Hi everyone, and welcome to another Dandelion Void devlog. Over the past few weeks we’ve been doing a lot of story development work, and last month the team gathered to review a story overview slide deck together. This makes for a great opportunity to show you all how we manage our process for building the world of Dandelion Void!
Throughout this post we’ll be showing you a series of (heavily redacted) slides from this deck to guide the discussion.
For those concerned about story spoilers: This post is focused on the process of building the world of Dandelion Void, rather than any particular lore details. We’ll be sticking pretty closely to information that we’ve already discussed publicly, such as our Steam page description and in other devlogs. To this end, we’ve blurred out certain details from the slides we’re showing off. Don’t expect any huge spoilers or lore drops today!
With that said, if you’re hoping to go into the game with absolutely zero knowledge of the Pergola’s backstory, you may want to exercise discretion with this post.
From Void to Dandelion
For almost as long as the game has been in development, Brian (Dandelion Void’s game director) and Robin (a gameplay programmer, writer, and the author of this article) have been building out the backstory for the Pergola, the ship our game takes place on.
Brian established the basic technical details early: the Pergola is a generation ship, a spacefaring vessel designed for a voyage so far away that multiple generations of “crew” must live their lives, have children, and die before the journey is completed. No faster-than-light travel or cryosleep here: just a lot of time to kill.
On top of this core structure of the world, Brian established a few other base premises for the game:
Retrofuturism: The ship is built with a combination of 70’s era design and technology, plus more advanced science fiction spacefaring mechanics
Overgrown spaceship: Something very bad has happened to this particular vessel, leading it to become derelict and overgrown.
“Space caveman”: The player is a descendant of the original crew, now living a hunter-gatherer existence in the ruins of their ancestor’s technological wonderland
Hostile Plants: The plants aboard the ship have evolved to be mobile and predatory, and now hunt the remaining humans
It’s worth emphasizing that all of these parameters were set to meet Brian’s desired gameplay mechanics and visual aesthetic for the game, rather than being driven by a particular story he wanted to tell. This is pretty common for games: designers often start with mechanics and a desired look, and then need to come up with a story that supports them.
With all of this said, just because our story is downstream of gameplay doesn’t mean that the story isn’t important. A big part of the appeal of exploring an abandoned structure is finding out what life was like for its inhabitants back in the heyday, so this was our next step!
From Prototype to Premise
Once Brian set the core parameters of our gameplay and aesthetic setting, Robin had to answer some important questions:
Why did the ship leave Earth?
Who was on the ship?
What was it like to live on a spaceship your whole life?
Where was the ship going?
What happened to the ship that led to its degraded state?
Each of these questions could be answered in hundreds of different ways. But for the story as a whole to feel cohesive and satisfying, we needed to define some core themes. Every work of art is built around themes in some way: Star Wars: a New Hope is about the Hero’s Journey, the relationship between an empire and its subjects, and the human relationship to desire and power. Project Zomboid is about the fragility of life, the struggle against overpowering adversity, and what it feels like to live in a doomed world.
Neither of these works is reducible to only these themes – they’re full of incredibly specific plot beats, characters, props, game mechanics, etc. – but the core themes are the beating heart of these works that define the overall impression they leave on the viewer/player.
Similar to how our story can’t contradict the game’s gameplay and aesthetic, it should also avoid compromising our core theme. In the story overview presentation, we call these two restrictions our “Narrative Anchors”:
Coming back to the questions we outlined for Dandelion Void, the most interesting one to Robin was the first: why leave Earth? Part of the premise of a generation ship is that the original crew doesn’t live to see the destination, so the Pergolans would need to have had a pretty compelling reason to be willing to die in space. Were they right to do this, wrong, or a little bit of both? This is the question that gets at the root of our core theme.
We won’t actually write out the core theme in this devlog – we think it’ll be more meaningful for you to play the game and draw your own conclusions. Suffice it to say that once all this soul-searching was done and we answered the original questions we outlined, we had enough material to write the blurb that now sits on our Steam store page:
The Pergola launched in the late 20th century in an alternate timeline. As the brutality of capitalism came to a zenith, popular uprisings fragmented the United States and Europe into a jigsaw puzzle of separatist territories.
In response, the scattered remains of the old world’s powers joined into a brutal military regime. This old guard stands in opposition to the optimism and pragmatism of the newly formed Workers United Government.
During a fragile window of ceasefire, a cadre of artists, scientists, and controversial financiers in the autonomous San Francisco Bay created the Acorn Starship Collective. Visionaries to some, gutless cowards to others, the ASC launched the Pergola towards an exoplanet with speculated life-sustaining capability, a dozen generations away.
You know nothing of this. Your eyes have never seen these long dead founders, and your feet have never known the soil of Earth or any other planet. Your world is one of cold steel bulkheads, winding jungle corridors, and the groan of unfamiliar machinery. You are alone.
From World to Words
Once we had the core pillars of our setting defined, there were still a thousand details to fill in. One particular challenge with Dandelion Void is that we’re not building one world; we’re building three:
The alternate-history Earth before the ship’s launch
The society aboard the ship in its heyday
The world of the overgrown derelict after the ship’s collapse
When we’re feeling alliterative, we call these eras The Juncture, The Journey, and The Jungle:
It was important to us that all of these settings feel robust and lived-in, so as a creative exercise Robin began writing a series of standalone short stories, each of which took place in a different Pergolan era:
Similar to video game concept art, these stories aren’t all meant to end up in the final product; their purpose is to help us visualize what daily life might be like in these different settings. The process of writing a linear story helps us figure out what aspects of the world are the most interesting to create a narrative around, and it forces us to define all the little details of the world in a cohesive way.
For instance, right now Robin is writing a new romance story set in the “Journey” era, before the collapse. If our protagonist were to have a meet-cute, where would that take place? Would the builders of the ship want to install amenities like cafes? What type of food would be practical for the closed ecosystem of a generation ship? Would she pay for her meal with money, some kind of rations stamp, or would it simply be free? The answers to these questions have implications not only on the final words that do end up in the game, but also on art assets, game design, etc.
Like with concept art, this is a lot of work to put in for something that won’t end up in the game – for instance, “Old Belmont” ended up at over 10,000 words – but we do think the depth that this practice gives to our world is a worthwhile return on investment. And since most of our inspirations from the game come from science fiction literature, it only feels appropriate that we would build the world of Dandelion Void by writing our own.
Without being plugged into games writing circles, we actually can’t say whether this is an established practice for games writers. It could be that this “narrative concept art” technique is unique to the development of Dandelion Void, but we’d also not be surprised at all to find out that we have simply rediscovered the wheel.
From Script to Screen
Up to now we’ve spoken entirely about worldbuilding prep work; how does story end up in the actual build that our audience gets to play? This is such a complex topic that it goes beyond the scope of this worldbuilding-focused devlog, but we can discuss some general principles.
Each player who starts the current version of the game is presented with some short expository information as they select their background, as well as a storyboard-style intro cinematic. Beyond this we have a pretty light touch with introducing the world. Unlike an RPG full of dialogue, quest descriptions, etc., Dandelion Void is a quiet game; the player moves through the Pergola like an archaeologist exploring a ruin.
The bulk of the way players currently experience story is through in-game books, pamphlets, and other materials. We have a rule that every book needs to have actual readable content; usually this is presented as an excerpt from the total text that the player character would see. We even have fragments of our concept stories chopped up into a few of these books, although the in-game versions only contain a small fragment of the content from the source story. Finally, every computer terminal you operate in the game has a variety of old text files left in its memory.
These are all great resources for players who are highly motivated to learn more about the game’s story. But we’re also aware that most players will not stop to read every loose sheet of paper they find on the floor, especially when doing so means taking a break from the action. That’s okay! The game is, after all, a game.
This means that we are very conscious about needing to expand the delivery of the story into other means, such as environment art. This is one of the reasons Robin made the slide deck that we’ve been referencing in this article. It’s crucial that contributors who make art, music, sound effects, social media posts, and programming all understand the most important aspects of the Dandelion Void world, because the work that they create is a form of storytelling just as load-bearing as words on a page.
Our lofty goal is that players who navigate the environment and listen to the sounds of Dandelion Void should be able to describe the most important details of the Pergola's backstory, even if they never read a single written word. There’s more work to be done before we reach this goal, but this is the challenge we’re setting for ourselves.
From Intro to Sign-off
That’s all for the devlog today! Thank you for joining us on this journey through the creation of the world of Dandelion Void. Until next time, everybody please take care and have a great week!
– Robin and the Manzanita Interactive team
