Hi everybody! Welcome to another Tuesday dev blog. Today we are talking about a new readable book system in Dandelion void, the content we’re writing for it, as well as some thoughts about narrative delivery mechanisms in games!
Exposition
Our team draws a lot of inspiration from science fiction literature, and we’ve been doing a lot of worldbuilding for Dandelion Void over the last few years. Like many titles in the “explore a cool abandoned structure” genre, our story is delivered through little scraps and pieces that you find in the world. Up to now this has been through item descriptions, but this week we've added readable books!
Books have technically been in the project for over a year, but mechanically they were just an alternate type of “food” that lowered your boredom instead of your hunger (for a while, we even had an audio bug where your character would chew loudly while turning the pages) These food-books worked fine, but most playtesters were disappointed that they didn’t get to see what their character was reading.
So as of this week, each unique book now has a short excerpt that appears above your player's head as you read! Most of them have between three and six sentences which you can read consecutively, or take a break in the middle if you like.
Showing this text over the character instead of via a menu means that you can continue exploring while you read, without having to pause the game. Just be careful to not bury your nose too deep – distracted bookworms make for great uproot fertilizer.
First-Person Problems
Displaying some text is easy; writing is the hard part! In particular, we've put a lot of thought into the format of our in-game texts.
A common device in games is to deliver your story through diegetic documents; your character is finding actual emails, letters, diaries, etc. that are written from a first person perspective. When done well this can create immersion and intrigue, but the constraints of the format often lead to a formulaic and contrived tone.
When people communicate in real life, they typically have a high level of shared context...
But the goal of video game narrative is to communicate exposition to the player, so the writer frequently needs to make characters restate information that should be obvious to both parties:
“Dear Samantha: as you know, today Horace from management implemented the new surveillance policy. The iris scanners, the fingerprinted doors, cameras tracking you everywhere you go – it’s creepy! Things have just been getting worse and worse since Arnold Kramer and the New Romans party came into power. I’m terrified what will happen to us if there’s another leak.
-Janie”
While this is just a silly example, it really is hard to write documents like this that sound natural. Samantha knows that Horace is a manager, she knows what the surveillance policy is like, and she certainly knows the name of the president and his political party – but the player doesn’t, so Janie has to spell it out. You also see this problem a lot in audio logs, only there, there’s the added issue that you have to justify why the character is keeping an audio diary in the first place.
With this in mind, we’re experimenting with something different: straightforward, honest-to-goodness, third-person prose. Most book excerpts are written as if they were snippets of a novel; dialogue is quoted, the reader has access to the interior thoughts of the protagonist, and a narrator can describe the scene.
We will be the first to say that this makes less diegetic sense than the first person, “found-document” style. Our in-canon explanation is that these are biographical novels on the lives of important characters, but yes, that’s a bit of a hand wave. On the other hand, not having to justify the premise for every document gives us a lot of flexibility and lets us skip the “Dear friend, I’m writing to you because…” filler. We also think the third person format captures some of the energy of the science fiction novels that have been such an inspiration for the game.
In fact, to get in the sci-fi-spirit, our first batch of books come from a series of short stories set in the Dandelion Void universe which Robin wrote last year to serve as “narrative concept art.” This was just meant as a worldbuilding exercise, but these stories have ended up being a nice primary source from which we can harvest snippets for in-game use.
Burn after Reading
As always, this dev log is just a snapshot of our current thought processes. The final game might very well end up going with first-person documents, or even a mix of styles. Or who knows – maybe we’ll give up on the whole “words” thing and just stick a couple skeletons next to toilets. Instant game narrative.
That’s all we have for today – it’s time for us to hit the books!