"We aren’t rebels, that’s something they don’t understand. We didn’t start the fight.
We’re just ourselves. Sea people, fishermen and fisherwomen, humans drawn to the coast, as we’ve always been. To separate us from the waters, the primordial source of all life, is unnatural, wrong, an abomination. The sea isn’t some political cause. It is something we are bonded to, deep in our souls.
The sea is where we live now. We can’t tell you exactly where; we can’t tell you exactly how. We have to guard our secrets carefully. The worry that they will come for us never lessens. That they will find us, and try to destroy us. Like they hunted our leader, The Mind. If he hadn’t been clever enough, none of us would have escaped.
And now escape is our business. It’s almost routine. Someone comes to the coastal caves. We shelter them, care for them, and prepare them to enter the depths, to adapt to their new home. Some are seeking the soothing depths of the waters, tranquil and serenely beautiful. Some just need a dark place to hide from the city and the oppression of the Surfacers. We don’t ask why they’ve come.
Most arrive through the underground river, beneath the Surface and the city it surrounds. We have connections on the inside. We are smugglers and pirates. At least until we are free. Then the sea provides all we need to sustain ourselves. Then we are simple sea-kelp farmers. The price of vigilance is high. We are forever on the lookout, delicate seahorses, ready to disappear into a crevice at the slightest flicker of steel. Everyone understands what happens if the Surfacers catch you.
Brunt is the bravest. If it weren’t for his help, even The Mind wouldn’t be here. He’s too old for this work; he really should be in the base. We should be looking after him at this point. But he insists, and who could ever refuse him, after all he has sacrificed? He was once Landed, like The Mind. Now his only land is a subterranean cave, with a great sink onto the surface of the sea. He keeps the cavern, receives the refugees, lowers the hand-winch to plunge SubVee after SubVee into our waters. The final path home.
It’s Maraea who is the lookout and his guardian. Her connection to the sea traces back through her long line of ancestors, each of whom she can name. They arrived by sea, they live by the sea, and there has never been a question or a compromise in her heart. Not once.
There is safety in numbers. But growing our numbers is a risky business. We thought we had it figured out. Until you showed up, silently pointing at an empty SubVee.
The first stages of Sub-Verge’s development felt familiar. The story and world of Sub-Verge was incredibly fun to write. I worked out characters, gave them personality tests, had them talk to each other, and people and a plot emerged. I listened to the song "Bathysphere" by Smog, and tried to capture the ominous dread of murky underwater feelings.
But the whole idea had emerged from the ‘garage band jam’ with Darren, and I knew this was meant to be a game. He’d gone, and I was on my own to figure out game mechanics. That was a world deeply unfamiliar to me.
My model, in the end, was Twelve Angry Men. Characters in a predicament where, unless everyone agrees, the situation won’t change. And the situation, in the case of Sub-Verge, is: you. You’ve shown up, in a sealed submersible, a bathysphere, a SubVee. The divers who find you are part of a rebellion, hiding from the controlling Surfacers above them. Your appearance throws them into crisis, because they don’t know who you are or why you’ve appeared. Are you a refugee, like they are, in need of shelter and safety? Are you a threat, a spy, a scout for the Surfacers, or a suicide bomber? Only you know, because your first move of the game is: picking a side. Before you even know what the sides are.
We can’t choose the circumstances of our birth – what community or country we are born into, who our parents are, what their political affiliations might be. Yet it’s this fact: when and where you are born, and to what family, that determines so much about our lives. And when you’ve found your community, and your people, whether they are your actual family or they are found family, it’s incredibly grounding. But what to do about a stranger, an outsider? Should a group be open? Or is safety paramount? These are some of the thoughts that were on my mind as I moved across the world, and worked on the story of Sub-Verge.
When it came to the mechanic, I knew I needed help. Before Darren left, he introduced me to Chris Garnier, who was working with him at Wētā as a level designer. Chris and I started hanging out, we went fly fishing (which is amazing in New Zealand) but didn’t catch anything. Probably because I’m an amateur and Chris is actually a spear fisherman – his favorite thing is to don a wetsuit and go diving in the rich coastal environments of New Zealand, to see what he can catch by net, by hand, or by spear. This seemed like an exotic hobby to me, someone born in the desert. It gave me the suspicion that he might like the world of Sub-Verge.
One day, we got lunch and were eating on the rocky coast of the Miramar peninsula, and I pitched him the game. I drew the SubVee and the divers on the back of a pizza box, and diagrammed out the way their conversation formed an interactive puzzle. He took a look, and after many years of experience in game dev, like Darren before him, he said... “Maybe.” And I had, luckily, found myself a programmer.
I was also trying hard to learn more about programming myself. Looking for works that bridged the games and books divide, it wasn’t hard to stumble across 80 Days, by UK studio Inkle, and their scripting language, ink. In the way I tend to learn a lot of things these days, I decided to teach it to my students at the University, which meant: I had to learn it myself first. Luckily, it’s written with writers in mind, and keeps the programming language light and easy to navigate.
Chris threw together the early prototype in Unity, based on the ink script that I had written, and sent me a test:
And the first, working version of Sub-Verge surfaced! And Lo, it was made of tic-tacs.