I think by late Saturday night, most of my assets for all three levels were at least at first pass completion. That left me good time on Sunday to do menus, credits, some polish etc. We had already recorded our voice parts by Saturday night, and the writing was finished, so it felt good at the time.
Georgia:
By Saturday night I was done! I had completed the writing by Saturday afternoon, at which point we went straight away to record the audio as a team. This meant that, whilst everyone else was really only at the start of their huge taskloads, I was done! I had highlighted to the team earlier on in the process that I was happy if we agreed that the best game to make was one with no writing - or one with heaps of writing - and I think we landed somewhere in the middle. This made my job the most economical out of the whole team. The emotions I felt as a result bounced wildly between “writing is useless in games, no one needs me, I’m a slacker” right through to “gosh I’m so great, look how fast I worked, go me”. But in regards to the question of whether we were going to make it, I didn’t feel even the slightest doubt. I don’t know whether this is because I have immense faith in this excellent group of people, or because I know almost nothing about the technical complexities of video game development, or maybe both.
And above is what we ended up with for Casey’s vignette at the end of the jam. The final game has one more vignette, as well an easter egg or two that we somehow managed to find time to put in. I asked the team for some final thoughts, including whether the completed game resembled what they had imagined after our initial discussions.
Georgia:
Weirdly I feel like it resembles exactly what we were going for. Which is always a strange feeling. But that’s not to say there weren’t surprises, either - it was so exciting to encounter the thing we had imagined at each stage of its journey into becoming a real thing. I had so much fun throughout the process and came out of the experience wishing that I could jam with this team EVERY weekend. Or at least one weekend per month. Maybe once a fortnight would be a happy medium.
Goldie:
It does resemble it. I think it’s a very good jam game, considering the time we had. The jam formula worked very well for our team, in that we quickly got something out which helped us to understand our characters better, and to create conversations about them so that we landed on the same page a lot. It was also awesome to just watch us working happily and quickly together. There’s nothing that feels quite like working in a very organised and talented team.
Maize:
Being on a team that I had already worked with so closely was a really different experience to past jams. I think Jason had a point when he said “Are we taking this too seriously?” It was interesting how our game didn’t change much over the jam.
I think that’s also a symptom of a 5 person team. But for us, we couldn’t have done it with less. I think I also mentioned during the jam: “wow, this is a distinct advantage - having a five person team that have all worked together.
A highlight for me was when we were doing the credit screen, and we debated on whether we should write the “designer” title 5 times, or if we should leave it out. I still think 5 times would have been good. Another advantage of our team is its diversity, and how we’ve been so value driven. This is just habit now, and comes in to all our conversations and decisions. It comes across in our game too.
Our thanks go to the organizers of TIGJam AU and everyone there for making it such a fun event! (And a special thanks to Chad Toprak for lending us his mic for the VO recording.) You can check out some of the other great things made at the jam here: https://itch.io/jam/tigjam-australia-4/entries
Wayward Strand is a lot of different things. Its setting is an Australian hospital in the ‘70s. It takes place on an airship originally constructed in Weimar Germany. It’s a real-time story. It’s virtual interactive theatre. It’s a video game in which you play as a character with limited agency - a teenage girl in a world of adults.
It has been difficult to find an entry point to talking about Wayward Strand and its development. But one obvious element that is a differentiating factor for our game (which is also what we’ve spent the most dev time on thus far) is its real-time structure.
I’ve touched on what a real-time story is previously; it’s a story which plays out regardless of whether the player/reader/watcher interacts with it, but nevertheless is reactive to their input. In our case the story reacts both explicitly, as the player character converses with characters in the world, and implicitly, as the player controls their character’s location in the world and stitches together their own version of the story by being present at a particular subset of scenes and events.
Our Influences
Real-time narratives aren’t a common structure in story-focused games, but it has been done before; notably in Smoking Car Production’s The Last Express, an adventure game set on the Orient Express in the days before World War I.
Critically acclaimed but commercially ill-fated, The Last Express is a fascinating experiment in real-time storytelling - you can read interviews on its development here. Reading about and then playing The Last Express is probably what first got me thinking about the potential of real-time narratives.
The other key inspiration for Wayward Strand’s real-time story is outside of the video game world entirely. In the postmodern theatre movement over the past few decades there has been an exploration of audience not as passive viewers, but as active participants in the performance. This “immersive theatre” experience was pioneered by theatre company Punchdrunk in interactive theatre pieces such as Sleep No More and The Drowned Man.
Several members of our team (most recently Russell and I, earlier this year) have been to Sleep No More, and it is a revelatory experience. There are several elements that make Sleep No More singularly brilliant - the physicality, both of the performers and of you as the audience sharing their space; the mystery of how the performance works and what you’ve become a part of; and the imagination-sparking magic of piecing together a story - your own story - from the fragmented sequence of events that you personally have witnessed.
It’s this last element that excites us the most - that feeling of exploring a narrative space and being encouraged to draw your own conclusions - and that’s part what we are aiming to achieve with Wayward Strand through this real-time narrative framework.
Design Constraints
The idea of placing the player character in a realistic world with its own life - its own heartbeat, pace and rhythm - isn’t new. It’s something that I think a lot of budding game designers imagine creating, and it’s been a bit of a white whale for some time in the simulation RPG space.
Because of these reasons, and because of the fact that The Last Express, one of the only examples of a real-time story we can point to, went way over-time and over budget during production, we have been very careful in choosing our design constraints to keep our goals achievable.
One of these constraints is the fixed nature of Wayward Strand’s narrative design. Unlike a simulation RPG, our story does not arise out of a systemic simulation - it is fully authored and bespoke. As in interactive fiction, there may be multiple possible scenes or outcomes that can play out based on player choice, but there is no simulation governing character behaviours or story outcomes. However, because of the real-time nature and the fact that there are multiple story threads being advanced in different areas of the game at the same time, the experience of exploring the story is still player-driven and highly variable.
Another important design constraint in Wayward Strand is the level of player agency. In most games player agency is dialled up to eleven - your player character is in full and complete control of their situation, not only making their own choices. but often making choices on behalf of other characters as well.
What we’re really interested in what happens when you turn down that dial. What happens if you play as a character with limited agency - limited ability to effect change in their world? This is a fascinating area to explore from a writing perspective in a game. By putting the player in the shoes of a character that has specific and understandable constraints to their agency, we’re able to give them a unique and often unseen perspective into the lives of other characters in the world.
While the player is able to exert some influence on many of the stories in the game, we can also present stories that exist totally apart from the player character, that they experience as an observer. Just as in life, the situations that other people are in don’t revolve around you, and sometimes don’t even concern you.
The final notable constraint is time. We’re trying our best to keep the experience of playing Wayward Strand, from beginning to end, under two hours long - roughly the length of your average film. This has a significant and deep effect on our design of the game as a whole - from keeping the interactions as simple as possible, to developing stories that can be told within this time-frame, to creating characters that you don’t need to spend hours with to begin to comprehend and empathise with. It also fits well with our goal of having as little filler as possible, regardless of where on the ship you choose to go to at any given time. Adding more content to the game doesn’t make it longer - it just widens the possibility space.
Hopefully you can tell that we’re incredibly excited about the possibilities of telling stories using this still fairly novel narrative structure. If you know of any examples of games that explore this design space that I didn’t mention, or have thoughts on real-time narratives, I’d love to hear them - just reach out to me on Twitter.
Russell and I have been working on a video game for a few months now, and it’s high time we actually started talking about it. While we haven’t sorted out an elevator pitch that we’re content with yet, the following is the closest we’ve come.
What is Wayward Strand?
Wayward Strand is a real-time story about a teenage girl who explores an airborne hospital and gets to know the patients within.
The girl’s name is Casey, and that’s her relaxing at one of her favourite lookouts, reading a book. At this moment in time, the airship in the distance is being converted into a mobile hospital; it will be operational in a few more months. After living with this floating shipwreck as a backdrop to her entire life and wondering what it’s like up there, Casey will be going up there for the first time - but not under ideal circumstances.
Her mum is the head nurse of the hospital, and she drags Casey along in order to help out for a few days. Not in the emergency ward or anything - she is a kid after all - her job is to go around to the patients in geriatric care, to check up on them, to keep them company and so forth. While she can slip away to poke around the abandoned areas of the airship itself, Casey realises that she can also explore the lives of the characters here, and that she even has the ability to affect them.
How does it differ from other kinds of games?
So in our pitch we call our video game a “real-time story” - what do we mean by that?
A real-time story is one where the events of the story occur of their own accord, on their own timeline, regardless of the player’s input. You know how in most games, if you’re standing around doing nothing, the game will basically hang in suspended animation, waiting for you to do something? In a real-time story there is no waiting for the player; a character will walk past you toward their own destination. They have their own plans, motives and goals, and they’re not going to wait around for a player to “activate” them. They will chat with you if they have time, but their patience is limited, and they have Things To Do.
This also means, however, that you are able to follow that character around and see what they get up to. Or you can wander around, seeing fragments of one character’s life, then another’s, and then stumble upon two characters who are truly in mid-conversation. You can be in another room while something important happens, and only piece together what occurred by observing its consequences. In a real-time story the world doesn’t revolve around you; it revolves with or without you.
What’s next?
As I mentioned earlier, we’re a few months in; we’ve got a 3D prototype of the game up and running in Unity, and have begun working with some artists; the incredible piece above was done by local artist Matthew Dobrich - you can check out more of his work on his ArtStation page.
At this stage of development, we’re looking to find more people to collaborate with; if you do anything in the realm of visual art and would like to work with us on
Wayward Strand, we’d love to talk to you. Just send us an email and let us know a bit about yourself, and what excites you about working on this project. In particular we’re searching for a collaborator with a distinct style who will help shape the look of the game.
A note on this - we are prioritizing finding collaboration partners with different life experiences to the two of us, which coincides with folks in marginalized groups and/or groups that are underrepresented in the games industry. Please reach out - we’d love to talk to you!
If you’re looking to keep up to date with Wayward Strand’s development, follow us here on Tumblr, or @ghostpattern on Twitter. For more information on us go to ghostpattern.net.
I’ve finally managed to throw together a new personal site on Squarespace. Now that I’ve done it, I don’t remember exactly why - I’m not sure whether it’s a done thing any more.
Anyway, it’s exists! Now to do some more fun things like… grant applications?
Life is a series of choices. You choose to cut your hair. You choose to adopt a cat. You choose to leave a comfortable, enjoyable job and chase a dream.
That might be a terrible choice. We’ll see how it goes.
Like many game creators, what drives me to make games is a frustration with the games that exist. Why do the best stories I’ve experienced in games pale in comparison to the best stories of films I’ve seen or novels I’ve read? Why do so many games look so similar to each other? Why do games take so much time to play? Why do aesthetics in games fall so far short of what they could be?
I don’t know whether I have the ability to create the game that is a response to these questions that I ask myself over and over again. But I’ve chosen to try.
“Having once whispered I want to die, I now realise that this wish will indeed be fulfilled, and sooner rather than later. No matter that I’ve changed my mind about it.”
“Days passed, much like one another to Pökler. Identical morning plunges into a routine dreary as winter now. He learned to keep an outward calm, at least. Learned to feel the gathering, the moving toward war that is unique to weapons programs. At first it simulates depression or non-specific anxiety. There may be esophagal spasms and unrecoverable dreams. You find you are writing notes to yourself, first thing in the morning: calm, reasoned assurances to the screaming mental case inside - 1. It is a combination. 1.1 It is a scalar quantity. 1.2 Its negative aspects are distributed isotopically. 2. It is not a conspiracy. 2.1 It is not a vector. 2.11 It is not aimed at anybody. 2.12 It is not aimed at me… u.s.w.”
– Thomas Pynchon, ‘Gravity’s Rainbow’
“I would set you free, if I knew how. But it isn’t free out here. All the animals, the plants, the minerals, even other kinds of men, are being broken and reassembled every day, to preserve an elite few, who are the loudest to theorize on freedom, but the least free of all.”
