Music!

Part of a series on The Caldecott Caper.  
 
Music was one of the biggest inspirations for Caldecott, and also one of the greatest frustrations. The module ended up getting published a month after I had initially planned, largely because Harebrained Schemes had removed all of the old music from Dead Man’s Switch and Dragonfall from the game when Hong Kong came out. The new music was fantastic, but very tightly connected to the Chinese setting of the game, and much of it just doesn’t fit at all into the environments I was creating. I hate being a pest, but spent several months repeatedly shouting into the well of HBS "support", hearing only my own voice echoing back at me. They still haven't restored the missing content, but I could feel my enthusiasm rapidly slipping away, so I bit the bullet and released the game in a much more mediocre state than I had hoped. It felt like trying to build a house using nothing but screwdrivers, as I kept trying to figure out how to use my inadequate tools to achieve the dramatic mood I needed.

But! This post isn’t about whining, it’s about music. Pretty much all of Antumbra and Caldecott were created while I was listening to music. My introduction to Shadowrun modding coincided with me getting deeply into synth pop, and that music has been a source of inspiration and motivation. I’ve continually expanded my awesome Pandora station, which I love and only listen to while modding; I also occasionally pull in specific albums or Beats playlists when I’m jamming on something in particular.

Anyways. Between the time when I finished writing initial dialogue for Caldecott, and when I actually published it, I started idly thinking about theme songs for all of my various characters. This is what I came up with. It’s a bit hard to define, but basically it’s a combination of the mood of the music and the lyrical content. (Sometimes because the lyrics seem to apply to the character, other times because it seems like something the character would say about someone else.)

No explicit spoilers follow, but the list is kind of spoilery if you haven’t played through the game before.

Rafik: Under the Tide by CHVRCHES.
Sable: Amor Fati by Washed Out.
Dorbi: Pretty much anything from Florence & The Machine, e.g. Drumming Song or Seven Devils.
Persi: Patti Smith, especially Gloria or Babelogue. And maybe also a little hit of Pure Morning by Placebo.
Horatio: Olde-tymey megaphone music.
Tolar: Bitch Better Have My Money by Rihanna.
Orion: History Has Its Eyes On You from the Hamilton cast recording… and, for good measure, Yorktown (The World Turned Upside Down) from the same.
Kroin: I Shall Ne’er Surrender You by Richard Paul.
Kora: The Gift of Freedom by Charles Webster (ft. Lisa Lindley-Jones).
Zielor: The Hand that Feeds by Nine Inch Nails.
Claude Bullion: Killing in the Name by Rage Against The Machine.
Ava Montalvo: Two Points by The Glitch Mob (ft. Swan). Runner-up: Bachelorette by Bjork.
Eriana: Bassically by Tei Shi.

And, finally, some songs that don’t really connect to any particular character but are (to me) very evocative of the game as a whole:

General setting and feel: Overdrive by Invocation Array.
Theme: Empathy by Crystal Castles (Alice Glass).
Plot: Help I’m Alive by Metric.
Player character’s journey: Be a Body by Grimes.
Most succinct summary of the game: Lean On by Major Lazer. (“Blow a kiss, fire a gun. We all need someone to lean on.”).
Final act: Panic Switch by Silversun Pickups.

Dramatis Personae

Part of a series on The Caldecott Caper.  
 
Okay, characters! This post will cover my selection and design for the crew members who join you over the course of the game.



Crew dialogue is a separate topic that I covered in my earlier post on dialogue. Also, my process for selecting crew members and coming up with their general concept remained unchanged from Corona; you can see that post if you want to learn about my (very loose) process. This post will just cover the changes from that technique.

One big change was that I tried to be more methodical in sketching characters’ personalities. In the Antumbra games, this tended to evolve organically as I wrote them. I was pretty happy with the outcome, but thought it wouldn’t work as well for Caldecott. One major new component of Caldecott was the favor system, which tracks how well you get along with your companions. In order for this to work, I would need to make the characters vivid and comprehensible to players, so they could anticipate which decisions would please or anger them.

The implementation of this ended up being very simple. For each character, I picked a single principal that would be most important in their life. It would inform all of their dialogue and decisions. By consistently keeping this in mind, I could help make sure their personalities made sense.

(I haven’t been marking spoilers in these posts, but this is all spoilers from here on out.)

Rafik’s primary value is LOYALTY. For Rafik, loyalty is a very visceral, personal thing. He doesn’t feel any sense of obligation towards institutions, but if someone does him a solid, they’re on his good list for life. Conversely, if someone breaks Rafik’s trust or reveals themselves as an enemy, he’ll hold a grudge forever.

(As with most of the companions, this doesn’t really map directly onto a traditional “good vs. evil” axis. Rafik can easily be perceived as the "good" companion, but he doesn’t have any compunction about robbery or murder, so long as he’s working with people he trusts and targeting people who he thinks deserve it.)

Persi’s primary value is INDEPENDENCE. She is drawn to the open road, to unfettered freedom. She resists anyone who tries to force her to play a certain role or restricts her actions. She’s perfectly happy on her own, and will only join up with others when the bonds are loose and they don’t hamper her flexibility.

Sable’s primary value is CURIOSITY. He’s endlessly driven to understand how the world works, to have as many different experiences as possible. In Myers-Briggs terms, he’s 100% P and 0% J. He never passes judgment, just goes “That’s interesting!” and starts looking for the next thing.

Dorbi’s primary value is POWER. She wants to amass as much of it as possible and reshape the world according to her whims. She’s a cheerful megalomaniac who is convinced that she would do better in charge than anyone else, and so anything which advances her position is for the greater good. (Once again, this might sound “evil”, but in practice Dorbi does often end up improving the world, even if it is for the wrong reasons.)

Having those principals in mind made every stage of writing easier. I came up with secondary characteristics as I wrote them, in large part to give them different speech patterns and make them “sound” more distinct, in addition to the content of their words being different.

Sable is upbeat and endlessly excited! He speaks with lots of exclamation marks! Along with many questions - wouldn’t you like to know the reason why? He has a splendid vocabulary, a veritable lexicon of obscure terminology that can sound overwhelmingly verbose in the context of Shadowrun.

Persi speaks in dialect, ya? Lotsa abbreviations an’ slang an’ such. It was a little difficult gettin’ the balance right, hopefully it’s readable an’ still gets the idea across.

Rafik tends to be more serious. He’s a straightforward guy. He speaks in impeccable sentences, as if he’s consciously thinking over each line before delivering it.

Dorbi is… just a little mischievous. She’s also very frank, and makes her feelings known. There’s no drama there, though. When she’s bored, she enjoys shaking things up with little non-sequitors. She’s also devoted to chaos, and will stir the pot to her own advantage.

One other feature I got to take advantage of in Hong Kong was the crew advancement system; this was added in Dragonfall: Director’s Cut, after I finished work on Corona, so I haven’t been able to use it before. What’s nice about this is it gives players the opportunity to help guide their companions as they level up; you can’t directly spend karma, but can choose special abilities to complement your player character’s strengths or cover for their weaknesses.

This is great for a couple of reasons. First, it increases the odds that any given character can be useful. If you’re rolling a decker, you can pick all of the non-decking upgrades for Sable and end up with a decent melee fighter who you might actually want to take along on missions. It also adds some storytelling potential. In Hong Kong, Duncan’s two tracks explored two different approaches to combat (lethal and non-lethal). There were gameplay implications to these choices, but they also resonated with the storyline in a nice way.

In Corona, the crew members were hyper-specialized. Norton was a pure support shaman who had literally zero offensive abilities. Hailey was a technological wizard who was useless at combat. On the other extreme, Elorn was terrific at destroying enemies with his guns, and couldn’t do anything else.

In contrast, Caldecott’s crew members are mostly “dual-classed”. This has a couple of advantages. First, if the PC is specialized, they should be able to outpace whatever the NPC is doing, which helps keep them feeling special and powerful. It also increases the usefulness of the crew advancement choices, so you can tilt into one of two fairly different builds and end up with something good.

Rafik’s two tracks are “Man of Faith” and “Man of Action”. The former is his Shaman track. These choices help him support his team by buffing and healing them. The latter is his pistol-wielding samurai track, which makes him a more effective damage-dealer.

Sable’s two tracks are “Hacker” and “Slasher”. A Hacker is a Decker, so this will give him upgraded skills and equipment for penetrating the Matrix, likely as the team’s primary decker. Slasher finds him embracing his pirate lifestyle, engaging with enemies up close with his devastating blade.

Persi is always a rigger, but her “Rigger” track doubles down on these skills, giving her abilities similar to what Racter gets in Hong Kong. “Demolisher” supplements her already-decent shotgun skills, letting her directly participate in combat.

Dorbi is always a mage. She’s introduced as a fire mage, which was the role she played in Corona, and her “Hellraiser” track continues that theme: lots of direct damage, area-of-effect attacks, and damage-over-time punishment for her enemies. Her new “Demagogue” track reflects her renewed climb to power, granting her the ability to confuse and dismay her opponents.

Sadly, I ended up needing to gut this entire system at the 11th hour.  😢  There's a bizarre bug that affects all UGC for Hong Kong which breaks the game when you try to save with crew advancement enabled. I'd been petitioning Harebrained Schemes to help fix this for over a month, putting the entire mod release on hold, just to get frustrated when they failed to address it at all. I'm still annoyed at how that all played out - if they had just said that they wouldn't fix it, I could have release this a month ago, and if they had actually fixed it, I would be releasing a much better game.

Some other random crew notes before I close this section out:

Rafik was originally named Destin, and all 400+ pages of dialogue that I wrote calls him this. Once Hong Kong came out, I thought, “Crap!” In Hong Kong, the first companion you get is an ork male named Duncan who has a background in law enforcement and is especially close to the player character. It was too late for me to change any of the story or design for Destin, but I figured I could at LEAST change that name to sound different. I spent some time on baby dictionary web sites before finally settling on Rafik.

Speaking of which, it wasn’t until right before I published Caldecott that I realized that, purely by accident, each of the main companions had a name that was exactly 5 letters long. That’s a fun little parallel to my accidental naming scheme of Antumbra, where each character’s name started with the same letter as their race (Dalmin the Dwarf, Turm the Troll, Orion the Ork, Hailey the Human, Elorn the Elf, Dorbi the Dwarf).

There are two other “secret” characters who I internally treated as crew members, although they don’t get advancement tracks and I don’t think most players will think of them as crew. Kora was a lot of fun - she’s a sweet woman, almost a mother figure, who plays some light mechanical roles (such as fencing paydata) before unexpectedly getting her legs back, picking up an SMG and a cyberdeck and joining your crew. I really like the idea of a player who you already know suddenly taking on a new role. Mechanically, this was important because, if you play as an awful person, you could lose all of your crew before the endgame, in which case you would need to have Kora as a decker and to play certain crucial roles in the narrative.

Finally, there’s Zielor. He’s… kind of a red herring, I guess? The most obvious inspiration for him is General Leo from FF VI, although their personalities are almost totally opposite. Zielor is set up as your immediate and most obvious antagonist: he is (spoiler) the person who kills you in the first scene, who ambushes your team repeatedly, and seems to be exacerbating the problems in Orkland. He’s also despised by Rafik and Kora, who are probably your two most trusted companions. And yet, in the bigger context of the game, he’s not one of the bad guys, and might even be seen as fighting on the good side, albeit in a warped sort of way.

Zielor is one of the major branching points of the game. IF you play in a certain way and make certain dialogue choices, you can convince him to join your team and fight by your side for the big finale. Otherwise, you’ll need to fight him and kill him once and for all.

I was careful not to make Zielor seem “too” good… he might be hard to “unlock”, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that everyone would WANT to unlock him. As usual, I try to treat gameplay and story as interwoven but not intertwined… ideally, the player will be left staring at the screen, mulling over the various harms that Zielor has caused, wondering whether the advantages he would bring to the table are worth the risk of recruiting him.

Okay! That will take care of characters for now.  Lots more to say, but not without getting into a rundown of the entire game plot. And, well, that’s what the game is for!

Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex in Video Games (But Were Afraid to Ask)

Part of a series on The Caldecott Caper. 

Okay! So, this is a topic I’ve been thinking about for a long time now, and as I’m starting to write this post I’m trying to decide how much I want to stick to describing what I did in Caldecott, and how much I want to discuss my reasons for doing it. I'll probably end up muddling through both of them.




I’ve been a big fan of video-game romances ever since Baldur’s Gate 2. Maybe even before that - part of the reason Final Fantasy VII was so memorable to me was taking Aerith on a date at the Gold Saucer. In much the same way that the SNES Shadowrun game blew my mind by introducing the idea of setting a roleplaying game in something like our own world, BG2 blew my mind by introducing the idea that video games could portray realistic human relationships.

Like a lot of BioWare fans, I’ve avidly followed their increasingly confident handling of romance against a changing cultural backdrop. They’ve always been trailblazers, from offering complete romantic arcs in BG2 through their  depiction of same-sex relationships and fully-realized transgender characters. As much fun as the games have been to play, I’ve almost been more fascinated by the behind-the-scenes thought that they’ve put into these relationships. Their fans have HUGE emotional investments in these parts of the game, and BioWare has been particularly thoughtful and deliberate in how they honor the trust they’ve been given.

One major turning point for me was watching David Gaider’s seminal GDC talk on Sex in Video Games. If you have even the slightest interest in the topic, I highly recommend watching it yourself. David is funny and humble and incredibly perceptive, telling an insider’s story about all of BioWare’s attempts, failures, and successes over the years.

I knew that I wanted to write a romance even before I knew for sure that I was going to write Caldecott. Nearly a year ago, I was tossing around a few different ideas - doing another Shadowrun campaign, or teaching myself the Divinity: Original Sin editor, or taking the plunge and learning Unity. My number-one objective, though, was to try my hand at writing a romance. I ultimately decided to stick with Shadowrun in no small part because I could visualize how I could make that romance “work” within the tools I had already learned, rather than starting over from scratch.

I’m definitely standing on the shoulders of giants here - I have the benefit of having seen the failures (whether artistic, moral, or financial) made by others, which gave me a clearer picture of how to try to avoid repeating those mistakes. At the same time, I’ve developed some strong opinions and theories over my years as a fan of romance, and welcomed the opportunity to put some of them to the test.

So, let’s start by talking about gating! Back in the benighted days of BG2, your character needed to match a specific set of requirements to even be considered by a potential partner: to “date” Aerie, you needed to be male, belong to a particular race (human, elven, half-elven or gnome), and be of neutral or good alignment. Interestingly enough, one of the very first player-created mods to come out for this game was the “Can’t Kill Love” mod, which removed all such restrictions. This had some occasionally-hilarious side-effects; most notably, Viconia’s man-hating dialogue makes no sense when delivered to a female lover. But I think it also spoke to the desire for players to pursue the objects of their affections, even when that didn’t match the original vision of the game’s designers.

Over the years, BioWare moved gradually in the direction of more flexible love interests. In the first Mass Effect game, Liara is a member of a mono-gendered alien species, but absolutely reads as female; the game was famously reviled on Fox News for including cut-scenes showing a female player character kissing her. Interestingly, there was much less controversy two years later in Dragon Age: Origins, where the male elf Zevran would make love to both male and female players.

This design reached its apotheosis in Dragon Age 2, which had four romanceable characters (not counting DLC), all of whom were bisexual. There was a TON of controversy around this, which I don’t want to get into here. Many players appreciated finally being able to “romance all the things”; others complained about how unrealistic the ratios were; others were uncomfortable with the way the game downplayed the characters’ bisexuality, only focusing on their attraction to the player’s gender.

Since then, BioWare has continued to grow its stable of romanceable characters, and along the way has grown the constellation of sexual orientations on display. The choices used to be “heterosexual or bisexual”; in the latest Mass Effect and Dragon Age games, there are also homosexual characters who can exclusively be romanced by players of their own genders.

To be honest, I haven’t decided for myself which I prefer: the “everyone can love everyone” free-for-all of DA2 or the “everyone is represented” mosaic of DA:I. When it came to Caldecott, though, I felt slightly hemmed in by practical constraints: I’m just a single writer/developer, making this whole huge thing all by myself in my spare time. Writing a full six romance tracks just wasn’t feasible, for both scheduling and plot-related reasons.

As much as I knew that I wanted to write a romance, I also wasn’t fully confident that I could do so successfully. I’ve never written a romance before, in any medium - not in prose or fan fiction or text adventures or anything. So, from the very beginning I was careful to write in such a way that, if I was unhappy with the final result, I could completely remove it and still have a full, functional game. I was more or less fine with taking this risk with two romance tracks, but just couldn’t justify the effort involved in writing additional tracks that might be scrapped, even apart from my worry of romance fatigue.

Fortunately, the two characters I had in mind for romance were both very believable as bisexual characters. (Spoilers incoming if you care about that.) Sable’s defining characteristic was his curiosity: he’s constantly searching for new experiences, trying to discover first-hand everything that the universe has to offer. It would be strange if he WASN’T bisexual. Persi would make sense as a lesbian or as a hetero woman, but, well, she isn’t either. I mentally put her at about a 4 on the Kinsey scale - she’s had some bad experiences with men in the past that leads her to be more comfortable around other women, but she’s attracted to people based on their individual characteristics and won’t turn down the right guy.

One funny little epiphany that I had while writing the romances was how relatively easy it was to write gender-neutral romance content. It would have been much simpler to only permit human romances but allow both men and women than it would have been to permit only male romances but permit dwarves, humans, elves, orks and trolls. Of course, I was allowing both variables to change, and regularly found myself wondering, “Does this make sense? What if the player is a dwarf? Can he or she reach that high?”

It’s kind of a truism that challenges lead to creativity, and I definitely found that to be true here. Something that sounds incredibly simple, like “You kiss her,” becomes really complex when the player can be pretty much everything. What if you are 3 feet tall and she’s 6 feet? Are you standing on a ladder? Is she crouching down in front of you? Does she pick you up to smooch her face? And none of that makes sense if you’re a troll: now you’re leaning down to her, not up to her. I didn’t want to write three versions of every dialogue, so I found creative ways to collapse the problem. Suddenly there’s tickling involved, and you’re both on the floor, and the scene is simultaneously much easier to write and more interesting than it would have been originally.

One recurring theme throughout development was a fresh appreciation for everything BioWare does. They’ve mentioned before how challenging it is to support romances for the different fantasy races of Dragon Age, and, boy, can I believe it. I don’t even need to animate video or anything, and already run into enough problems when I’m doing nothing but writing text.

Along the same lines - romance was one area where Shadowrun’s text-heavy approach really shines. Even high-powered AAA game engines can have a really hard time depicting seemingly simple interactions like touching or kissing. Since players are more or less buying into the text, though, I could get away with writing some scenes that would be very expensive to animate.

At the same time, I tried to use all of the tools at my disposal. Shadowrun has a simple but pretty powerful animation system; it’s under-utilized in the official campaigns, so it carries a big impact when a character starts dancing, or lies down, or otherwise interacts with their environment. I could also draw on standard visual storytelling techniques like fading out, using dramatic lighting, etc. These took a little while to script, but they help the romances feel more special, and hopefully help the character connect more to their relationship arc.

Oh, yeah, arc! That’s another thing I wanted to write about.

As I said before, I’m very indebted to BioWare in general and David Gaider in particular for generously sharing their experiences with creating romances. David used to run a tumblr, in which he shared surprisingly detailed notes about how his team constructed romances, down to a very technical level of showing how they traced out the arcs of the characters and tied them to developments in the plot. Reading that was eye-opening to me.

I didn’t exactly copy the system he described, in large part because of the difference in how Dragon Age and Shadowrun games are structured. DA tends to be more open-ended, with the player free to go pretty much anywhere and pursue any one of many quests at any given time; Shadowrun is more of a chain of missions, with some flexibility in how they are put together but without the ability to laterally switch between quests mid-stream. Still, his posts got me thinking about what was actually going on mechanically in all of those romances I’ve enjoyed, and ponder ways to translate that impact to Shadowrun.

The standard progress of a romance is a series of answers to questions: “Do you like me? Do you LIKE-like me? Do you like me more than anyone else?” There’s a gradual escalation in intimacy and affection, eventually putting your character on the path to commitment. It helps ensure that the player is buying into the romance, feeling like they’re making a choice and not being railroaded into something just because the game designer likes it.

I’ve thought for a while that this is actually a rather canny bit of psychology. There’s a potential for cognitive dissonance here: if the game gives you constant choice, and you end up in a romance then it must mean that you like the romance, right? Otherwise you’re making bad decisions, and you’re not the sort of person who makes bad decisions.

It’s also clever because it does a great job at emulating how love works in real life. Love isn’t a sudden bolt from the blue that strikes you and changes your life: love is a series of affirmations, a series of “Yes”’s given over time that gradually binds people together. In a video game, we approach this relationship through a keyboard and a mouse, but I think the principle is more similar than we might initially think. Love is something we practice, it’s something we work at, something we earn rather than are given.

Anyways. By making the player say “Yes” over and over again, we make sure they’re on board the love train before it departs the station. If not, that’s okay; this is an RPG, not a romance simulator, and they’ll still have fun. If they’re on the train, though, then they’re committed, and there’s a whole host of benefits that the player and designer get: greater emotional investment, a heightened sense of  stakes, and more emergent storytelling as your partner takes to the battlefield.

Okay! That’s more than enough theory. Let’s move on to mechanics.

First, gating. Any time that anyone suggests that Harebrained Schemes should maybe add a romance to one of their games, that suggestion is immediately dogpiled by lots of players angrily talking about how romance has no business in Shadowrun. Which always makes me sad - I like Shadowrun, and romance, and would like to see more of both - but also made me think more carefully about how I wanted to present romance in my mod. I ended up borrowing an idea from Fallout: New Vegas. That game brilliantly used the Perks system to enable romantic options: if you were playing as a woman, you could take the Black Widow perk to unlock flirting options when speaking to male characters, or Cherchez la Femme to do the same for women. That seemed like a neat way to let players engage in romantic content if they wanted it, while completely avoiding it if they did not.

In my case, I handled this through an early dialogue with Rafik, your first companion. As part of a general “getting to know you” conversation, he will gently give you the opportunity to state a gender preference; you can indicate which sex(es) you prefer, or make it clear that you don’t care for love. Future flirting options are then optionally disabled based on your choice. I liked this because it felt more like a roleplaying than a mechanical choice: you aren’t selecting a sexual preference from a drop-down box, but revealing it in a frank conversation with a buddy of yours.

One question I pondered for a while was whether to restrict flirting options to potential love interests, or allow flirting with a larger number of people. I think the main benefit of limiting it is to more clearly indicate to the player who is a valid LI; I was a bit concerned that, if they saw additional options, they might not pursue any romance at all because they were holding out for another one that they preferred. I experienced some (very mild) frustration in DA2 when I realized that I couldn’t romance Aveline, and in DA:I at being unable to romance Scout Harding, despite flirt options being available for both characters.

The counter-argument is that it’s more realistic to allow flirting with more people, and allows a greater range of role-playing. If you feel like your character would really like a particular person, then you might be annoyed that you don’t have the opportunity to express that affection. And even if they aren’t a valid LI, the other person could still turn you down, as so often happens in the real world. (Which then leads into a counter-counter argument, which is whether it’s really fun to let players experience romantic rejection in yet another medium.)

I ultimately decided to restrict flirt options to the two romanceable characters, but will be monitoring the reactions this decision gets… I doubt I’ll add more flirts in, but will keep those reactions in mind if I ever decide to try my hand at romance again.

In the Dragon Age and Mass Effect games, flirting tends to be a single-choice option: if you like the person, you hit the button with a heart on it and proceed. I do like the clear iconography of showing which options will encourage romance; it was annoying in Dragon Age: Origins when Alistair would mis-interpret my friendliness for affection. But I wanted to have more choice in my romances, so every time you have the option of flirting, you get not one but two flirt prompts to pick from. This gives players more flexibility in how they role-play this aspect of the story: are they a witty charmer? A confident admirer? A sweet partner? This also gave me more flexibility in the prompts I wrote; I could give players the option of using a really bad pun, without demanding that they use it to advance in their relationship.

The two flirt options are equally “good”; they each lead to different dialogue, but the main thing they’re doing is registering your character’s interest in the other character. After you have flirted at least twice and you’ve progressed far enough in the story, you will get the option to start your first “lovetalk”. I borrowed/stole this term from Baldur’s Gate 2, where this variable is used to track your progress through the four romance plotlines.

Persi and Sable have very different personalities and the content of their romances is entirely different, but structurally they are identical. After your two or more required flirts, your first lovetalk will broach the possibility of a more serious relationship. This offers some easy outs to players who mis-clicked or have changed their mind: were they just playing around? Are they willing to have a go at this?

This is also where I collapse the romance choices from two down to one. A small but persistent criticism of BioWare romances is the lack of polyamorous options. Patrick Weekes and other writers have frankly stated that this mostly comes down to scripting: allowing multiple simultaneous romances leads to exponential complexity that becomes impossible to write and even more impossible to debug. With just two options, I had a better chance of making it work, but was reluctant to take that risk for my first outing. So, that first lovetalk will also check to see whether you’ve started flirting with the other love interest, and if so, ask you to make a choice.

Narratively, this works pretty well. Persi is highly individualist - she barely feels comfortable letting one other person into her life, let alone two more. Sable makes it clear that he’s down for whatever group activities you might have planned, but that he won’t force Persi into anything she’s uncomfortable with. So, while I do allow players to express their preferences, they’ll ultimately need to pick between one of the two tracks (or jump off the train altogether).

There are a couple of throttling mechanisms in place to keep players from running through the romances too quickly. It would be weird if, say, you recruited Persi, then talked to her a couple of times, and then immediately started a relationship. (Okay, maybe not that weird in the context of Shadowrun, but weird for the arc I had in mind.) You’re always limited to a maximum of 2 substantive conversations with each companion during each hub visit, and can only start certain conversations after completing a particular number of missions. The upshot of this is that, if you recruit Persi first, you can start flirting with her immediately and begin the love track after moving to Halferville; but if you recruit her last, you’ll be flirting with her at the midpoint of the game, and only start “dating” her later. I did a lot of careful work with the throttles here, trying to help things have a somewhat natural flow while also accommodating the flexibility I wanted in the game  design.

After that initial gating conversation, Persi and Sable each have 3 additional lovetalks; as noted above, the content is completely different for each, but they follow an identical dramatic arc.

Lovetalk 2 is rising action. You’ve affirmed your affection for one another, and start exploring the benefits of your relationship. There’s more physical contact, more intimate conversation that starts to get at your personal feelings in a way that you wouldn’t explore with mere friends. It ends on a high note, cementing your mutual attraction.

Lovetalk 3 is the complication. Anxiety and conflict comes bubbling up, as your partner gets cold feet. This is centered on a fear of change: the increased intimacy is starting to change them in ways that worry them. This is a last chance for players to break off the romance if they aren’t happy with how it’s proceeding. Otherwise, though, they can talk through the problems with their partner, reaffirm their commitment, and create a shared vision for what this relationship could look like.

Lovetalk 4 is the climax. I was inspired by the capstone quest design for romances in Dragon Age: Inquisition, where you are set on a mini-quest that reflects your partner’s personality and desires. We are playing a video game, after all, and it’s good to use those tools to support the romance, rather than just having it be a sort of vestigial appendage to the gameplay. This is also yet another case of the player affirming the relationship: not just clicking “Yes” in a dialog box, but actually taking the effort and thought to complete a meaningful task. At the peak of this comes the sex scene, and the romance is “locked in” (if not yet complete).

(The sex scene is, hopefully, tastefully done. It amused me to write this in a gender-neutral manner yet again; I’m curious how many players will pick up on that. It’s quite brief in comparison to the overall span of the romance, and miniscule in the context of the entire campaign, but hopefully evocative enough to resonate with players.)

And, from there… well, without getting too deeply into spoilers, it ultimately determines the end of the game. Let’s just say that once again I borrowed heavily from Baldur’s Gate 2, with your partner playing a significant part in your personal story and ultimately, potentially, featuring in your epilogue.

Along with the great guidance from BioWare, I also benefited enormously from Feminist Frequency's Tropes vs. Women in Video Games series, which has spent several episodes specifically on the topic of sex and romance in games. Originally I mainly focused on ensuring equal representation: if both men and women are potential LIs, have an equal amount of content, and are portrayed equally, then there’s no problem, right? But her more recent videos made me think more about the role that the romance played within the game; I feel like I was mostly on the right track anyways, but in some cases I decided to make small adjustments, and other times felt reaffirmed in tentative decisions I’d made earlier.

A few particular items that may be noteworthy:

• There aren’t any mechanical benefits attached to the romance. You don’t earn extra points or level up by bedding another character. It’s another aspect to your story, not to your gameplay.
• Sex isn’t a reward. Your partner won’t fall in love with you because you defeated the arch-enemy or gathered 1000 coins. Progressing in the romance requires attention to and empathy for your partner; to succeed in the romance, you must focus on the romance.
• Your love interest kicks ass. They’re an equal partner on your team, bringing their own unique mix of skills to the challenge, and have value as people outside of their potential appeal as a girlfriend or boyfriend.

As noted above, restrictions lead to creativity, and I found that to be true here as well. When I realize that I'm falling into a trope, I hope to recognize it, and then rewrite to avoid the trope. That's always a good thing! At an absolute minimum, it means that I'm not repeating the same storytelling techniques that have turned this into a trope, and will come up with something relatively new that may surprise my players.

On a broader note, I thought a lot about agency, throughout the development of the game but particularly when writing the romances. It’s a tricky balance to strike. Players want to feel like their actions have significance, like they’re a force in the virtual world, that their decisions have consequences. It can be very frustrating to express a desire and have that desire thwarted. And yet, in the real world, we have limited agency; thus, it’s much more realistic for the player to experience periodic resistance and conflict.

In Caldecott, I tried to handle this by setting each major character on their own separate wavelength. They express their own opinions and desires, which may not match the player’s own. In a successful relationship, you essentially harmonize with them: finding a mutually-agreeable path that lets you maintain your independent identities while simultaneously joining forces and creating something new together. That promotes the idea that the other characters are individuals not under the domination of the player’s whims, while also allowing the player to steer the story in the direction they wish to go.

Okay. This post is way too long and I’m officially rambling now.

Bottom line: This was really hard, but also incredibly rewarding. Romance is one of the biggest minefields a video game writer can enter, and I have no doubt that I’ll get a lot of negative feedback for it. (I’ve found it somewhat helpful to think of this as a form of penance for the innumerable times I have complained about a lack of options in BioWare games.) I have no regrets about doing it, though. After playing through it myself and seeing how the romance integrates with the player’s personal story, I feel validated in my initial theory about romance being an effective technique for raising the stakes and making the player more invested in the story.

I have no idea yet if I’ll try this again; a lot will probably depend on what kind of reception this outing gets. If I do try my hand at romance in the future, I would love to work with a larger stable of characters, ideally with a wider range of sexualities represented. That might also be a good point to finally start actually collaborating with other writers. Precisely because these arcs are so personal, they’re emotionally exhausting to write. I think I could benefit from sharing the load, as well as gaining in perspectives from writers from different backgrounds than myself.

Say What?

Part of a series on The Caldecott Caper.

Obviously, I’ve written a lot of dialogue for previous Shadowrun campaigns. In the time since then, I’ve been thinking a lot more about structuring dialogue. I ended up taking a more methodical approach in The Caldecott Caper, which I think served me well… it gave me a good framework for dealing with the large volume of discussions, supporting my goals for player agency and narrative coherence.

First, as background, I should mention that my dialogue is primarily dialogue. That’s, uh, tautological, but also worth explaining. In the official campaigns (Dead Man’s Switch, Dragonfall, and Hong Kong), a significant portion of the text in the dialogue window is actually exposition. And that’s great - the writers do a terrific job at noir-ish scene-setting, describing the various scenes that you find yourself in and directly telling the story. In my own writing style, I rely primarily on the direct words of the characters to tell the story. Probably less than 10% of my text is straight exposition or narration, and that’s often supporting the dialogue itself (such as describing the body language of another character). In contrast, I’d guess that Hong Kong is probably more like 25-30% exposition.

Dialogue serves a lot of different purposes in the game, and the way I structure these dialogues will each be different.

MECHANICAL

Sometimes information is best presented through dialogue, but it purely serves a gameplay purpose. Prime examples are merchants selling you equipment, or a taxi driver offering you different destinations. There isn’t much to do here: you’re basically giving a menu and letting players pick a choice.

I deliberately try to keep these as simple as possible. It’s tempting to, for example, have a merchant say something silly after you shop with her; but if the player will see that same “joke” a dozen times, it will quickly get old. I try to keep the dialogue here natural and perfunctory.

INTERROGATION

This type of dialogue is very common in some other RPGs - if you ever find yourself mindlessly clicking through every choice in a menu, you’ve played this sort of game. These dialogues are mostly used to provide a somewhat-natural way to impart information to the player: describing the setting, or their adversaries, or their goals, or the background and history of the characters they’re meeting.

This information is often not mandatory, and it’s the sort of thing a player might quickly click through or skip altogether. People who care about the lore and the story pay close attention here, so I put effort into making the content engaging. I’m also careful not to hide crucial information here, since it’s something that can easily be missed.

These dialogues are structured rather simply. Typically there’s a “hub node”, where the player will see a bunch of questions like “What is your name?”, “What is your job?”, “What can you tell me about Dunkelzahn?”, and so on. Players can click through them in whatever order they want. There aren’t any positive or negative consequences to asking these questions: they’re purely to give the player (not even the character) access to information. Once the player has satisfied their curiosity, they will just click “Goodbye” to exit the conversation, or another option to proceed to the next major node of the discussion.

REACTION

This is something I paid a lot more attention to in Caldecott than in previous games. When there’s something important going on - a key piece of plot is being revealed, a character is revealing their agenda - there will often be a lot of text from one or more characters. It seems weird to have the player character just stand there silently while the the other person monologues. But it’s also weird to have them just give neutral interjections like “I see” and “Go on.”

I decided to take this opportunity for some light roleplaying. After a suitable amount of time has passed in a conversation, the player character can offer a response to the speaker. This doesn’t have any mechanical impact on the conversation: it will still proceed forward, with perhaps slightly different text as the speaker reacts to the player’s words, but it won’t actually change the ultimate outcome. Even if the game itself doesn’t keep track of the player’s response, though, the choice becomes important to the player themself. It becomes a part of the story they are creating: how do they feel about this person? Do they admire them? Loathe them? Are they curious? Bored? Driven by greed, idealism, loyalty, pragmatism? Over time, the player can create a richly nuanced portrait of their player character, without me needing to support a ton of scripting.

I considered a few different ways to organize this, and ultimately came up with the principal of always offering at least three different reactions at each “reaction node”. Three is kind of a sweet spot for me. One choice is no choice at all, just a Continue button. Two choices tends to veer towards manichaeism, a reductive good/evil, right/wrong morality that I find extremely boring to play and even more boring to write. As soon as you offer three options, though, you break out of that dichotomy and make things way more interesting, hopefully forcing the player to actually think about their choice rather than blindly hitting the “good” or the “bad” button. Four choices is even better than three, but I think you start hitting diminishing returns: the marginal improvement from 3 to 4 is much less than the improvement from 2 to 3, and I feel that ultimately my time is better spent offering reactions to more situations than offering more reactions to the same situation.

Drawing on traditional Shadowrun archetypes, I came up with a scheme of three different personality types to highlight in these reaction nodes. The first choice is a classic “black trenchcoat and mirrorshades” persona. This is a player who is no-nonsense, practical, and results-oriented (or at least puts up the facade of being such). It’s a very cold personality.

The second choice is a standard “heroic” persona, which is actually rather rare in Shadowrun but very common in other RPGs. It’s empathetic and helpful (or pretending to be such). It’s a warm personality.

The final choice is the “pink mohawk” persona. This is where you get reactions that are wild, unpredictable, humorous and/or violent. This is the loose cannon who will risk everything for no good reason but have a lot of fun doing so. It’s an electrical personality.

There's no incentive for a player to consistently pick the same archetypal responses, and my hope is that players will vary them based on the situation and their relationship to the characters. One player might act warmly towards a longtime friend, have a sharp sense of humor towards a romantic interest, and a serious relationship towards their business associate. Another player might suck up towards their Johnson, kid around with their friend, and be vulnerable and sweet towards the object of their affection. I find these sort of varied portraits infinitely more interesting than "I'm a Paragon!" or "I'm Chaotic Good!"

Having this structure in mind was a huge help while writing the reams of dialogue for the campaign. This particular node type comes up a lot in the conversations you have with your companions, typically in a hub as you catch up on their backstories. Only a few choices actually have lasting impacts on your crewmembers, but there are a TON of opportunities to vary your responses to them, which means that, ultimately, each player will have a slightly different relationship with all of the characters in the game.

DECISIONS

These are rare but powerful. At certain points in the game, your responses in dialogue will actually (gasp!) have consequences. As such, I structured them a little differently.

First and most importantly, I deliberately avoided ever giving 3 options here. Consciously or subconsciously, I hope that most players will eventually realize that “three-choice decisions don’t really matter”, and will thus pay a bit more attention when they realize that their prompt has 2 or 4 choices in it.

Along the same lines, I avoided directly mapping the three persona types onto these choices. Sometimes they’re very straightforward (keep the ship or sink it?). At key points in your companion conversations, you are presented with a 4-choice window to respond to a particularly important issue to them. By grokking their values and desires, you should be able to pick a decision that they will approve of. Critically, there are always at least 2 “correct” and 2 “incorrect” choices here. I want the player to still have choice even while advancing towards their goals. Sometimes you can gain favor by agreeing with a companion, but you can also gain favor by making a reasonable argument against them.

I also put a lot more effort into making sure that the results of decisions were clear. In the feedback to Antumbra Saga, I realized that most players had no idea about how some underlying mechanics of the game worked: how you could avoid fighting Norton’s Army in Colma, why and how Redding was changing over time, etc. In Caldecott, I tried to make those consequences much clearer, either directly through the UI (showing on-screen status updates when you gain or lose favor), or through more explicit linking of later events to past choices in the dialogue. (“I’m mad at you and am about to shoot you because you sunk my boat two missions ago!”)

UNLOCKED OPTIONS

In the Shadowrun games, you can sometimes unlock certain options based on pre-requisites of the character. The most obvious example of this is using Etiquettes: if your character is versed in Gang-speak, they’ll be able to talk down some particularly hostile foes; if they’re adept at Corporate talk, they can bluff their way past certain office situations. Sometimes you can also use character stats and skills like Strength or Decking to bypass certain challenges.

I like including a range of these in my campaigns, as another way to reward players for the choices they make while building their character. If they’ve invested Karma into increasing their Charisma and learning a new Etiquette, I want to reward them by giving some in-game benefit.

I never make this an absolute requirement; there’s always an alternate route to success. But using these unlocked skill choices is always a fast route to success: players can confidently choose those unlocked options knowing that they will lead to an optimal outcome.

There’s definitely a valid school of thought that says this is bad game design, that it’s encouraging the sort of mindless clicking that I decried above. I can recognize that criticism, and also appreciate the work some other teams are doing to overcome it, particularly the system being used in Torment: Tides of Numenara. But again, for me it all comes down to helping the player have fun, and I think it’s more fun for the player to see a new option that they unlocked from previous choices than to not offer those choices, or, even worse, to penalize them for picking something they tried hard to get. (Failbetter Games are the masters at the latter sort of construction, which is part of why they’re awesome but also something I would not want to emulate in my own games.)

Okay! So, all of those things above are what I think of as “nodes”. You can chain multiple nodes together into a conversation. A standard hub conversation might look like this:

• You greet Dorbi and ask her how much she likes burning people alive. This kicks off a new conversation thread.
• She tells a graphic story about this one dude she TOTALLY burned alive. You have a reaction node where you can express your appreciation or horror at her actions.
• She reacts to your words with a few custom sentences, then proceeds to mention that she totally burned a dude right outside just before you came in.
• There’s an interrogation node here where you can ask her who the dude was, why she burned him, whether you need to worry about the cops. Or you can just skip all that and ask what the hell is wrong with her. All of these choices lead to more text, but don’t have long-term implications.
• Finally, she asks whether you have a problem with her setting dudes on fire. There’s one choice unlocked with Etiquette: Shadowrunner that she will approve of. Otherwise, you can pick from various options to try and encourage or discourage her from burning dudes. She’ll remember what you said, and you’ll gain or lose approval accordingly.

SO, THOSE ARE THE NODES...

There are lots of different types of conversations you might encounter throughout the game. During my writing phase, I would typically write all of the dialogues of a single type in a single Google Doc before moving on to the next one. Here they are!

CRITICAL PATH DIALOGUE

This is the backbone of the story. It covers all of the major story beats, major plot revelations, and crucial branching choice points.

These dialogues are sometimes quite complex. My favorites to write were probably the Council scenes. There’s one council early on with your player character, your (work) partner Rafik, and his (romantic) partner Kora. This summarizes the opening events of the game and sketches out the shape of the rest of the game to come, while showcasing the personality for these two major characters and defining your relationship to them. The second Council comes three missions later, after you’ve recruited your other allies: now a full room of six people, there are a lot more participants, a lot more viewpoints, some opportunities for friction (which you can smooth over or just ignore), and more details about how the game is going to go down.

Those dialogues were very unusual - it isn’t possible to get more than 3 team players into most maps, so doing something this complex wouldn’t even be possible in most scenes - but was totally worth it. They don’t just set up the plot for the campaign: they also implicitly support the major themes of the game, getting you thinking about teamwork and loyalty and support.

Other critical-path dialogues are more traditionally structured, often with one significant NPC and you. I tried to complicate these slightly with the use of interjections: your companions each have opinions about the right and wrong way to do things, and will speak up about what they observe and think.

Sometimes critical path dialogues lead to key branches: major characters living or dying, or making choices that will reverberate in the future. Other times you’re more or less railroaded into a certain plot direction. In these cases, I tried to give the player more space to react than normal: instead of the standard 3 response choices, I would sometimes offer a half-dozen or more, hopefully increasing the chances that they’ll be able to identify with a certain motivation for the actions they’re about to take.

MISSION DIALOGUE

If you only read the critical-path dialogue, you would have a complete (if sparse) story that would hopefully make sense. You really wouldn’t have a game, though. The Caldecott Caper is structured like a typical Shadowrun campaign, with a series of runs (missions) that each advances you in some way towards your goal. Each of these is a game-within-a-game with its own story and objectives.

This sort of dialogue is important, but (mostly) only in the context of your current mission. For example, one early mission has you optionally solving a gangland murder mystery. This involves interviewing witnesses, searching for evidence, and fighting off several attackers.

Structurally, these conversations were similar to the critical-path ones, but they tended to be simpler. I don’t want to bury the player in too much lore that won’t apply to later portions of the game, and also don’t want them to lose sight of their overarching objectives.

When possible, I would try to find ways to tie these mission dialogues to some of the bigger themes of the main story. In my revisions, I updated a bunch of random corporate stuff to instead focus on Shiawase: by making them a more consistent presence in the game, I could reinforce their importance and add significance to the player’s interactions with them. I didn’t overdo it, but over time I think I found a fairly happy medium here, using stand-alone stories that had thematic resonance with the meta-story.

SIDE MISSIONS

There are some inessential parts to Caldecott: optional objectives within runs, or side-quests that you pick up in the hub which may span multiple quests. They mostly exist to fill out the game: you would still have a game if they were all removed (unlike mission dialogue or critical-path dialogue), but it would be less fun.

This was definitely an area for me to indulge my more whimsical moods, often getting meta or drawing absurd characters. That lighter sort of tone isn’t too popular within Shadowrun, but I feel like I can get away with it as long as it’s sort of off to the side, where cranky players can ignore it.

Structurally, the biggest difference with this type of conversation is that it can be declined. There really isn’t a good mechanical reason to do that - you’re turning down extra karma and/or nuyen - but there could definitely be role-playing reasons to do so, or you might just be in the mood to play through the game as quickly as possible. Otherwise, these dialogues play out as normal: a quest is granted, you can often ask questions related to it, and then usually must hunt down and speak with multiple people before completing the goal. For narrative and plot efficiency, I almost always piggy-back on top of existing characters for these quests, rather than creating entirely new characters who will only serve a limited role.

BANTERS

These were a lot of fun to write! I covered this in more detail in my writeup on Corona so I won’t reiterate too much of that here. I deliberately did these fairly early on, since I’d found them so helpful for homing in on each companion’s unique voice.

Structurally, these are unusual conversations in that the player character plays little or no part. In most conversations, I’m careful to not go too long without letting the player character chime in and share their thoughts; here, though, it isn’t unusual for an entire back-and-forth of 12 or more nodes to continue without any word from the player. This works because the player is essentially eavesdropping on a private conversation between companions.

I really like these conversations. They are 100% inessential - since they’re random, you can’t count on the player hearing any particular one of them and so I’m careful not to convey any plot-critical information in them - but I think they do more than almost anything else in the game to reinforce the impression that this is a large, vast, complex world, and that there’s a lot more going on than just the single story in front of you. The world is filled with other souls, each with their own hopes and fears and desires, and they exist as entities independent of your own observation.

The Shadowrun Returns engine isn’t particularly well-suited to supporting banters, but they’re important enough to me that I hacked together a system to support them. As in Corona, I relied on a combination of global-level variables to track which banters had been heard, along with scene-level triggers to check the validity of each banter. One thing I was dissatisfied with in Corona was how deterministic it was: banters were checked in the same order, so you would always exhaust earlier banters before reaching later ones, which meant that some of them were much more likely to fire than later ones. In Caldecott, I used some more trigger-fu to come up with a truly random banter system, so even if you replay the game bringing the exact same companions you may get unique banters.

HALFERVILLE DIALOGUES

Most of these focused on your companion characters. These are fairly meaty arcs, similar to the ones you have with crew members in Dragonfall and Hong Kong. You unlock later conversations as you play more of the game, gradually getting to know your companions better and earn their trust.

As with so many elements in Caldecott, I drew on BioWare for guidance here. The official HBS campaigns use “trust” to track your relationship: basically, the more you talk with your companions, the more they like and respect you. I wanted to try and involve players a bit more deeply, to think more carefully about what each companion was really after. So, I use a system of “favor”. In each main Halferville dialogue, you’ll be asked to make a choice or react to a pivotal piece of information. Based on your response, you’ll either gain or lose favor with this companion. Over time, this will shift their opinion of you, growing warmer or more hostile.

This is mostly a roleplaying matter. I deliberately avoided a system like that in Dragon Age: Origins, where there are in-game mechanical benefits to maximizing favor; BioWare abandoned this themselves in later games, which makes sense, since it encourages munchkin metagaming at the cost of storytelling. At the same time, I did want there to be consequences to your words and deeds, so those are mostly conveyed through the story. Characters speak more kindly to you if you see eye-to-eye with them (or you’ve done a good job at convincing them that you do). If you REALLY annoy them, they’ll eventually leave your party. I’m sure that the vast majority of players won’t ever see that, but I do think that having that option available makes the choices more compelling for the majority of players who don’t choose that path.

Structurally, these are fairly intimate conversations. There’s a lot of back-and-forth between the PC and NPC, and I tried to rotate conversational duties: it’s often the PC’s role to ask questions, but I made sure that there would also be times that the PC is on the receiving end of queries. These generally don’t have long-term impacts, but I think they can help prompt players like me to think through their character’s backstory and personality, which can lead to stronger role-playing and a closer connection to the story and the world.

There are also conversations with other NPCs in Halferville, which kind of act like mini versions of companion dialogues but with lower stakes. Those other conversations tend to focus more on filling out the backstory, giving more context to the factions and personalities that dominate the Bay Area in the 2050s.

LOVETALKS

I’ll cover these in my romance post. Structurally, they basically branch off of the companion conversations: after you pass a certain threshold of intimacy, you are moved from the “friendship track” to the “romance track”, and get to enjoy another dimension in your relationship.

BARKS

These aren’t exactly dialogues, but they’re still speech, so I’ll include them here. These are small but, in my opinion, effective ways to reinforce characters’ personalities and create fun little emergent moments for players. When one of your companions defeats an opponent, they will sometimes spout a random phrase. Dorbi might say “Ya burnt!”, while Rafik would say “Don’t mess with us!”

I’ve always included these in my mods, all the way back to the very first Antumbra. Much like banters, the engine doesn’t support them all that well, but they’re important enough to me that I hack them in. I came up with a slightly more elegant way of doing them this time: instead of implementing the barks directly inside their triggers, I stored the barks in global variables, and then selected them randomly, much like my new approach for banters.

Corona had interesting barks since the companions were so unusual. Norton was a pacifist, so he didn’t have any barks related to kills; instead, he would occasionally spout a phrase when healing or hasting a companion. Similarly, Hailey almost never dealt direct damage; instead, she would cheer on her drones.

All of Caldecott’s characters are at least decent fighters, so I went back to just doing combat-driven barks here. I wouldn’t rule out adding pacifist ones later, but it’s low on my priority list.

I’ve been thinking even more about barks in the wake of finishing Dragon Age: Inquisition. Partly because they’re so short and general, they lend themselves really well to the emergent stories that players tell themselves, rather than the scripted stories told by the designers. For example, in my main DA:I playthrough, my dwarf warrior tank Aztar romanced the dagger rogue Sera. During particularly intense fights, Sera (a standard glass canon) would sometimes go down; Aztar would yell “Protect Sera!” with a mixture of anguish and anger in her voice. In my head, this was telling a particularly apt and tragic story: Aztar was berating herself for failing to safeguard her lover. In actuality, the game wasn’t trying to do anything of the sort: it was just a little bit of dialogue that would run when the PC saw a companion go down. But the exact same speech makes perfect sense even in the absence of a romance. In that case, the player’s perception colors the same dialogue differently: perhaps reading it as desperation for the party’s chances now that casualties have arrived, or frustration at Sera for failing to protect herself. I think those are some of the best tools in the game designer’s arsenal: offering evocative moments and situations, and letting the player use their own mind to craft larger narratives out of those moments.

WORDS, WORDS, WORDS

Phew! That's it for dialogue. Just for fun, here are some final stats that may be of interest:

The number of words per campaign, rounded to the nearest thousand:
Antumbra Saga: 51,000
Dead Man's Switch: 78,000
The Caldecott Caper: 98,000
Dragonfall Director's Cut: 330,000
Hong Kong: 443,000

Swear words:
Antumbra Saga: 0
The Caldecott Caper: 114
Dragonfall: 197
Hong Kong: 424

I was a bit surprised to see that DFDC and SRHK were so close, since it felt like Hong Kong was much wordier. I think part of the reason is because DFDC needed to duplicate a lot of lines due to the way HBS implemented reactive dialogue. Also, I think the pacing of Hong Kong contributed to that impression: much of the "added" words were to Heoi, so the dialogue sometimes felt much longer because you were getting it all back-to-back.
For reference: The Great Gatsby is 47,094 words long; Nineteen Eighty-Four is 88,942; Anna Karenina is 349,736; and The Lord of the Rings is 455,125. And, yes, this means that The Caldecott Caper is 208% is good as The Great Gatsby.

Capering

As long-time readers of the blog may have guessed by now, I’ve been working on a new Shadowrun campaign! Nothing makes my blog posts dry up quite like spending every free waking hour hunched over a keyboard, dreaming of technology and magic running unfettered in a world much like our own.

So (drum roll) allow me to introduce the latest offering from Antumbra Enterprises, The Caldecott Caper!



I wanted to capture some of this experience for posterity, but also want to avoid the mega-posts that marked my previous efforts, so this time around I’ll try and be a bit more disciplined, writing more posts that try to stay focused on particular topics. My tentative game plan is:

0. This post: Introduction and timeline
1. Writing dialogue
2. Romance
3. Characters
4. Music
5. Community
6. Post-mortem
7. Story
8. Reception

I’ll avoid rehashing any of the points made in my previous posts. For the most part my process remained the same as before… the overall pipeline feels efficient to me, and I’ve gotten better at it over time.

One major difference this time around was the timeline. A few of the ideas for The Caldecott Caper have been floating around since Corona (the third and final part of Antumbra Saga), but I didn’t start actively thinking through the plot for this campaign until Harebrained Schemes’ Kickstarter campaign in January. My tentative plan was to launch TCC shortly before the mini-campaign was released. The mini-campaign was initially scheduled for late 2015; working backwards, I figured that I should try and wrap up my own campaign before Thanksgiving.

I knew that there would be significant changes to the engine, especially for the new Matrix. Much of my pain in modding Shadowrun has been dealing with newer versions of the engine, which inevitably break things, so I decided to restructure my workflow to get as much “safe” work done as possible before Hong Kong came out, so I could focus on scripting and other high-risk tasks on the final engine.

In practice, this meant writing a ton of dialogue and building maps. For dialogue, I was going a bit out on a limb: I’ve been increasingly drawn towards reactive narratives, where the conversation can vary based on the prior actions of the player (rather than a straightforward “Prompt A always results in Response B” structure). This was a bit cumbersome to do in earlier versions of the Shadowrun engine, for technical reasons that are hard to describe here. I reasoned that the team at HBS would have had the same frustrations as me and would have come up with a solution as part of their new engine overhaul, and so I wrote my dialogue (in Google Docs as before) with tentative confidence that I could support reactivity without too much extra scaffolding. (I was delighted and relieved to find my trust rewarded with a simple change/fix that exactly matched my desired behavior.)

I was a little more leery about working on maps, just because I knew I would be missing out on most of the great new Hong Kong props. Still, I knew from experience that map-making is one of my greatest weaknesses, and so I wanted to get out in front of that work as much as possible. Among other things, this meant that I ended up polishing my maps at a much earlier stage than normal. Typically this would be one of the last things I do to my campaign before publishing: placing lights, special effects, decorations, etc. This time, I got that level of atmosphere down very early on. That ended up working out pretty well; I don’t know if I would necessarily do it in that order again, but it did give me more momentum once I was ready to start actually creating the meat of the game.

The testing was also a bit different than before, and, more broadly, I felt a bit more pressure. Antumbra was released in an environment where there were already a dozen other well-reviewed campaigns. By the time of Corona, I had a few dedicated fans, which was wonderful, but still did not feel like the spotlight was all that bright. By now, though, Antumbra Saga is the #2 most popular campaign for Dragonfall, with tens of thousands of subscribers, and I’m increasingly aware that any new campaign will get a lot of attention. Because of that, I wanted to focus a bit more on testing and polishing before releasing the game to the wild; on the flip side, I’ve learned a TON from supporting my campaigns over the last two years, and so have gotten much better at creating content to avoid problems in the first place.

Okay! This is starting to get a bit rambling, which is a good cue for me to cut off this post. Up next, I’ll share my experiences with writing dialogue!