I wasn’t sure if I should be writing this. When I was thinking of ideas for Equip Story newsletters, my instinct was to celebrate yesterday’s launch of Clone Drone in the Hyperdome, the VR game I’ve been working on since February. But I had a nagging doubt. Equip Story is about figuring out the most fun and enjoyable way to make art free from capitalist constraints. So why would I write about my day job? My position as a Narrative Lead at Doborog Games is my capitalism umbilical cord. My wife and I rely on that money to eat and buy clothes and pay off our kooky creditors! This gig was very much an exercise in capitalism, not a spontaneous outburst of unprompted creativity.
Here’s the thing, though. I had more fun working on Clone Drone in the Hyperdome (CDHD) than I’ve had on most gigs and even many personal projects! Granted, the game took a lot of hard work to put together. I’ve never had a jobs that wasn’t frustrating or exhausting at times. On the whole, though, my experience making CDHD was a joy.
I want to take stock of what made the process of CDHD such a terrific overall experience, so I can apply these factors to future Equip Story games.
Artistic Freedom – Our creative director, Erik Rydeman, put a lot of trust in me when it came to the game’s story, characters, and worldbuilding. From the beginning, he said he wanted to give me the narrative tools I needed, so I could treat them like a blank canvas to paint on. That’s pretty much what writing the story felt like. To be clear, he had feedback for me to incorporate. (High quality story notes for a designer / programmer without a background in storytelling.) And there are creative and budgetary constraints on the type of story you can tell when entering a project already two years into development that’s fast approaching its ship date. That said, I can claim a lot of authorship over who the characters are, the words they say, the way the story unfolds, and how the underlying relationship systems work, which feels really good!
Unique Challenges – The best thing about being a narrative designer, in my opinion, is that every project has unique challenges. Rarely do I encounter a gig that’s formulaic or “cookie cutter” in terms of how the story is built. Doborog Games not only challenged me to create design docs, story outlines, branching dialogue, UI descriptions, and even assist with voice casting and direction, but I also performed mocap in the game. A lot of it! Anytime our main cast speaks outside of combat, I was effectively puppeteering their models in sync to the recorded dialogue track using proprietary tools Erik developed himself. In total, I believe I recorded over 3000 unique animations! As someone who has admired Jim Henson and the Muppets my whole life, it was remarkable and unexpected to take on a puppeteering role.
Creative Collaboration – Brainstorming with Erik was great, because we have similar creative sensibilities. His feedback was always on-point and helped my writing better dovetail with the game’s core mechanics. Doborog has assembled an incredible team. It was a pleasure collaborating with everyone! Whether it was giving notes to our genius artist Isaac on his instantly lovable character designs, offering feedback to our level design wunderkind Dylan, or figuring out how to make impossible schedules work with our intrepid producer Ayla, Doborog is a collection of all-star talents who act like team players. Being able to bounce off this group has been invigorating.
No Crunching – Doborog had a hard deadline for release. My early drafts of the game narrative inadvertantly would’ve added mechanics and systems to the game that, while not difficult to build, would’ve taken the engineers time we did not have. I voluntarily suggested we cut the features and scenes I proposed to make sure the team would’ve have to crunch. Everyone on the team was aligned on this. Rather than work insane hours to add “nice to have” extra features, we focused on the core gameplay experience and scaled the work down, so that it could be completed in the appropriate amount of time by the team. You know, ethical shit!
CDHD wasn’t all sunshine and robo-lollipops. There were difficult days. Even without crunching, deadlines still stressed me out. I had less than a year to develop the story, write the character bios, write the lore, write the script, design (and redesign) the relationship system, oversee casting and all voice record sessions, mocap all the dialogue, and QA the narrative. It took a lot of focus, scheduling, and in the case of mocap, literal sweat equity to make it all happen in such a small timeframe. I wish we had more development time for the narrative, but with future updates, I hope we can add back some of the stuff we ran out of time on.
The story of CDHD is about a robot forced by a maniacal boss to win a death sport by killing their fellow captives. This gig was the opposite of that! I felt like a human who was encouraged to work creatively and collaboratively by a very chill boss. I’m definitely going to look to these tenets – artistic freedom, unique challenges, creative collaboration, and no crunching – as I develop the ideal creative process for my own work. Thank you, Doborog!
🎲 Your Turn: Have you ever had a great job? A job that was creatively fulfilling, fun to do, and/or you had great co-workers? I bet there are more takeaways we can find from good gigs. Tell me about your best job by replying to this email, or tell the whole world by hitting the orange button below.
🔌 Plugs: CDHD is out on Steam VR and Meta Quest and it’s getting great reviews! Erik and I were interviewed on Meta’s blog about the release, and our social team put together a video we would’ve called a “featurette” back in DVD times, where I praise our incredible voice cast.
📨 Next Week: After The Phenomenals launches, we get an evaluation from Dorian’s number crunchers.