Project Info
Release Date: 5/5/20 (PC), 9/10/20 (Switch/PS4/XB1)
My Role: Narrative Designer, Writer, Composer
Full Credits: Ben Walker (Project Lead / Engineer), Kyla Fury (Narrative Designer / Writer), Jackie Kreitzberg (Producer), Ryan Anderson (Combat Designer), Leo Dasso (Art Lead), and many others. Full credits here.
Published by Versus Evil.
Reception
- Best Strategy RPG of 2020 – RPGFan
“I’m absolutely stunned by how good this is… Grab this with both hands. It’s really solid stuff, a fun story, and a lovely entry-level tactical combat game, and indeed infinitely more accessible visual novel.”
-John Walker, Buried Treasure
“The story is a delight with well paced, snappy dialogue… the relationships between the students weaves a strong, believable background which plays excellently off the more fantastical story.”
-Anna Marie Privitere, RPGamer
“Wintermoor Tactics Club is story-driven in the most beautiful way… I love everything about this game.”
-Alex Southgate, ThatVideoGameBlog
At the time of writing, Wintermoor‘s PC release has a 80 Metacritic and 89% positive reviews on Steam.
Scope of Work
The following work was done in collaboration with cowriter Kyla Fury.
- Planned plot, characters, and themes of 12+ hour TRPG from scratch
- Over 50,000 words of character dialogue
- Designed all story missions, sidequests, and minigames
- Item, enemy, and quest descriptions
- Voice actor briefs and casting
- Commercial copy, including trailer script
- Detailed style guide and extensive localization commentary
Narrative Design Highlights
Player Agency
Since Wintermoor had a very limited scope, our challenge was to give players a sense of choice without causing the plot to significantly branch or requiring new assets.
One primary approach was letting the player write tabletop campaigns. The main character, Alicia, writes stories to help the other characters confront and overcome issues in their lives, which then become playable combat encounters. Because the specifics of these campaigns stay in the realm of fantasy, their scope is very contained and we can let the player customize many aspects. Examples include naming characters, choosing how to reveal a dramatic plot point, and even determining what kind of monster is the villain. (To help keep the art scope down, I came up with the conceit that she only has a limited set of miniatures for representing tabletop characters.)
When possible, we also reflected the user’s choice visually in the setting. Early on, Alicia’s friend asks for help in wording some graffiti, the results of which are written on the wall for the rest of the game. Later on, we introduce a minigame where the player has to draw a poster. The game has no way of knowing what they drew, so the characters respond to it in a noncommittal or puzzled manner. Since players often found this hilarious, we introduced a recurring gag of calling back to the posters unexpectedly during dramatic moments.
Narrative Iteration
From the start of development, I sought ways to receive player feedback as early as possible in order to iterate towards greater understanding and appreciation of the narrative. Kyla and I gave a GDC talk that delves into our process and motivations, but here are a few examples:
- From soliciting feedback on early plot treatments, we realized that it was possible to read its “nerds vs. cool kids” plot as having antisocial themes promoting tribalism. We decided to prevent this by making a prosocial theme into a primary pillar of our narrative and design, and rewriting the plot to express it as well as possible.
- After completing our first draft of the story, we contracted a diversity reader to provide feedback, which was especially important since our main character is African-American and I am not. Rather than anything censorious, the feedback encouraged us to dive more boldly and directly into some of the issues Alicia would face as a minority.
- Our playtests were accompanied by surveys about the narrative at various points. Based on the aggregate responses, we heavily revised the pacing of hints for the plot’s central mysteries so that they would unfold gradually without being either too obvious or too out-of-nowhere. We also extensively rewrote dialogue based on player perception of the characters, to ensure that their development arcs were coming across.
Combat Collaboration
Throughout development, I was in communication with the lead combat designer, Ryan Anderson, in order to foster ludonarrative synergy whenever possible. This included:
- Providing character briefs for both PCs and enemies so their move sets could match their personalities
- Syncing to make combat upgrades as relevant as possible to corresponding character developments
- Designing story-relevant “twists” or “gimmicks” in certain battles
The latter was especially relevant in the final chapter, where I collaborated to design narrative-centric battles that used combat mechanics to culminate the story’s thematic arcs.
The most crucial is a battle against the “Clubless Club.” After your opponents’ clubs were defeated and cancelled, they renounced their identities to form a revenge cult. Since the game’s main theme is about connecting with people different than you to avoid radical tribalization, fighting the cultists isn’t the answer: instead you must connect with them and remind them their lives had meaning beyond their clubs.
Since Alicia doesn’t personally know any of them very well, she must choose another Tactics Club member to speak with each cultist opponent. Each enemy’s moves and dialogue give hints as to their true identity.
Choosing correctly defeats the enemy, while choosing wrong restores them to full health. This rewards players for listening to and learning about their opponents over the course of the game – the battle is very difficult otherwise.
In another late-game battle, an argument between Alicia and her fellow Tactics Club member Colin comes to a head. Colin insists on having a tabletop battle to prove who should be the leader of the club, but Alicia wants to talk through their issues. In the ensuing conflict, the player must damage Colin’s figurine to provoke him and allow for a brief conversation. After three such conversations, Alicia is able to convince Colin to accept his fear of change and avoid making a disastrous mistake.
For the penultimate battle, we wanted to reward the player for Alicia’s many acts of kindness over the course of the game. The enemy – essentially a curse powered by victimization and isolation – seems impossible to defeat at first, but every turn one of your former enemies arrives to help. Their cutscenes contain choices that allow the player to choose the most helpful buffs or debuffs.
Quest Design Highlight: Chapter One Intro
Design Process
In addition to handling the writing and narrative design of Wintermoor, Kyla Fury and I also designed its quests. Here is an outline of our usual process for designing each chapter’s content:
- Kickoff Meeting: Gathering the requirements for the chapter from the narrative and combat teams: story breakdowns, character arc outlines, combat encounters, upgrade rewards, etc. Plus discussing our timelines and resources (art, etc.) with the producer.
- Quest Flow: Based on those criteria, we broke the chapter down into a main questline and optional side content. After some iteration, we ended up with a flowchart like the one pictured below.
- Implementation: We implemented the quest’s flow while the dialogue, battles, and environment were being created.
- Playtesting: Even with just a rough playable of the chapter, early playtesting from devs and trusted testers could identify issues with pacing, clarity, and logic.
Tutorial
The questline that took the most effort was the very first one. Because of shifting tutorialization needs, our first chapter was finalized only late in development. Our design goals throughout for the intro questline were:
- Get to combat as quickly as possible to avoid players getting antsy
- Introduce players to the world, the main characters, and the central plot conceit
- Teach combat with a series of scaffolded tutorials
Eventually we ended up with this structure for the quest chain:
Here are a few of the design problems we ran into along the way, and how we approached finding a solution.
Adapting to Gameplay Needs
Tutorializing combat was our team’s top priority for the first chapter, but the nature of that tutorial kept changing as the design team iterated: the number of battles fluctuated, along with which characters and enemies were involved.
Our first pass at an intro questline used an “in medias res” structure: what better way to get to combat right away than starting mid-battle, in a high-stakes snowball fight? When the tutorial changed from one long battle to a series of small encounters, we adapted by cutting between narrative-focused flashbacks and the present battle, to weave a flow of story and gameplay moments.
However, even after extensive revisions, some problems wouldn’t go away. The flashback structure felt repetitive, and the ambiguity of opening with a context-free battle meant that players went too long without having clear goals or motivations (why exactly is the snowball fight high stakes?).
We ended up changing the opening to begin on an ordinary day where the main character plays some relaxed tabletop games before learning about the main conflict (school snowball tournament). That framing gave combat design a great deal of flexibility, where it was easy for us to adjust the number and nature of the tabletop battles. While it didn’t get to combat as quickly, it ensured that combat would be introduced the right way, which was a higher priority. It also fit the game’s warm and cozy direction better to spend a little time hanging out with the main characters before introducing the admittedly high-concept conflict.
Reducing Linearity
With the intro questline having to juggle a lot of narrative and tutorialization requirements, our first attempt prioritized efficiency over gameplay variety and pacing. It was a rather linear series of walking from point to point between scenes and battles. Playtesters felt impatient for the game to “open up” like it does in later chapters, so we initially tried to streamline the intro quests even further to get them to the open part quicker. But when that didn’t make much of a difference to them in the moment, we instead tried to make the tutorial more dynamic by injecting opportunities for players to explore and express agency.
Experiential Opening: We had decided not to open with combat gameplay, but we could at least open with exploration gameplay. The intro quest begins with the main character searching her room for lost dice, which lets the player explore a bit (and lets us tutorialize the controls for doing so). This exploratory structure shifts more of the content to be opt-in for players. If they want to skip to combat as soon as possible, they can do so (since we guaranteed that no matter where you look you’d find the dice quickly). Players who are more invested in the tone and narrative can instead continue to explore the room and hear Alicia’s thoughts, learning more about her history and personality.
Opening the Campus: Originally the tutorial battles came in a quick series, but we decided to space them out for pacing reasons. Since the battles all take place in one room, we mixed things up by having Alicia search for her absent friends. This helped the pacing by allowing players to wander to their satisfaction and express agency by choosing who to find first. More importantly, most of the critical events in the quest chain took place in the same location, so it was helpful to break players out to the larger campus. It gave players the promise of a larger world with enticing things and people, rather than keeping them confined to one room.
Expressive Choices: The direction of Wintermoor tried to avoid complex branching dialogue for scope and accessibility, so we had to find other ways for players to make choices. First we added a few simple expressive dialogue branches that quickly converge. One example is where the player chooses how to creatively take on a tabletop RPG boss, which inevitably leads to the DM getting frustrated and railroading the campaign back on track – the branch convergence becomes a way to introduce a meaningful character conflict. Though some of the choices are indeed that straightforward, we made sure to teach the player that in Wintermoor seemingly simple or fluffy expressive choices can actually have long-term consequences, which is a pattern we carried throughout the game (see “Player Agency” above). In this quest chain, they help a friend decide what graffiti to draw, and then whatever they choose shows up prominently on the wall for the rest of the game.
By incorporating all these agency-forward tweaks, players stopped wanting to skip past the intro to get to the part where it opens up, because the intro gave them more of what they were looking for.
Documentation
Here are some of the documents Kyla and I created over the course of designing this quest chain:
- Quest Flow Diagram (pictured above)
- Quest List
- Final Script Excerpts