Once More On Inspiration
(It's terribly beautiful - artists never tire of delighting us)
I might’ve run out of inspiration sources for the diary without your comments. You keep bringing up topics that keep us floating freely across Midian, which is quite symbolic.
In the comments under the last entry, you noticed that I didn’t mention Slay the Spire among the sources of inspiration for Knock on the Coffin Lid, and you found that to be odd. I can see how that might seem strange so I’ll try to clear up the matter.
Starting Point
Slay the Spire is not a source of inspiration, but a starting point. When we thought about what genre our game should be, we chose it not as a single project to follow, but as a phenomenon that defined a whole genre.
Think about it: if you want to make a real-time strategy, does Dune II count as inspiration? I’d say no — but you could argue with me.
Or take novels: if I decide to write one, someone before me already came up with the very idea of writing novels. Does that person count as my inspiration? I’d say no, you might say yes.
It’s a tricky question. In the broadest sense, the experience of past generations is our global source of inspiration.
The Clone War
So we decided to make a roguelike deck-builder. But instead of cooking up a Slay the Spire clone and disguising it to make it look as little like the original as possible, we wanted a Slay the Spire +++. That’s why we didn’t even change the names for basic mechanics. Think for yourself, if a mechanic is expected to be in a certain game genre, why bother renaming it? Just to avoid looking like Slay the Spire? Pshaw! Maybe it’s better to stick to the conventional names for mechanics players will inevitably need anyway?
If we want a roguelike deck-builder +++, then it should be
+++
Then we shouldn’t mutilate the basics of the genre, but try to develop them into something bigger. The first thing that came to our minds was a roguelike deck-builder with a plot. It seems to be an obvious idea, but its execution ran into a bunch of problems right away.
Problem number 1
How do we tell the players a good story if they’re guaranteed to see only the beginning and the end? We don’t know which ways they will pick. What do we do? We couldn’t find any existing solutions, so we started inventing our own.
Invention number 1: in-game texts from the viewpoint of the main character. Yes, don’t be surprised—originally, they were in second person: “You came”, “You saw”, “You conquered”. But telling the story in the hero’s own words allows for a deeper portrayal. But who to tell the story to? Mortis, of course! Yes, everything had to be rewritten from scratch, but that’s what you do for a good idea.
Invention number 2: travel notes, those dialogues with Mortis about what happened to a hero. They aren’t strictly tied to the game events, so they allow players to receive content in a more or less linear way. You meet dwarves, you get a travel note about dwarves. You meet orcs, you get a travel note about orcs. You’ve seen any 15 events? Get a note. That was a great solution, but it still wasn’t enough.
Problem number 2
It was partially created by me, and in general by players like me. The thing is that I don’t like changing the ways of achieving a goal. If one route in a game feels appealing to me, I keep redoing and refining it until I complete the game. That means, as a player, I won’t see the idea I came up with as a writer. What do we do? We found a ready-made solution.
Groundhog Day and Edge of Tomorrow
We decided to expand the events depth-wise. If the main character takes the same road again, then they know in advance what happens next. This opens up new opportunities—both for the main character and for the game developer. How about we tell the player a story within the event? Let’s go for it!
Can one consider the movies Groundhog Day and Edge of Tomorrow our inspiration? Yes, but I don’t think so. We didn’t envision our game in that style. We had the specific problem of presenting the game world and we found a solution. Maybe my perception of the term “inspiration” is somewhat narrower than the generally accepted usage, but we understand each other regardless, don’t we?
New Opportunities — New Problems
(and new automatons)
When we decided to have several playable characters, the idea of describing the events from a hero’s POV was already in the works. And what does that mean? It means that one story can be told in three different ways from the perspectives of three different heroes! Or perhaps we could tell even three separate stories? Whoa.
That also means three times more work and three times more time. KOTCL turned into a long-term project not only because of COVID, but also because of all the cool ideas that sometimes arose from problems—and sometimes caused new problems.
But, despite problems old and new, we wanted so badly to make all that happen. And I’ll tell you, without false modesty: we did it.