G’day, Taverneers!
With our next patch quickly approaching, we wanted to give you something fun to read in the meantime. This week, Epic Tavern Project Lead Rich sat down with our Lead Writer Shawn to ask him some questions about his background, his writing process, and his approach to conjuring the stories you see in Epic Tavern!
Rich: I'm sure the people reading this want to know a little bit about your background. Is this your first time writing for a videogame? What else have you done, up until you started on Epic Tavern?
Shawn: Writing video games has been a dream since I got my first Commodore 64 in the Long Ago Time, but this is my first real crack at it. I've done a bit of everything. I wrote and performed comedy for years, spent some time as a newspaper sports editor, and more recently got into making horror movies and writing comics. It was through that work that I met Eric (Lead Designer).
I was fortunate to grow up with an after-school program run by a game designer, whose friends were game designers. I remember us making an orc-versus-dwarf combat football game with a 6-foot-long game board when I was still in grade school. I grew up with this stuff.
I have vivid memories of a road trip to GenCon as a little kid, in a car full of adult game designers (John Wheeler, Peter Rice, Bud Wellington) who were arguing about realism-vs-playability in random weather and encumbrance systems. I just soaked it all up.
Rich: I've read your comics, and they are great. What initially sparked the idea for Escape from Jesus Island?
Shawn: It hit me in waves over the course of 20 years. It started in the parking lot after seeing Jurassic Park, when talk radio said someone claimed to have found the Shroud of Turin. I started laughing uncontrollably, imagining Jurassic Park, but with Jesus clones instead of dinosaurs. One stormy night, the Bodies of Christ break loose and run amok. I outlined the first draft right in the parking lot, then wrote it up that night as a short film script. It started as straight slapstick, like an episode of Scooby-Doo. It even had one of those chase scenes in a hallway with lots of doors, where the heroes and villains run in and out of doors completely at random.
Then Dolly the Sheep totally changed the story. Dolly was the first sheep ever cloned and it took 277 attempts to get one that lived. Which meant best-case scenario, if you were trying to clone Jesus, you would first end up with 276 fatally mutated, near-Jesus freaks. That's when I started to realize it was a horror story.
The final big shift was when I partnered with artist Mortimer Glum to transform it into a comic. It was around then that I fully realized it was the Biblical story of Revelation, using cloning as the catalyst for the return of Jesus and rise of the Antichrist, who in our story is the twin brother of the reborn Christ. That's when everything clicked into place. I spent a year immersing myself in scripture and listening to sermons about the Antichrist and Apocalypse around the clock. It was madness, but it led to finally finding the story in its current form.
Rich: Amazing. It feels like you've really been enjoying the writing you've been doing for Epic Tavern. What challenges and opportunities does it present that differentiate it from writing for film or comics?
Shawn: It's so much fun and it breaks my brain in new and interesting ways. Branching narrative is a whole different world and it took me awhile to really get my head around that. When breaking down a story in any other form of writing, you consider a wide range of options, but at the end of the day, you have to decide on which of those things actually happens. You discard the other ideas.
With a game like Epic Tavern, I get to explore every possibility. So I now find myself drawn to storylines based on the range of possibilities they present rather than a specific narrative outcome. Where failing creates an equally interesting path. Every path is the real one for the player who's on it. That was an important realization.
Most fiction writing is the process of narrowing down possibilities. Branching stories are the opposite. It's all about exploring and expanding possibilities. And the process of layering all those narrative threads in such a way that they elegantly play out is my favorite puzzle ever. I've become completely obsessed with it.
Rich: You and I know that there is a lot of craziness behind 'how the sausage is made' in Epic Tavern's narrative engine. If you could let the players know about a particularly interesting 'behind the scenes' mechanic/system that goes into determining what any given piece of narrative looks like, what would it be?
Shawn: A big part of the fun is finding new ways to use the storytelling tools this engine provides. One new tool that's super simple in concept but that opens a whole world of possibilities is Global Variables (GVs). It allows me to insert an invisible flag (either Yes/No or a number) into any piece of text and then later modify or check for it and display different results if certain criteria are met.
I've gone full mental with this new tool. Sure, I can use it to track major world events and make sure if a store got blown up three quests ago, people don't talk about it like it's still there. But that's the tip of the iceberg. It's now my intention to create a unique GV for every NPC in the game, as well as each faction, and have every interaction either help or hurt your reputation with them. And to have them treat you according to your past history with them. So every interaction is building your personal story. Once I realized that was possible using Global Variables, I knew I had to do it.
I'm currently working on an Olympics-style event, The Frozen Games, for our upcoming patch. Since it's a giant event in the story world, I wanted all the famous people in Beor to either be competing or attending. But there are all kinds of quests that can kill off prominent residents. Using a bunch of Global Variables allowed me to be sure that folks killed off in your timeline aren't in attendance (although, any role you played in their death may come up).
Rich: Whoah. I think we did the math once and found that players have like 1 in 1,430,000 chance of experiencing the same story as another player by the end of the prologue. Sounds like it's only getting crazier. Speaking of the story world, how the hell do you maintain a world's worth of people, places, events, items, etc, and keep it all straight?
Shawn: Like anything complex, you just break it into manageable pieces. When I have a bunch of narrative threads running parallel, I treat each as its own universe until it’s finished, and then worry about weaving them together later. The end result is writing that's buried under a terrifying pile of string commands, but it only looks scary from the outside. The individual components are still simple threads. You just learn to zoom in and block out the surrounding noise.
For the world-building stuff, I use a variety of tools. One of my first priorities when joining the project was assembling a world bible of every piece of established info about Beor and its inhabitants. That gave me the foundation to build on. I do most of my world-building work in Scrivener these days. For especially complex storylines, sometimes I'll use an engine like Inklewriter to knock out a quick outline I can click through. And I'll even go old-school and sketch out a quest tree by hand from time to time.
Obsessively building medieval fantasy worlds is something I've been doing my entire life, so that was one of the things that most excited me about Epic Tavern.
Rich: Super interesting insights, I'm glad you are on our team! One of the great things about being in Early Access is that we're able to see systems come on-line all the time that help us to achieve our visions. What's one of the pieces of tech/systems that you're most excited about? How will it help you get even crazier with telling Epic Tavern's story?
Shawn: One of the biggest upcoming additions that I'm psyched about is making it so every character who ever steps foot in your tavern has a unique backstory with a payoff once fully revealed. I recently drove myself to the brink of insanity knocking out more than a hundred 10-part class-specific backstories that will be assigned to procedurally generated characters going forward.
I wasted a fair amount of energy trying to figure out a system for randomly generating backstories, and maybe that could have worked to a degree, but the end result of actually writing each is just so much better. This was one of those times when grinding through a problem was better than trying to find a clever way around it.
When this expanded feature goes live, we'll have around 150 unique unfolding backstories in the game. I think that pool is probably deep enough, but if it turns out players are getting far enough in the game that they're meeting more than 150 heroes, I'll crank out another big batch.
Rich: That is a staggering number of words. Do you have any advice for aspiring game writers?
Shawn: Technology has evolved to the point where you don't need anyone's permission to make games anymore. You don't have to wait for a break or to be noticed or any of that. The gatekeepers have lost control and the gates are wide open. You can make games on your own right now, today, with tools that are free in many cases. If that's what you want to be doing, do it. Don't talk about wanting to be a writer, put your ass in the chair and be one.
The primary difference between me today and me before my father died 10 years ago is that I no longer wait for permission to go after what I want. Life is short and it goes fast. Spend your time doing the stuff you want to do. If you do it enough, you'll build up a marketable skill or two along the way.
And creativity breeds creativity. Working crew positions on several films led to directing my own movie, which led to my comic, which led to Epic Tavern. Taking that first step of an unpaid production assistant gig on a bad indie horror movie opened the door for everything that followed.
Want to reach out to Shawn, Rich, and the rest of the devs? You can! Join our Discord channel: https://discord.gg/ftxnBWe
From everyone here at the Tavern,
CHEERS!