One thing I skipped in the previous post on this was a description of The Last Clockwinder's story. You play Jules, a young engineer returning to her childhood home -- the Clocktower -- a giant tree in the middle of a waterlogged planet, and was previously tended by Edea, the Clockwinder. Jules returns with her friend and colleague Levi to save the Clocktower from sinking into the ocean. As she works on this problem, she encounters old recordings of her previous stay on the Clocktower -- when she was a wayward child crashing into Edea's solitude.
Our main narrative units for The Last Clockwinder wound up being audiologs and radio conversations -- two gaming mainstays. The risk with both of these -- audiologs in particular -- is that they can end up making the story feel like an adjunct to the gameplay rather than a cohesive part of it. Story, then gameplay, then story. I found myself wondering at some late stages whether we'd missed the opportunity to try for something more 'interesting' in terms of narrative delivery.
But I don't think that was the case. Not that we couldn't have done anything differently (something I may cover in a future shard) -- but they're mainstays for a reason. They can achieve a lot within many of the resource constraints I mentioned in my last post.
What's more, it's been very validating to see various reviews (user and critical) which have mentioned the 'just enough' nature of the story and narrative delivery. One of the reasons we took this approach was that fourth constraint -- balancing the player's attention. A player could skip every audiolog, multitask while problem-solving, or give them more of their attention. We made sure that nothing in the audiologs was critical to playing the game or having an understanding of the story, even if it would be an underweight one.
The radio conversations were, for the most part, the 'narrative golden path' -- the 'sine qua non' of the story. They represented more of an interruption (though most of the time multitasking was still possible), but were more important to motivating the player, clarifying next action/objective, and moving the story forward. (That's a very 'plumbing focused' take on them; I hope they're also characterful and entertaining in their own right. But, as far as possible, every bit of material had to pull its weight.)
One affordance of both audiologs and radio conversations is that they allowed us to think in terms of short, discrete scenes. That's not always a good thing in games, but the internal structure and placement of these scenes were very clear tools to play with for pacing out the narrative.
Here are a few further snippets that feel relevant here:
Before we knew more about Jules and how she'd map (or not) onto the player character, we knew things would lack a certain dynamism/interplay if there was only one speaking character in the present on the Clocktower. Levi (the 'old hand') was an early addition with this in mind, to provide a foil to Jules and/or the player character. (An alternative would have been to only tell the story through the audiologs -- but this would have wound up remote and unsatisfying, and limited the scope for shaping an emotional arc across the game.)
The original concept for the story was more 'hands off' and about striking mood and tone than about interfacing so closely with what the player was doing and motivating/directing them more explicit. I'm glad we didn't pursue this route in the end, for a host of different reasons -- iteration through playtesting was a key step in validating this. Moving away from that made it easier to give the player more of an emotional anchor on and understanding of the characters and world and better support the gameplay (helping motivate and direct them as the game unfolded). But there are a bunch of details of the world and characters that got left on the cutting room floor for that reason. 100% the right decision, but still interesting to reflect on now.
My original script for the game was significantly overlong. I'll definitely write this up as its own post and maybe even do some side-by-side comparisons on my cuts. The first complete script draft I remember averaged about 4 pages per scene. I got the scythe out and cut that in half, and things still felt too long, so I had to cut it in half again. Really interesting (and vital!) process to undertake.
We underwent several iterations of the script before the game was playable end to end -- all fine and normal. We had to get things down on paper and sometimes with scratch audio before knowing final decisions on various elements (sometimes so that those drafts could inform the decisions themselves). But it was also vital that we actually allowed time for several 'match passes' amid the polish when things were playable. This didn't just mean fixing things that were straightforwardly inconsistent with final game flow -- it meant looking for specific opportunities to exploit that connected the script (which always risked feeling 'remote' and removed from the player's reality due to our constraints) to what the player was seeing and doing in a given space. Again, something I can perhaps showcase in a script comparison, but often it meant replacing a general detail in a line of dialogue -- something that declared or implied something about the wider world, for instance, or a joke -- with something that filled the same role in the dialogue but was rooted in what the player would be seeing or doing at the time. This was another way in which we could mitigate some of the common downsides with our narrative units.