Narrative Balance

This past summer, I implemented dialogue in Chronoblazer for the very first time. The implementation itself wasn't without challenges, but I found the most interesting aspect of it was the impact it had on how the game was perceived and understood by players.

Quick Plot Summary

Players control "Subject 4", the fourth person to volunteer to be the pilot for the Trailblazer project. Trailblazer is run by a small team of scientists, engineers and mechanics. They have discovered time travel very late in a war, after their side has already lost. Time travel is made possible using an element called Flux, which is already a common energy source in this world and a large reason the war is being fought in the first place. There are limitations to Flux time travel - it requires large bursts of Flux energy in the past, and you need to know exactly when and where they occurred. So, gameplay begins in the ruins of a reactor core and new checkpoints are unlocked by destroying other Flux reactors.

Subject 4 has no memories of her life before Trailblazer or of her missions so far. Her support crew, Molly and Dez, are hoping for a breakthrough with her but are tired after months with very little progress.

We begin the game just as Subject 4 begins remembering her time in the past, which allows Dez and Molly to start guiding her toward undoing the damage caused by a massive explosion triggered in the past called the "Dread Blast". Players encounter the Dread Blast during gameplay as a slow moving wall-of-doom that pressures them to move forward.

From early on, I envisioned the story being presented in a number of different ways. Memory fragments that will be presented as short, mostly still-image cut scenes with text. These will fill in the important blanks of our protagonist's life before Trailblazer. There may also be supplementary data that's unlocked and can be viewed between gameplay runs, from a cockpit screen that takes place in the "present-day", post-war period.

Also in the same cockpit screen, there will be dialogue between the player and their crew. The dialogue will give context to what the player is doing, fill the player in on the most important plot details, and provide some light tutorialization. This is the element of the game's narrative that I have been working on so far, with the other pieces to come later.

Before Dialogue

I have been taking Chronoblazer to Full Indie meet-ups (Vancouver area indie game gatherings) to gather feedback off and on for a bit over a year now. As the core mechanics and loop of the game have started to solidify, a handful of things have remained somewhat difficult to explain to players. I had always had the idea in my head that a bit of dialogue about these specific things will solve the issue.

I also had an idea in my head that an objective and story motivation are important to keep players engaged. This is something that has been drilled into me working on AAA games, that you can't just drop someone into a game and expect them to care about making forward progress.

At the same time, I had been showing this game for about a year with no overt narrative content whatsoever. The very last playtest before adding dialogue, I had landed on a couple of things that seemed to keep people engaged and pushing forward. First, I had started showing the shop screen (where upgrades for the ship are purchased, which is super important for the game) immediately after death. For a while before that, you had to press a button to see it from the post-death "cockpit" screen. Second, I had created a map screen that's shown right before you launch into your next run. This lets players view where they've been and plan their route.

With the map screen and the shop screen now front-and-center, I had quite a successful playtest. People seemed to fairly intuitively figure out what they were trying to accomplish. I saw people that sat and played until they had every upgrade and saw the entire map.

So adding dialogue on top of that can only help, right?

Dialogue - The First Attempt

Despite my most recent playtest going well, I still had the impression that the game was a lot to take in for new players. I had an idea to introduce everything gradually, highlighting the amnesiac element of the story and making things a bit more cinematic.

After your first few runs, nothing is explained. You'd never return to the cockpit screen, just respawn and try again. Then it would be a small twist a on your third or fourth run when you learn that you have people watching and working with you, and we introduce the concept of the your "deaths" just being runs in a time loop. Then later, once you actually have enough money to buy something, we show you the shop. The map isn't shown until later either, because for the first little bit we're basically skipping everything on the cockpit screen to keep things snappy and get the player's feet wet.

Oh, and player motivation is important too. So let's explain the war a bit... leave it a little mysterious, but make sure players know why they're going back in time repeatedly to shoot stuff and collect crystals, and why a giant explosion is following them.

When playtesting this version of the game, some issues were illuminated. Holding off on certain features, like the shop and the map, actually seemed to make players confused when they finally do show up. And trying to explain them through dialogue wasn't really helpful. When the shop and map were thrown in people's faces with no context, people picked it up much better than when they were held off on and explained first.

The amount of dialogue was an issue in general, with some wordier bits of exposition leading some players to just skip through. It doesn't help that I added logic that if an important conversation should be shown (i.e. explaining the store the first time you see the store) all the other unseen dialogue would be shown too as part of one long conversation. I was quite proud of the way I programmed this, but in practice it lead to so much exposition all at once that most players skipped it (and then started skipping all the dialogue from that point on).

Finding the Balance

One idea I had liked from the first pass of dialogue was the player's radio cutting out during the very first conversation, allowing it to be cut short and deliver just enough information.

I decided to expand on this idea and use it for more conversations. This gives a reason we won't expect Subject 4 to keep asking questions, which allows the narrative of the game to retain some mystery. Why are you going back in time collecting crystals and shooting things? Will you ever know? Does it matter? In general, the amount of exposition is cut way down and I think the dialogue sequence, as it is right now, is much snappier.

The map and shop are shown right away again too. There's still a bit of dialogue about the store, but it just kicks in as one of several conversations that are seen sequentially, a new one after each of the first several runs. You can have already bought stuff, it's fine. The logic for combining conversations isn't needed either anymore, keeping things short and sweet.

I had envisioned the dialogue being like banter between coworkers from the perspective of a new hire, but I think the correct cadence makes it more like pieces of context picked up from guards by a prisoner with no memories. And that's probably more interesting anyway.

Conclusion

As with all aspects of game development, narrative content is iterative. I have seen this in action on projects I've worked on, so I'm not particularly surprised. But it has been an interesting challenge trying to find the balance between giving the players enough information and reaching the tipping point where it's just too much or things get muddy. I have had to accept that maybe some of the backstory I envision for this game will have to stay out of the spotlight, buried in logs and optional conversations for only the most diehard or curious players to discover. This game seems to demand quick and snappy pacing, and I'm not going to fight against that.