Philip Huxley, Narrative Director & Rebecca Haigh, Writer
Hello, each week leading up to the release of Dance of Death: Du Lac and Fey we have been hosting AMA (ask me anything) style discussions on the Salix Games Discord. We’ll be releasing them weekly for you to enjoy. If you would like to ask any question leave in the comments below or join our Discord and participate in the friendly discussion with the development team.
Where do you get your crazy ideas?
Philip Huxley (PH): In general, I have no idea. I try and read a lot and consume plenty of TV and movies, then let the whole lot percolate and hope something emerges.
Rebecca Haigh (RH): From everything. My husband is a graphic designer and we’re really into food, so I have to put up with his crazy ideas too. ‘What if we mixed this with that? Will it go? What if we tried this?’ We watch a lot of Netflix. That’s always good for inspiration. Our friends are also constantly creating, so we get ideas from them too. There’s always someone to bounce something off.
Marmite: yes, or no?
RH: Yes.
PH: Yes.
Which came first, ‘Victorian London’ or ‘Arthurian Legends’?
RH: In terms of my work on the game, I began very much in ‘Victorian London’. I had to brush up on my history knowledge in order to create characters and do them justice. It’s absolutely astonishing some of the things you learn – the things you never even considered. My favourite bits were about 19th century street food. Fascinating!
PH: We were toying with the idea of doing something with the Ripper and exploring the myths and falsehoods around that. Then it was a case of finding a way into that story. JJ was really keen to inject a fantasy element and that's how we stumbled upon Arthur.
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Without knowing the content of the game, of course, were you at all worried about perpetuating a kind of Ripper lionisation that some treatments tend to fall foul of? Did you make any efforts to centre the stories of the women he killed?
PH: That was very much a concern. But the more we explored the history of the case the more we discovered just how much had been distorted, which made us determined to try and present a different perspective. This is certainly where Mary comes into the story. Having her voice, and the other women's voices, in the game is a must!
RH: To add to what Phil has said, we made the stories of the working class the priority of ‘Dance of Death’. I love the quote that history is written by the victors, but it is also written by those who are able to pick up a pen. There are so many stories that have gone unheard simply because they have been lost to time.
JJ: I’m going to jump in on this too. It’s actually the reason I chose the Ripper story in the first place. I was reading into it and discovered that all the previous tellings of the story were incorrect. We actually have vast amounts of information on the time and the women but that story hadn’t been told. The least interesting thing about Jack the Ripper is the ripper himself.
RH: The women of the time were those people. We know them only from the few photos we pore over and whatever anyone wrote down about them in newspapers and history books. This is why we've worked so closely with some amazing historians to get the truest idea of who these women were, without the biased lens of history.
PH: There's a book coming out next month, called The Five. It's about the five canonical victims and dispels so much BS around how they are remembered. We actually had the pleasure of working with the author, Hallie Rubenhold. She's awesome!
Hallie Rubenhold – The Five
RH: And another historian, Judith Flanders, dictated what was accurate and what wasn't. Anything from petticoats to pea soup. We couldn't have done it without them!
Is it a coincidence that you and Du Lac share such impressive cheekbones?
JJ: Du Lac’s concept was based on David Bowie and Tom Hiddleston. I wanted a romantic era knight, rather than a typical tank character you get in most video games.
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ Playable Character Sir Lancelot Du Lac
How do you guys maintain continuity and not uh...cock it up all the time with multiple writers working on such a large narrative?
RH: For me, it wasn’t the continuity between writers that was the issue but, in all honesty, my own across the project. It is amazing how you grow and change in the space of two years, which is how long I have been on this project now. Phil has always communicated brilliantly well and the roles were divvied up in a way where I have always known what I have been doing. It’s when you get to your own work from two years ago and you’re like – what was she thinking?
PH: Iteration is key. Having the time to iterate as well. It allows you to go back and pick up on the bits that stick out.
Was it tricky to balance all this historical accuracy with building the rules of your universe? Just the presence of your protagonists opens the scope.
RH: What I have personally found is nice about historical accuracy is that it grounds your concept. Rather than necessarily restricting it, it sort of provides a cage that shapes your fantasy as it grows inside of it. With the Ripper murders, it was very much a ‘this happened then – we can’t change that’ approach, but we could sandwich it between character development that was entirely our own.
PH: The historical accuracy was a great way of keeping the fantasy in check, which I liked. As Bec says, it helped to ground it. Things never ballooned out of control in that sense.
RH: The presence of our protagonists also meant that we could see this horrific incident through three different pairs of eyes, each offering a different perspective. As we mentioned previously, Du Lac’s and Fey’s stories came back into vogue during this century, so Du Lac would have been very much at home. Fey – not so much. Mary, of course, was local, so having someone who knew the non-playable characters and the area was a really nice change from Du Lac and Fey’s alienation.
What was the most surprising thing you found out through research that went contrary to common assumption regarding Victorian London, or Jack the Ripper?
PH: For me it has to be that only one of the victims we can say with any degree of certainty, was working as a prostitute at the time and that was Mary.
RH: There was a lot of stuff to unlearn in this project. You realise that you can only trust what has been written down to a certain extent, as human beings tend to like to plug gaps where they don't have information, and in so doing make assumptions.
Funnily enough, but not funny haha, Mary is the biggest enigma. She is the one who left behind the most questions. Most of the other women had families in London, children, brothers, sisters and so forth. They had a background people could draw on to paint a picture of the individual. Mary wasn't like that.
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Did you find that out after choosing to make her one of the protagonists or was it something that helped you choose her for that role? And what challenges did you encounter about making her such a big part of the overall story (without spoiling anything of course)?
RH: I came on project when Mary was already very much one of the protagonists, but I think even we were surprised as we went along how little we knew, and possibly could ever know, about someone so famous.
Did you ever get stuck on a piece of dialogue or narrative and later realise that just completely deleting the thing was better?
RH: You don't leave much headroom for the stuff that gets deleted.
What has been the most difficult part of writing the story? Was trying to keep it in period difficult?
PH: Luckily, we've had some amazing historians collaborating on this project and they've been invaluable in keeping it period accurate.
RH: What sticks in my mind is my first time writing Du Lac. That was certainly a wall I had to bang my head against until I broke through - with Phil’s help of course.
PH: This is most difficult part–it might sound too broad–but just trying to tell a good story.
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ Playable Character Sir Lancelot Du Lac
For both of you, what really snapped the character of Du Lac in? That is, brought him together from words to a real character you could work with? And furthermore, what was so hard about writing Du Lac? What did you specifically have to get the hang of?
RH: Du Lac, for me, was a process in copying voice rather than someone I could just embody. With Mary and Fey, I found I could see the world through their eyes far easier than I could with Du Lac. I could come up with their dialogue on the spot. For Du Lac, it was a process of poring over Phil’s work to pick up on the little details and eccentricities of his language.
PH: Without embarking on spoilers, it was putting that character out of time which helped us to explore who he was.
RH: I was given the opportunity to work on Du Lac's journals, and that really helped get me in his headspace because here he could be more honest, more open with himself. That helped me to be more open too.
PH: Journals are awesome!
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What Madonna songs would you choose for Du Lac & Fey?
RH: Du Lac & Fey Combo is four minutes to ‘Save the World’ by Madonna and Justin Timberlake.
PH: For Fey 'Live to Tell'.
RH: Du Lac is ‘Vogue’.
PH: Du Lac is ‘Die Another Day’
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Listen to Du Lac & Fey: The AMA’s playlist on Spotify
Dance of Death: Du Lac & Fey will be released on Steam April 5th, add it to your wishlist!
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