The Last Clockwinder's playtesting process provided an excellent means to probe and iterate on the narrative. With scratch audio we put together in the game, the managed playtests Pontoco ran were a chance to see how players were responding to the narrative.
A big focus for this process was comprehension. The story-world of the Clocktower, the Clockwinder, and the history of Jules and Edea in particular had a lot of different elements which we needed to get across without stating them too baldly or losing the charm and characterful dialogue. We were able to make a lot of well-reasoned changes in response to seeing playtesters actually play the game, at a stage when the script wasn't polished, the audio was scratch (e.g. me doing my best 'Alex from The Expanse' voice for Levi), and the game wasn't playable end-to-end.
This also gave us insight into the ways the players were interacting with the environment and the narrative elements, which helped us reposition or resequence the audiologs between and within rooms to manage that flow a little better.
Here are some key ways in which we responded to this feedback.
Simplifying the story
Things started off too complicated. This was mostly about the makeup of the story-world and 'rules' of the Clocktower. I think this was partly just a desire to make the story seem maximally interesting on paper during development, and partly as we tried to link together key threads from the story with what was being depicted in gameplay.
We did a lot of work, sometimes quite painful and difficult, to rationalise the story-world and the story itself. Collapsing or omitting plot beats; coming up with new explanations for things; working out what things could afford to be ambiguous to the player and what couldn't[^1]. The key here was not being attached to any one vision of it over time -- accepting the necessity that things would change (while still caring deeply about the story). Though it could be particularly difficult to really 'see' a new version of the story, since it was a kind of palimpsest of all the versions that had preceded it.
Being more explicit
I said before that we didn't want to state things too baldly or lose the character/charm and feel like we were hitting the player in the face with LORE and MOTIVATIONS. But there had to be some give in that. As always, what's obvious (or even banal and uninteresting) to the people immersed in a thing is not so to a first-time player. Recognising that was important, as was realising that some things that had become routine to us could be interesting revelations to the player taking their first steps into this world.
In practice, this equated to a) working out what these essential factors were ('the tree is called the Clocktower and is meant to safeguard endangered plants'), b) saying these more explicitly, and c) saying them enough times.
This could turn into quite a mechanistic process -- 'find 3 places to say that thing in the first five scenes' -- or inform revisions to ensure we weren't missing opportunities to underscore key details. Both get smoothed out in polish, but literally doing script passes where the goal is 'use Jules's name five times to ensure the player knows who they actually are' means you have the right bricks in place.
Cutting, cutting, cutting
I mentioned in the last post that I cut the script down to roughly 1/4 of 'average pages per scene'. That was vital. Too great a volume of material, no matter how good or characterful, can end up obscuring what you need them to know to understand the 101 version of the story. Slimming down the number of lines and how long each one is helps the most important stuff stand out to the player.
Obviously, there are limits to that, and you don't want to suck all the joy and whimsy out of the script, but the limit is usually much closer to the bone that one would naturally assume. To paraphrase something Stephen King says in On Writing: 'But it's good' isn't an argument against cutting something. It's supposed to be good -- that's your job as the writer. 'Good' should be the baseline.
Cutting is valuable for plenty of other reasons. It puts more trust in the voice actors: they can make a line that seems simple, even boring on paper sound great -- usually more easily than a complicated line. And short is usually just better -- I think knowing how much you can say in how little space is a foundational skill of the craft of writing.
Squint Factor and Overindexing
Two additional factors in the iteration process from playtesting. Playtesters and their feedback were invaluable, but we had to account for squint factor, particularly with regards to the voice acting. Our scratch audio was of servicable quality, but it was not recorded by professionals. The presentation and quality of it was also different from how it would be in the finished games. We had to consider what feedback might just be 'taken care of' by the switch to professional VO. (But also not let that stand as an excuse not to address something that could be improved in the draft.)
Likewise, it wasn't necessarily the right move to make a change in response to every single piece of feedback.
- Every player and playtester has their own unique context
- It's resource-intensive to be constantly making these changes
- Some feedback might contradict other feedback
- Our own vision of the game and its story was an anchor point worth protecting to some extent
[^1]: And not 'ambiguous' in the sense of 'vague', but drawing the distinction between what we had to have them understand and where it would be okay if they got the wrong end of the stick/weren't clear on our own version of things.