Maciej—a multilingual philologist, RPG aficionado, and award-winning writer—joined the Fallen Gods team in October 2014 as an editor. He quickly proved indispensable, and his role grew to include scripting events, then helping design events, then editing voice over, then implementing Unity content, then setting up combat encounters, then selecting the “deck” of events for different dungeons, then…. Well, you get the drift. “Longsuffering” barely begins to describe it.
While Maciej modestly claims not to have “made” any part of the game, the reality is that the fingerprints of his careful touch are everywhere. We’ve all benefited from his guidance, and I’ve never had anything comparable to his editorial work on any of my prior projects (even AAA RPGs with budgets in the millions of dollars). The only question is which of us will have the greater trauma from the process!
- Mark Y.
Mark: One of your principal roles on Fallen Gods is editor. How has your experience playing RPGs and adventures over the years informed your approach to the game’s text?
Maciej: To put it bluntly, my experience and preferences regarding games have made me wish for the texts simply not to waste the player’s time. Many games have very little regard to what is really communicated through their text — whether all of it is truly useful, or whether some of its parts could be removed with no loss in substance — which leads to a lot of meaningless reading that the player is compelled to sit through, just because it might hold something of value. I feel like in Fallen Gods we’ve put a number of constraints on ourselves that let us avoid this pitfall, and while in some cases the game does throw extended texts at you, I believe that each time all of it is significant.
Mark: You also serve as a sounding board and scripter for the event design—that is, the gameplay framework in which the game’s text appears. What do you look for in a good event?
Maciej: First and foremost — choices with weight. And by this I don't mean that they should all be epic in scale, but rather that they should always make you consider which one to pick. The antithesis of this is finding a desk and having choices like, “1. Open the left drawer,” “2. Open the right drawer,” “3. Look in the trash bin.” It’s empty content that brings very little to the gameplay experience and is only meant to draw it out by having you mindlessly click three buttons to get what you could have just been given at the outset with no input.
Instead, to follow the same example, I should have some knowledge of what the drawers hold, opening each should have some risk to it (the owner put a venomous snake in the left one), and I should only have enough time to open one of them safely — because the owner is about to barge through the door with a shotgun.
Obviously there are also other aspects, particularly those that pertain to replayability or obscure outcomes that require multiple “keys” to access and which are very cool to get on your nth playthrough, but I think the “weightiness” of the options presented is by far the most important one.
Mark: As one of the first team members on this project, and a de facto producer, what do you think have been its biggest challenges?
Maciej: The greatest challenges have always lain in the ebb and flow of the development cycle, primarily since everyone involved in this game isn’t doing it on a “full-time” basis, so every now and again someone may disappear for an indeterminate time. In other words, the hardest part is to keep up with the flow when everyone’s productive, and to keep it going when someone is dormant.
In the former case, considering that I have to manage and implement so many things, when I’m suddenly flooded with a lot of new UI assets, events to (re-)script, bugs to fix, VO to mix, and whatever else, it can simply get incredibly overwhelming. And given that some of these may be interconnected and require one for the other to work, it’s important to set priorities for yourself, as well as make sure you’ve noted down everything that needs doing. Because that’s the other major problem — when juggling a dozen different things, it’s easy for one to get lost somewhere, and that’s also definitely true for the project in general when you have to manage it for such a long time.
In the latter situation, during periods of slower productivity, the challenge is often to simply make sure that the development keeps rolling. It can be hard to implement new mechanics when you don’t have the UI to support them, or work on game balance when half the events are unfinished. You have to start taking shortcuts or making placeholders for everything, and these also have an uncanny propensity for taking root and staying in the game for much longer than they should. But overall, this is a small price to pay for not having to run a tight schedule where everyone is forced to work on the game, and letting them pace themselves.
