Hello! This is GINGER , Game Director of Tobor, and you are watching 'Hotline Tobor' on CH 7.
Before we begin our show, I just want to let you know that today's post will be more enjoyable for players who have played Rocco's island. So let's go right ahead and begin our episode of 'Hotline Tobor'.
INTRO
On our previous episode, ‘The IT Crown’, we briefly showed how TOBO all started and how it evolved over time.
On this 'Hotline Tobor' episode, I would like to share more details about the 'Characters' and the 'Story'.
Ultimately, the team wishes to design a 'Universe' through the games we make. And when you are trying to create a 'Universe', the story and the characters are the most important asset. So during pre-production stage we had long meetings to define the pillars of the story. We ended up with three keywords.
Ensemble Cast/Failed Clones/Tragedy
I'm sure you have already noticed that they are all related to the story composition, characters and genre. After we have decided on these important pillars to create a unique game, let's dive a little deeper with the details.
Ensemble Cast
Instead of the popular model which gives precedence to a sole protagonist, we decided to make it into an ensemble cast composed of multiple principle actors that provide different angles to the same major event in the story. Believe me, writing a story in this manner was way more difficult than we ever anticipated.
We knew that we wanted to make a game that can utilize a surveillance camera with many simultaneous events happening at the same time. Using this surveillance camera system, multiple characters can move around in multiple spaces. At this point we had two possible ways to tell the story. Omnibus vs Ensemble Cast.
But why ensemble cast over omnibus?
The omnibus way would tell the stories of multiple characters independently. Each character would have their own story, but their stories would not have connections with the story of other characters. Each screen would tell a different story. However, we wanted all these individual stories and the character's past to be connected to each other formulating an environment where every character would have different perspectives to the same events that happen this world. So whichever character's story you decide to follow, you get to watch another character too and you get to a different perspective, making it a really compelling story and concept. Hence we decided to go with ensemble cast. And because there are 16 surveillance screens and because the player can only see 1 screen at a time, the player needs to chose which character or event they want to follow.
This is where 'Rocco's Island' comes in. As soon as we fixed on the ensemble cast method of storytelling, we immediately asked ourselves 'How are we going create a past to all these characters?'. We looked at Rocco's Island, and there she was, a character with a long history. Her name is 'Goralini'.
The Founder of Trillian Academy and Goralini Foundation.
Failed Clones
In Rocco's Island, Goralini creates clones. My first impression of it was that cloning human beings would be forbidden by law, and that the technology she created is probably tremendously difficult to make. Then I started to imagine that there must have been a lot experiments to create such a technology and that she probably had failed a lot too. Not to mention that wherever these experiments were done, it had to be hidden somewhere. So I concluded that there had to be 'failed clones' somewhere in the early days and started writing the plot about the many failed clones of Goralini.
Failed Clones of Eva in Rocco's Island.
I didn't think Goralini would discard her clones just because they are failures. Moreover, even if they are experimentally considered as failures, they were humans too, not monsters. So the dev team ended up setting the characteristics of the characters as 'having mental problems' with apparent deformation of the physical body. That's the reason why all the characters in the game are distorted or slightly awkward in different ways.
However, not all the characters in TOBOR are failed clones. Some were born in Undercroft and some where not. So we brought in other characters and designed it so that it would also have a historical connection with 'Goralini'. Whether they are clones or not, we wanted our characters to share a commonality of 'Failure' and 'Defect' throughout the game. That's why Tobor experiences a lot of failures in the game, and the story is also about characters with flawed personalities. So let me give you an example of all this through a characters named 'Maja'.
Maja- The Queen of Undercroft
Initial Concept Drawing of Maja
Maja is an arrogant queen who uses her unknown powers to rule Undercroft in a very demanding way. In order to design the concept art of Maja, we tried different styles of a tyrant, cobra, judge and a ruler. Ultimately, we decided that the concept in the middle that looks like a cobra would blend in with the story the most. We tried to use as much sharp edges to express her sharp personality.
We developed it further and finalized it with more details. Then we turned them into graphic assets and implemented it in the game. Then we naturally moved on to the next task, which was defining her movement and animation. But before we could define her movement, we needed to define what she does and what she says. Hence, with all this under consideration, I've started to jot down about her past history, trauma and experiences to fill in the gap. Her verbal tone(mostly always strict and angry) would be all related to her past defining her current attitude and personality.
< Past setting of Maja(It's actually couple of times longer than this>
Every character that appears in Tobor would all have their own versions of this settings. The majority of all this work would not be directly implemented in the game, but they were necessary settings to have everyone in the team to discuss and understand the foundations of the entire story. With all this set, I started to fill in out other gaps and settings that would be necessary to run the game play such as objects placed and minor events and dialogues. Based on these individual settings, I started to connect the characters with the major plot and story of the game. Gradually asking myself and imagining "How would this characters react in these occasions?".
Animating
We wanted to create a great 'experience'. Using text and visual art alone is not enough to to create an experience. Animating is very important. The goal is to create characters that looks live enough so that the player can assimilate into the story. While a character's appearance and dialogue may express who this character is to some extent, we believe that non-verbal character behaviors is even more powerful. Imagine a situation when the dialogue is very demanding and strong, but the movements are timid and unstable, then the player naturally picks up that there is something wrong with this and develops more curiosity.
Well, that's one failed clone and many more to go. So repeating this process 5 more times and voila! All our main characters are complete! Then I had to use a timeline to coordinate all the information and carefully align them so that there would not have errors in the settings and storytelling. Our characters all live in a harsh environment, they all have weird personalities, what's next?
Tragedy
Oh, did I already mention that Tobor is all about tragedy? I'm sure you already know this, but Tobor is a multi-ending game and a choices matter game. All the endings will be completely different and depending on the ending, the subject of the tragic event changes. False beliefs, ignorance, excessive greed... they all are great ingredients to make a tragedy work. At least, that's how we did it. Ultimately, it's up to you to choose which tragedy is best for Tobor, because his destiny is also in your hands. We call it destiny, since in some occasions, you won't be able to control it either. I mean Tobor is the main protagonist of this tragedy after all, right?
< Tobor is also a failure>
Conclusion
Hope you now understand how we tried to stick to ensemble cast, failed clones and tragedy. Also, we tried hard to mix these together to create a very unique game that has great replay value. Yes, you'll probably have to play it many times to understand the entire story. We've learned so much making Tobor. Thanks to this experience, I now know how difficult it is to make great story games. Writing the scenario, designing the characters, punching out the dialogues to deliver a great gaming experience is extremely challenging. We hope it's worth it. We hope many players enjoy playing Tobor.
Thanks for taking your time to watch this 'Hotline Tobor' episode. Hope to see you all in another episode.
Cheers,
Sincerely,
Ginger, Director of Tobor.