The Last Clockwinder came out on VR platforms last week. I worked on the game, on-and-off, from January 2020 through to right near the end. Specifically, my role (alongside Olivia Wood) was developing the narrative background for the game, iterating on that, and writing and polishing the game's script.
My plan now is to work up a series of these shards on aspects of the development from my perspective. In keeping with the nature of this blog, they're not meant to be finished, polished artefacts. I'm thinking of them more as 'thought sketches' -- a way for me to reflect roughly on the project as much as to surface anything externally. They may serve as a precursor to more developed posts elsewhere or pitches for talks.
One of our main early discussions for The Last Clockwinder was over how to tell the story within the project's constraints. In the main and in no particular order, these were:
Affordances of VR
Representing any text-heavy content in the game, for example, didn't seem like a viable approach. This also informed things like expected play session duration in terms of parcelling out content.
Development resources
These priorities, for instance, made it unrealistic for narrative to demand character models or custom animations. Written story could inform aspects of the art and mechanical design, particularly in terms of influencing things that had yet to be designed, but the visual and mechanical design would need to have a heavy influence on the written story.
(I'm drawing a false distinction here between 'written story content' and the narrative of the game as a whole, because the art direction, environment design, etc. are not separate from the narrative and storytelling; they are it. But: see my original disclaimer around this being a 'thought sketch'...)
We also knew from the start that we wouldn’t be implementing any kind of complex underlying narrative systems. We weren’t going to incorporate branching narrative or have space for the player to make any significant choice in the story. That’s not a good or a bad thing; it was a reality of the game as it could be made, and so it was our job to make the story as satisfying as possible within that frame. Which is to say: making the player still feel like an agent in that story where the nature of their agency had these constraints.
Financial resources
Into which I lump: funding levels, general budget constraints in indie games, and prioritisation of investment narrative vs parts of development that were more critical to realising the core vision of the game. This is relevant in as much as it determined the available 'narrative resourcing' as a function of Olivia's time and mine plus the available time from other members of the team to dedicate attention to narrative. Which, of course, has an effect on what can realistically be delivered.
Balancing the player's attention
This always is (or should be) an important factor in narrative and game design. But specifically here, the heaviest emphasis was on the strength of the core mechanic and puzzle design. Those elements would be giving the player a lot to think about (and marvel at), and the core audience the game was targeting wasn't necessarily one who were automatically invested in narrative. 'Storytelling vs mechanics' is a false dichotomy, but we also wanted to be realistic about the game's audience and bring that mindset to decisions around the storytelling.
In the next post, I'll look at our approach to some of these constraints.