This past month has been a big one for us & Beastieball. I spent a fair amount of time designing, scripting and laying out the game’s ending sequences - and as a result of my labour Beastieball (finally) has an ending and is a beatable game from start to finish!
It’s a major milestone for sure, but there’s still a long road to having a finished video game. Especially because of the game’s open-ended nature, a lot of what we have feels more like an outline that still needs filling in. In particular, I’m most concerned with doing more work on the story and world-building over the course of the adventure. Typically in these newsletters I try to share what wisdom I’ve accrued from experience… but this time I’d like to be a little more candid and share aspects of this game that are still ongoing challenges for us.
The stories in my games are almost always the focus of the project and something we put a lot of care into. I’ve tackled a lot of different game genres and story presentations. Notably, the second half of Chicory presents several major story threads that can each be experienced in any order. After the success of that experiment, I felt more confident stepping into Beastieball with the plan to have almost all of the game’s events be unordered. I’ve never really loved the storytelling in the open-world games that I’ve played, but I was excited to take the narrative design experience I have and apply it to that problem to see what I could do. But I didn’t anticipate all the ways that I’d be challenged by the process along the way!
For starters - because any given event could be visited at any time, each event often has to be written with very little outside context. In my past games, I always had a clear picture of the journey over the course of the adventure; which parts are happy, which parts are sad, what the protagonist is feeling when they first reach a location and what happens to them there. Wandersong, Chicory and Phantasmaburbia all feature dramatic story reveals followed by sections that reckon with the fallout of those events - and that context shapes how small interactions with every NPC was written, the mood of the music in certain areas, etc. While there is an overarching plot which connects the smaller events of Beastieball, we don’t always know where each step of the story will happen for each player, so we don’t get to have that added direction for every area and character in the story.
The protagonist themself is fully customized and named by the player - and has no formal dialogue of their own, so that the player can project themselves into the story. We want players to express themselves through their Beastie recruit selections, their Beastieball strategies, and the ways that they explore - but what we lose is that there is no central protagonist whose shifting emotions and perspective can guide the story. Instead we put the focus on the characters you meet along the way. Ironically, even though this is by far the largest adventure I’ve worked on, it is necessarily constructed out of the smallest pieces of self-contained stories in different parts of the map.
But the challenge that I least anticipated was how much the storytelling is beholden to the structure of the game itself. Because every piece of the story is small and self-contained in different areas, we have to devote an outsized portion of the wordcount just on instructing the player and pointing them in the right direction so that they know what to do next. I’ve hinted at this challenge in previous newsletters, but it’s exacerbated by having so many small “quests” that don’t relate to each other. In larger linear games, players eventually fall into a pattern where they generally know the direction they’re going in, and the game can explain a little less and start to have more breathing room for flavor. That’s not quite the case in open-world games like Beastieball, and at times as a writer it can be suffocating!
In the bigger picture… The best stories are always built on surprises. If you already know what’s going to happen, there’s no suspense or excitement pulling you forward. But games are the opposite; if you don’t know where to go next or what to do, it quickly gets frustrating and boring as you go in circles without a clear purpose in mind. An open-world game where the player can do things in any order therefore needs to establish clear goals for the player in every direction, and at its heart needs to fall into some type of repetitive structure or pattern the player can learn to recognize, ie. “defeat the big boss in each area.” While there are many cool surprises in store in Beastieball, larger structural necessities like these are always exerting force against us.
Every story always comes with its own challenges, of course. And to some extent, it’s true that if the process for anything is easy, then you’re not really doing anything ambitious. But there are also a lot of hidden compromises that come with the decisions we made about this game early on, and we are at the point where we need to accept those compromises and move forward with the best version we can create. There are many amazing things about this game which will only be possible because of those compromises, too. Ultimately we have to find a path and plan that leverages the game’s potential strengths the most, rather than spotlighting its weaknesses. This project has done a lot to show me my limits as a creator, but I’m still loving the challenge and optimistic that at the end of our struggles we’ll produce something truly excellent.
Wish us luck!!!
Wishing you luck! I believe in you and your talented team. And yes, sometimes a compromise or a step back in life can allow for a challenge to solve itself. So why not in game making, right?