Games are best when they’re weird

We’ve been chipping away at this game about androids and feelings and megacorps for over 18 months. Now there are only 4 days left before Silicon Dreams spills its circuitry onto the Steam store, and we wanted to take a step back and look at what the game was when we began planning, what it has become, and how it’s changed over all that time.

At our core, we’re nutty about narrative (It’s in all our studio bios: we make the weird, off-beat narrative stuff) and our hope with this project was to make a new kind of narrative game that pushes the form into uncharted territory. We wanted to make an experience that allows you to take the story where you want it to go, and that would respond and react to all of the minute choices you made along the way.

Humans are storytellers – and stories

From the very beginning, we knew that we wanted a flexible kind of narrative architecture. We just weren’t interested in telling a linear story. Pretty soon after we started work on it, we hit on a useful metaphor: if a game with linear (or even branching) narrative was like riding down a river and choosing which path you wanted, our game was structured more like a dungeon you might explore in, say, Skyrim. There were certain avenues you might go down, and certain “rooms” that branched off those avenues you might see inside if you had the “key” – or you might miss altogether. And you always had the option of returning to the “hub” and striking off down another “avenue”, and leaving the dungeon (ie. conversation) whenever you liked.

We were set on making a game about exploring (hence the dungeon-crawling metaphor) a person; getting to know their habits and fears, understanding their origin and perspectives on the world, and most importantly, encouraging you to predict and manipulate their emotions as you learn more about who they are. (Check our post “Telescopic to Microscopic” for more about the shift in perspective between Jamie’s last game – which had a very wide narrative scope – and Silicon Dreams, which is focused on only one person at a time.)

How do you program a person?

So how do we design one of these characters? Each one is effectively an entire chapter in a book, so we need some kind of writing/design principles to guide us along the way. 

Think of each character’s personality as a pyramid: at the bottom is the world in which they live. We’ve tried to flesh this out as much as we can given our meagre budget and time constraints, but we feel we’ve been able to convey a lot of the world’s character through aesthetics (hello beautiful cyberpunk skyline) and dystopian news articles. 

That layer directly affects the one above it: the social relations between the characters. We had to ask ourselves who each of these people are: that includes their roles in society, levels of privilege, and relations with others. Are they a hot-shot surgeon? An android who thinks they’re better than other androids? A human with no status but plenty of attitude?

Those two layers aren’t directly accessible to the player – they’re just backstory. But the next two are: first, the actual dialogue spoken by each character during the interrogation, and finally, the emotions felt by each subject as they speak those lines. Both of these are affected by the lower levels of this pyramid, of course: a privileged, arrogant character might not feel fear, only disgust and anger (fool!) when confronted, but a socially vulnerable character might feel fear. The fun thing is how these emotions can colour and affect your reading of the literal line: if a character says “I think it’s time for me to leave” and fear spikes, that gives you a very different reading than if anger and disgust had maxed out instead.

What’s also fun is how you can start adding stuff to a character sort of off-the-cuff, as long as you don’t go too crazy. If you’re writing a character and decide they need to show their sensitive side, you can throw in a reference to a poignant moment and create a whole new conversation topic – effectively one of those “avenues” from earlier. The responses in that topic can then be locked or unlocked by whatever emotional values seem relevant for that aspect of their character, and could even wind up unlocking information relevant to the “main” storyline – the equivalent of discovering that an avenue in a dungeon loops round and takes you back to another part of the space. We had to be careful not to go too crazy with this – the more we unlocked stuff willy-nilly the more the whole character just became undifferentiated soup – but it shows how flexible this kind of system is.

The last delicious thing about this system? The player can move on whenever they want. If they get stuck on a topic, or just bored, they can move on to a different topic or just submit their report at any time – and even if they get the answers horrifically wrong, that isn’t an automatic fail: the game just keeps on rolling. There’s no barrier to progress: the only friction comes from the player’s fear of getting a question wrong, and their curiosity to learn more about the character.

We all muddle through as best we can.

We hope that these systems help players feel like they’re actually investigating these people, excavating their personality one anecdote at a time, rather than picking from a series of pre-programmed responses. If we’re lucky, these characters will seem more alive as a result – but only time will tell!

Despite all the changes to the game – how you play it, how it looks, an ever-shifting release date – we managed to hold true to our inspirations, I think. In this game there’s no right or wrong way to play; it’s a lot like life in that regard. This is a game where you’re put into a situation you didn’t choose with only limited control, forced to interact with other people (without their consent) and you just have to make the best of it. This is a game about making hard choices, about the struggle to choose compassion in an uncompassionate world, and about exploring the strength required to slog through each day in pursuit of your goals, whatever those goals may be. In that regard, the original concept of Silicon Dreams hasn’t changed a bit.

Want to meet these characters? Intrigued by the thought of peeling apart this system to see all the ways it can surprise you? (I wrote the thing and it still surprises me!) Silicon Dreams launches on April 20, so go wishlist it ya silly!