Faces to the Faceless
We love instant messaging. Gone are the wrinkled pieces of stationery clutched to the chests of distant lovers through long nights, along with the exhilarating ring of a long expected call from the downstairs kitchen. Both have given way to the faint quake of the rectangle in the back pocket of our jeans. What has been lost in ceremony has been totally reimbursed in convenience. Many pine for what they call the good old days; few have anything nice to say about the United States Postal Service when pressed.
Though comparably simple, modern text-based communication is also precarious, as prone to misinterpretation as it is to expediency. There’s a reason people call to inform their loved ones about a death in the family or a recent engagement. Certain strains of information require intonation to be properly delivered. Otherwise meaningful words become mere arrangements of letters, and that’s just not enough sometimes.
HX as VN
The choice to tell the story of HeavenX via direct messaging and emails was a simple one, but has created its fair share of challenges. To relay narrative through text is not uncommon, but in the modern day this approach is normally aided by character sprites or illustrations. Take the visual novel as an example. You compliment the tsundere character and she immediately chews you out for being stupid and ugly, as is her nature. Meanwhile, as if to convey her subconscious affection towards you, she blushes and casts her eyes to the side. Without these visual cues the tsundere appears less like a potential love interest, and far more like an undersocialized freak. Luckily there’s no shortage of these types in the white collar world.
There are no character sprites hovering behind the dialog window in HeavenX. The game’s characters cannot react to your messages in real-time save for the use of a limited set of emoticons. In order to address this visual disconnect between the NPCs and the player, we have worked to ensure that any ambiguity is intentional and meaningful. Creating conflict is a crucial part of any character-driven story. Bridging these gaps, or widening them, forms the backbone of your interactions with the NPC coworkers in HeavenX.
Who is who?
Our story system attempts to capture what it’s like to socialize within a handful of productivity and communication platforms, with all of the implied benefits and drawbacks of each. Casual communication is reserved for Shout!, a direct messaging system. More formal mailings are sent via Edict, the email client of Zhaoxing Heavy industries. Characterizing the NPCs within the limits of each program has required a high degree of care and intent. Each had to be given specific idiosyncrasies that would differentiate them from their other coworkers. Take Beth Joon-Wen and Kyle McCafferty as an example. Beth occupies the same position at Zhaoxing Heavy Industries that you do, and is fresh out of college. She’s considerably less formal, with the bulk of her online communication prior to her employment done in web forums. Rather than use traditional English, Beth takes shortcuts where possible and strives to keep her conversations light and casual.
Kyle, meanwhile, is a manager to the manner born. He communicates with a rigid efficiency, a nearly imperceptible hint of domination dripping from every word. He’s got a job to do, and more importantly you’ve got a job to do. Kyle exists to keep you on track. Unlike Beth, he doesn’t care much about being your friend and his dialog reflects this.
Every character in HeavenX can be identified solely by their grammar, vocabulary, and communication habits. Even if the usernames for each character were to disappear from Shout!, a player could finish the game and know exactly who they were messaging at any given time. A message from Beth could never read like a message from Kyle, and vice versa. There is still much work to be done within the story system, but these rules regarding consistency and readability are set in stone. We’re developing vivid characters, some likeable and some contemptible, using a limited set of tools that serve to bolster the realism of the game’s setting. Characterization is important, and equally so is the satire we’re hoping to cultivate through the player’s interaction with Zhaoxing Heavy Industries and its employees. Working within the confines of Shout! and Edict has been an excellent exercise in creative limitation, and we firmly believe that the narrative is all the better for it. Anyway, let’s get back to work.