So excited to finally have the game up on Steam, and massive thanks to everyone for wishlisting. Early wishlist numbers are looking really promising!
Story Design
For this dev diary, I wanted to dive a little into one of the core game design decisions of the game. How detailed should the story be?
Sounds like a fairly simple decision, doesn't it?
Strap in for some diagrams.
The game I want to create is one that has a story that feels deeply immersive, like you're playing in a real country, where your own decisions and choices meaningfully affect what happens. A sandbox, basically. That means the story needs to be dynamic.
A lot of the game was inspired by things I'd read or podcasts I'd listened to about the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, and the Cuban Revolution. I found these stories so compelling because they were real stories where it felt like the foundations of society - of the whole world - were getting completely blown apart. Events unfolded day by day, sometimes hour by hour, with a breathless, dangerous momentum, and tiny decisions could have huge impacts. Things (or people) that were once sacred and unassailable were suddenly vulnerable, broken, or dead.
I want to capture a bit of that fear and exhilaration in the story. And for that, the player needs to really care about and be engaged by the story. That means I need to avoid that "flavour text" feeling, which can crop up in games like this where the stories are just a vague means to an end, fodder for game mechanics, rather than something the player can genuinely connect to. "Politician caught in scandal" as a headline just won't cut it. Who cares?
So that means the story not only needs to be dynamic, it also has to be deep.
I don't believe these are mutually exclusive, but generally you will see games either going for one or the other, for obvious reasons.
Notable exceptions are things like Baldur's Gate 3, but sadly I don't have a budget of millions or a huge team. On a more indie level, there's Rimworld. Rimworld pulls off depth and dynamism of story with some incredibly clever game design, but it's at a scale where you're talking about individuals, not a country of millions of people, so I had to come up with a different approach.
Events
The building blocks of the story in Stop the Press are Events. Each one is a single news item that may or may not pop into your inbox in the morning. Each event is handcrafted, each one has its own source or journalist. It'll come with a letter giving you the details (or at least, the details the source wants you to have), and it'll usually come with headlines for you to write and edit. I want those headlines to have enough options within them that whatever agenda or playstyle you have can be accommodated, while still feeling plausible within the game world (this seems to end up somewhere between 5 and 50 combinations). And then there's all the stuff you may never even see from that event - if you haven't hired that journalist you'll instead get a newspaper clipping from another newspaper with a different version of the story, and some events have different variants depending on things like past events or that source's opinion of you.
This all means each event takes a long time to write.
If I had infinite resources and time, I could write millions of events so every run feels totally unique and authentic. Of course, the more events there are in game, the more fluidly they can respond to the player's input, and the more immersive and exciting the story feels.
But I don't have infinite resources and time, and I don't want to keep people waiting too long for the game. So I have a key question:
What level of depth and complexity of story gives the right balance between an immersive, replayable experience, while also still being possible within a reasonable amount of time?
Or in other words, how can I make the story both deep and dynamic, while also finishing the game before I die?
An easy answer is just to make the game short. But I think a game like this that's too short loses out on a lot of the things that make it fun. For a game where you're building something from nothing, you want to look back over what you've achieved and feel that you've come a long way. That's not very satisfying if you actually got there very quickly. And it also harms the story too: the reason it felt so earth-shattering when King Louis went to the guillotine was because Kings like him (and usually with the same name) had been in power for longer than anyone could remember. It really felt like something that was part of the laws of physics was being undone. Overturning a regime (if that's the path you want to take in the game) won't feel very momentous if it's overturned in half an hour.
So, if not taking the easy way out, what's the next best option?
Attempt 1
My first approach was maybe the most obvious. If we imagine the story as a line, then each time it hits a 'decision point' it forks. Those decision points might be something like "Faction A challenges Faction B for power" and the two resulting paths were "A takes power" or "B stays in power".
But for the game to feel properly dynamic, it needs to change quite a bit in response to what the player does. That means you need a lot of forks.
And that becomes exponential. Very quickly you're at a point where after just a few forks, you have to write a huge number of different versions of what happens on day X.
The worst thing about this is how inefficient it is. Some of the paths through this tree are going to be more likely than others, which means you end up writing lots of events for scenarios that are hugely unlikely - in other words, spending lots of time making content few players will ever see.
Attempt 2
The next approach was to try and use the same structure - which does have as its advantage being relatively easy to conceptualise and implement - but just cut off the most unlikely paths to avoid wasting time.
I didn't love having to lose potential playthrough options, even if they were unlikely. But really, this approach is just a sticking plaster. The fundamental problem remains that it's an exponential structure, so you have to minimise the number of forks to keep things manageable. A couple more forks on my 'likely' paths and I'm in the same sticky situation I was in attempt 1.
Attempt 3
I then toyed with the idea of seeing the story not as a branching tree, but as more of a network, where stories can move back in on themselves. Imagine you had a segment of story that was about, say, some revolutionaries landing in a remote district by boat. Perhaps you could reach that story segment when the Royalists are still in power, but you could also reach it via another route when the Liberals are in power.
This is more complicated to work out, but if you can manage it, there's a huge benefit in that you get to effectively re-use stories, rather than having to re-create many different variations of them.
The problem here is that you have to lose a lot of specificity to those stories. If you don't know what the context is that an event is happening within, you can't add in all those little touches that refer to other parts of the story or world, and make it feel alive. When those revolutionaries arrive by boat, they might be able to put out a statement that says "down with the government", but they can't make a speech about taking down the king or how the liberals are all traitors. You're getting dangerously close to that 'flavour text' problem I wanted to avoid earlier. Back to the drawing board.
Attempt 4
A very good (and very smart) friend of mine suggested another way of thinking about this. Rather than seeing the game as a path through a tree or network, I could see the game as several parallel tracks. Say you had X endings, you could then have X tracks. In this game, that might look like a track for each of the possible factions, moving towards that faction's ultimate dominance.
At any one point the game is moving along one of the tracks - but whenever it hits a decision point, it could shift over to another track. Crucially, it could shift over to another track at a different point.
That immediately gives the game a LOT of dynamism, while keeping the depth manageable too - as long as the number of tracks is kept limited, they can all be written in depth. I think for a lot of games this could be the ideal solution.
However the specifics of Stop the Press meant this wasn't quite the right fix here. This is a game about revolutions - about changes in the status quo. That means that those transitions between tracks can't just be little jumps - those transitions are where all the juiciest parts of the story will go, where one regime crumbles and another steps in. And if you need to make all of those transitions deep story segments in their own right, you've once again got a mountain of work on your hands.
Current Attempt 5
After talking it through with that friend, and a couple of others, I've settled on the current plan. It's not perfect, but I think it strikes the right balance between all these competing pressures.
All of these options so far conceptualise the story in 2 dimensions. The current plan effectively adds a third dimension to the structure.
Imagine if you plotted out the story you'd want to write if you had loads more time - that might look a little like a combination of Attempts 1 and 3.
Obviously the issue here is that to write the full depth of the story with this level of dynamism, it would take forever. But if you only wrote the key storyline events - those might be 1-2 events per day, rather than the 10-15 possible events per day that the game has - it becomes a lot more manageable.
Of course, it wouldn't be much of a game with just 1-2 events per day. There's no depth. That's where the third dimension comes in.
If we think about the next category of events - not the main plotline ones we've already dealt with, but the major subplots. These should still reference and feed into the main plotline, but their relationship to it might be a bit looser. That means exactly when these events happen can be a bit more fluid.
To take an example: if you had the following plotline playing out over several days, with a fork to the main story in the middle -
These events have to happen in that order and follow a clear sequence. But what about events like these?
-Liberals call for peace
-Desertions on the rise in army
-Panic in border regions
These could happen at any of those 4 days, across either fork, and still feel plausible and authentic. But they probably do need to happen within this 'local' area of the story to have that grounded feeling. They couldn't happen somewhere totally different at a point in the main story where there's no threat of war.
What that means is we can take our main plotline network, and divide it up into local areas, like this.
Second order or subplot stories can happen anywhere within their local area. That means for lots of these forks, you only need to write the subplot-level stories once, rather than have different versions for every single point along the network of main storylines.
It's like having another layer of the story at a different 'resolution' superimposed on top of the 'high-resolution' main story.
Then we can do that again with events that are much less tied into the main storyline - advertising opportunities, human interest stories, sports, culture, etc. They should still change as the main story does, but the 'resolution' of that doesn't need to be so granular. So you end up with wider local areas for them like this:
Superimpose all three layers on top of each other, and you get something that looks like this. Pick any single point in the main storyline (the black lines), and you also get an 'address' that gives you a pool of local second-order stories to pick from (the blue area), as well as a wider pool of third-order stories from a broader area (green or orange).
That determines the sorts of stories the player might get in their inbox that day.
This in theory means we have all the dynamism of a more complex branching storyline and the depth of a fully crafted story, but also we've managed to eliminate a huge amount of the redundancy of writing duplicate or rarely-seen events. Even better, that's not been achieved by cutting off unlikely possibilities from the player - all possibilities remain open.
This isn't perfect, and it's still a huge amount of work. But I think it gives a template that strikes a good balance. No doubt it will evolve further as the game takes shape... but I'm interested to hear what people think!
* For anyone wondering why this Dev Update is #9, the past instalments can be found on the Discord. Now the Steam Community is live, Dev Updates will be posted both here and in the Discord.