I started working on Fractal Space about 5 years ago, for the mobile version of a game that was still in development but live at the same time. That was the big challenge, as the developer had released an early version and players were absolutely loving it, BUT there wasn’t really a plan for a story. The developer is leaning more towards C# than prose and he could sense that his game needed a story to infuse some life and a stronger identity into his game so he asked me to do it.

My first task was to understand what players already loved about the game and the universe, then look at the gameplay itself, what are we asking of the player? This allowed me to identify a theme and controlling idea that fitted this atmosphere he had already created. From there, I built a story that would accompany the player through Fractal Space maze of puzzles, provide break when the puzzles are hard, use joke to give him clues and add a layer of meaning to what the player was doing.

Today Fractal Space has 700k downloads on Android only and a 4.7 rating and many players love its original story which, while preserving its lighthearted tone, helps players reflect on the power of choice and the importance of balance in life.

As you can see, the writing part is pretty low tech, what I need to have is a file name, a short description of how or when to trigger that dialogue and then the characters who speak. After that, once everyone has reviewed the lines and is happy, I integrated them in Unity. In this case using a custom system created by the devs themselves.

Each chapter of FS corresponds to a major plot point and has an associated theme that strongly binds the art, the level design and the story together. Our goal is to tell a story without drowning the players in words, to do that we use the level design and the activity or actions we request of the player as a story telling tool. For example, there is a chapter about loops and patterns, the idea here is to discuss how we tend to repeat similar patterns in our life and how that blinds us and blocks our progression. In this chapter, the player goes through a series of rooms that have the exact same shape, but to solve them, he needs to break the previous pattern every time. For the last one, he needs to run in a straight line, move forward, which echoes the very first line of the game and our key message “The shortest distance between now and then is a straight line between two points.”

In FS, level design and stories are tightly knit together and it is their combination that allows us to tell a powerful story of escape, choices and growth.

Time to let the players speak:

5 years after the mobile version, I’m working on a new version of the same story for the PC and console edition of the game, with plenty of new rooms and new player tools. To be continued…

You can download the game demo here

The chronology is an important aspect of the lore that helps the writing team both get inspiration for writing missions, and maintain an overarching consistency in the universe we develop.

3.5 million years ago

TLDR:

• Humans lived under the protection of an Alien race
• Humans betrayed Aliens and stole a secret knowledge and tech
• Humans turned this knowledge into a massive weapon and destryoed a planet
• Some of the humans survived and fled
• We have lost the knowledge of what happened then and of how humanity developed after.

Humans came to Phaeton from Earth. The fifth planet was inhabited by an intelligent pacifist species who had achieved high technological development. For several thousands of years, they lived a peaceful life. These aliens had a tool they used for travelling, they shared only part of this tool’s secrets with what resembled a human race who had recently discovered their planet and it allowed them to travel faster as well as use long distance instantaneous communication. However, they refused to share the technology allowing instantaneous travel, fearing they would misuse it. Years passed, and the humans grew jealous of the aliens’ knowledge. They started resenting the fact they held knowledge from them so they stole their secret.

They needed a Navigator. Navigators are people born prescient enough to access another dimension and guide the ships to the right location. To upgrade the structure of their port and be able to teleport objects, the humans needed Navigators but it seemed only aliens had this skill. They kidnapped alien children, studied them until they managed to create a serum that allowed them to modify human children so that they would adopt alien characteristics. The aliens eventually realized humanity’s betrayal and grieved their generosity along with a consequence they can foresee but not stop.

As they had anticipated, humans built a canon allowing them to teleport void and create super massive implosions. They destroyed the fifth planet and murdered the race that had been their host for the last millennia.

Today, no one knows if some aliens managed to escape, we only know humans did, leaving their slaves and prisoners behind in the midst of the chaos they created. Planets’ orbits changed, moons fell, meteorites crisscrossed the sky for thousands of years. After their tragic mistake, humans struggled to flee the solar system. The abandoned ones, the low caste that stayed behind flew to Earth. Many died in their ships crushed on the unpredictable trajectory of various stellar objects. Those who reached Earth dug underground cities and lived there waiting for the sky to stop falling.

800 years ago

TLDR:

• 3 terraformed planets: Earth, Mars and Luna
• All scrambling for resources and stations are overpopulated
• Political tensions are brewing

Population has reached its maximum on all 3 terraformed planets. Mercury settlement is still not complete and more people than it can host are waiting on orbiting stations. Only Mars has regulated its population and its resource consumption drastically, but Earth which used to be the most hospitable planet now requires oxygen from Europa to be pumped into its atmosphere. Earth has overshot its population growth target and its resources consumption target alienating Mars against them as Martians are forced to take on more and more refugees.

Luna terraformation is underway but in Mars’ opinion it’s costing the system more than the benefits it will offer. A magnetic line, the lift, is drawn from Luna to Earth in order to guide shuttles for sending colonies outer space. Governments agree that the outer solar system is the future and it needs to be conquered to solve this issue. Mars is taking the lead and outer exploration is voted a priority against Venus terraformation, energy corporations are securing government funds to be able to send ships to Jupiter’s moon within 50 years. More and more people are accumulated on generation ships while waiting for a hospitable planet, there is a new generation of people that has never set foot on a planet in their entire life.

700 years ago

TLDR:

• Technological advance allows to explore beyond the belt
• Resources of the outer world appease a little bit the political tensions between the planets’ governments

Human race achieves faster propulsion making possible the exploration of planets beyond the asteroid belt. We start by sending penal colonies leaving from Mars to Europa and Callisto providing the initial workforce for the Outer Mining Stations OMS. Europa’s goal is to sustain the water needs of the inner planets. Earth is on the verge of collapsing and has stopped supplying Mars which terraformation has taken 200 years longer than expected and which weather is still not regulated to support the water needs of its colonies. The last resources are used to send generation ships beyond the asteroid belt and the first long range ice haulers. The success of the Europa probe ship eased the tensions between Earth and Mars and successful negotiations lead to the first settlement a year after with regular shuttle supplying both planets in water. The resources in the outer world were more than the governments had expected, more probe ships were sent and returned with promising results.

[…]

25 years ago

The outer government has evolved into an oligarchy. A totalitarian regime takes over the inner planets and decides to start mining the Belt for resources they can’t obtain otherwise. An Earther preservation project that scientists have long been working on launches the Arch, the first massive space animal station where 7 animals of every remaining species on Earth embark.

8 years ago

Our player was fighting for the Inner Alliance to protect Deimos and its neighboring stations when it is blown away and his fleet is sacrificed by missiles sent from Mars. The player refuses to die for a government that betrayed him and he flees to the Belt saving the civilians he can bring onboard. One of them is Norma Vacen, an engineer from Khors and her team. The player finds a new home in Pallas, fixes and repaints his ship. Branded a traitor, his crew becomes his family and they can never go home. He finds work in the Belt more easily than he would have thought, legal or almost legal contracts, escorts, deliveries, protection missions. Life is not bad. One organisation has tried to recruit him, Ceres Republik, their propaganda is intensifying, they have started building stronger defenses to protect the Belt, mostly from abusive mining from the Inners They’re always looking for good soldiers and good pilots. But even if they are an anarchic organisation, they’re just another organisation. The player takes contracts from them but he is not pledging allegiance to their group. What did he learn? Live for yourself and for your people, never trust a government to make the right decision, the people are just gun holders to them.

Present time: year 3479

Kaden Doran is taking various contracts to transport resources around the Belt and safely escort civilians. He has no affiliation beyond money.

The constraint of this exercise was for each episode to be only 6 pages long. Below is the first episode of Shadowplay, our online comic.

After having validated a summary of the story for this episode with the creative team, I wrote the description and dialogue of each panel before sending it to the artist who would add his input (in red in brackets below) on how to depict them. We would iterate and agree on this document with our art director before starting the storyboard phase.

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After I worked on the comic book and user research for this project, I took on more writing and narrative design tasks including character bios and an update of the main story arc. Later on, I developed missions and lore to fit the new art direction taken by the project.

Julia

“What in Suvarovs underpants is that? Is that..? It is! It’s a Mark II Arkwright Battlecruiser! I’ve only heard about them – rumored to have impenetrable IDF shields. Coincidentally – much like Suvarovs underpants I suspect.”

Motivations

Julia McIntyre is the player’s friend from the prologue. She’s a free-thinker, cheeky soldier who joined the Mandate corps because erm… free travel?  She didn’t care for the cause, but her lust for adventure couldn’t be quelled, and this seemed like an exciting enough opportunity. She doesn’t particularly trust the Mandate or the Empress nor does she care for the chaos of the rebels or the greed of the pirates. The only one she is fiercely loyal to, is the player.

Words that describe Julia

• Carefree
• Fun-loving
• Loyal
• Brusque
• Honest
• Unafraid
• Foolhardy

Background

Julia has always had a problem with authority.

When she was young, she lived on Victoria, in one of the many cities that cover the planet. Her mother was always a bit of a wild one, and she ran off when Julia was five to join up with a band of space pirates, leaving Julia to be raised by her father, a quiet man who didn’t know what to do with his high-spirited daughter.

She joined a street gang, mostly out of boredom. Their leader grew nervous of her recklessness, saying she was going to get them all arrested. This came to a head when she arranged to steal the Blackstar Diamond during a speech given by the Europan delegation on how to minimise the environmental damage done to the planet. The Europan’s brought the diamond as a symbolic gift, meant to symbolise a clean start, a fresh approach to environmental affairs. Julia stole it. And dumped it in toxic waste as a message to what she saw as “empty promises and hot air aimed at distracting everyone from the terrible conditions under which we all live.”

The leader of the street gang wasn’t happy with any of this, but Julia challenged him and took over the gang, turning it into an infamous criminal enterprise.

Soon she realised she had done everything she could on this planet. She took after her mother, and her gaze was drawn to the stars. She wanted to see the galaxy. To explore. To meet new people and bask in the sunsets of a thousand different worlds.

Unfortunately for her, being the leader of a gang would never buy her a ticket out of Victoria. However, the Mandate corps would and that’s how she joined. “Free travel, eh!”

What Julia saw as her sense of adventure and lust for life soon earned her a reputation as a brave (or foolish, depending on whom you asked), risk-taker (or a danger to those around her, again, depending on whom you asked.) She worked her way up to a Captaincy and was put in charge of a fully-staffed ship.

During her first month as captain, she was involved in a battle with the rebels. Her ship had been hit by a focused EMP burst and it lost all power. Her crew was dying slowly as the oxygen pumps stopped working when the Player led a team into her crippled vessel and saved her crew, getting them to safety first (at her insistence).

Sadly, the rebels had boarded the ship by then. Julia told the player to leave her behind, but he refused. He went back on his own, and he and Julia fought their way through the ship, killing rebels as they went.

Since that time, she and the Player have been very good friends, (of the bickering/bantering kind) but don’t let that fool you. They would die for each other.

More on this character:

Julia was my very first character design before I started getting mentoring and taking writing crash courses. She is a character written with intuition and based on the needs of the team. What did we need to know when we started working with her? We needed her role and we needed to know how she would sound, what was her tone and personality like. We wanted a badass, unafraid rebel to incite our player into action and that’s exactly what Julia does. If you compare it to the later characters that I wrote you will see that she does not have the 2 parts bio, she does not have the archetype explicitly yet, although she is very clearly the outlaw. You find both her strengths and weaknesses in the descriptors.

So why changing the format of the character design over time and why putting inconsistent formats in the portfolio you ask? Ha-ah! Because, it’s good to be a writer and to think about consistency yes I promise I do that too, but when you’re a game writer your main goal is to be part of the team, especially if you work for indie companies, you need to adjust to what they need. You don’t need to compromise the quality of what you deliver, but if your document is so long that no one else in the team will read it, what are you compromising there when you do that.
Writers must show flexibility! We’re often seen as the romantic, imaginative loners of the team, we’re often introverts, we like to communicate with documents more than in big meetings and when we’re asked when it will be ready it seems to us like a crazy question but we’ll give them something. All this may very well be a stereotypes but even if you’re an extrovert, adapting so that your communication is spot on is key in game writing, so don’t stick to one character design format, work with what works for your team and create a collaborative document. It is the form, what matters is that you convey the content!

I defined with the creative team the themes and the controlling idea we wanted to develop in 50 AU, a space opera RPG. The goal was to identify a theme that would fit a gameplay focused on large space battles and an art style that mixed high-tech gear with the future of piracy.

The themes that emerged were around geopolitical conflict and the search of a new habitable planet. This goal was set by politicians years and years ago, before humanity developed its new space identity, and it was never updated. In the current day of our player, a single planet could never sustain the whole of humanity as it grew after generations of space exploration.

This provided us the setting for leading our players into massive space encounters and skirmishes alike.

2 quotes helped us build the themes for the game:

“Every organization rests upon a mountain of secrets” – Julian Assange

“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.” – F. Nietzsche

The controlling idea for our story was people federate in larger and larger group, power dynamics emerge and corrupts those systems, derailing them from their initial good intentions.

I used values from the table below to ensure consistency in our story.

People can be trusted	Middle size organisations can sometimes be trusted but you’ll find out they had a personal interest in it that resembles one of the governments
Individuals who look like people but are part of governments look like they can be trusted but they cannot	Governments cannot be trusted

The goal of this table was to help us ensure that no mission would contradict the controlling idea, while giving us a framework to develop a variety of characters and missions that would illustrate the concept in each cell.

Once this step was done, I went on to write the story arc with the main plot points, then I detailed each mission around its role in the main story arc.

Below is an example:

Plot point	Location	Type	Mission steps	Key sentences
Starting point	Deimos and the belt	Cinematic	PP1- Player works for Earth government. PP2- sent to a conflict PP3 – realizes his crew has been sacrificed and him betrayed PP4 – escapes with his crew to the belt PP5 – branded a traitor becomes a smuggler	Those ships… no those ships aren’t Martian…
Mission 1	Belt	Exterminate	Because of resources issues some inner ships are mining the belt, The belt is a neutral area, nobody is supposed to exploit it. You are asked to find who is doing it Your main character recognizes inner markings and inner ships in an outer belt area. No pity, you have to burn them down, they just shouldn’t have come	Fucking inners! Like they haven’t screwed us enough, they think they can come and mine here, and nobody will fight them off. I say we teach them a lesson!
Mission 2	Saturn	Delivery	A rumor from years ago says the rebellion on Deimos was staged, by a corp wanting to break free from the inner government. Player takes a contract for the corp after saving one of the scientists in the team. The ex-Martian corp is paying you to retrieve a package from the outer and deliver it to one of their new station in the belt. Player learn about Martian mentality Fight pirates to deliver package and head off to Saturn.	Martians! Land of queen bees, we could give them the best of the moons and it still wouldn’t be enough!
Mission 3 Inciting incident	Jupiter trojan	Boss	Delivery mission for Ceres. Taxi the scientist from one asteroid in the trojan back to Ceres. Meet Dust and learn about the fifth planet destruction and that Kuiper’s confederation tried to kill her. Pick her up, fight off Outer ships, intel about the Ancient civilization and the technology that destroyed the 5th planet. Kill the boss and go home. The boss here is a Kuiper sergeant that has managed to track her in the trojan which is Kuiper territory, he’s calling her a traitor and asking our player to deliver her to him. Because of your own history with the inner government you know what they mean by traitor, they threaten to attack your ship and won’t back down so you destroy them.	Long before us there was a fifth planet, a peaceful civilization, an ideal world, and someone came to blast it away leaving chaos behind them.I will find out why!

Below is a sketch that summarizes the balance between missions where the player feels trusts or distrusts as this is the main sentiment we want to manipulate to build tension and emotion in the story.

The game is a cyberpunk RTS where cinematics are key to delivering the story of the game along with lore pieces: short stories that the player can read in between his games. The intro cinematic given as an example below intends to help viewers grasp at the role and the huge reach that a single mega corp has in our world, and it sets a strong cyberpunk tone.

This is a promotional video of the game:

This is the brief for the game intro cinematic I wrote:

INTRO SCENE

EXT. METROPOLIS, SECTOR Z – DAY

Over a black screen.

Narrator

“On February 14th 2250, the NeuroNet launches. The Keeper AI guides hundreds of thousands of users through the largest knowledge library ever created.”

“Over 18 hours, the NeuroNet achieves its one millionth registered user. Over a week, Project NeuroNet has become humanity’s largest success in history.”

Bird’s eye view of a city filled with shiny skyscrapers, we go down to see the rooftop terraces and people in bright coloured bikinis relaxing on futuristic loungers. The camera turns to show the neck of a pink haired gorgeous woman and we recognize a Tesseract plug, zoom in as if we were going down the golden circuit.

EXT. TESSERACT DISTRICT – DAY

Narrator

“The power of its mother corporation, Tesseract, now extends far beyond biochemical engineering as it becomes a state corporation.”

Image of the Tesseract building with an immense screen changing from one logo to another, illustrating its status upgrade.

EXT. SECTOR X – DAY

Black screen. The music changes to something darker, ominous and accompanies the transition to a more limited colour palette of faded pink and purple.

Image of the devastated city with buildings crumbling and sirens blaring. It’s raining a polluted rain.

Narrator 

“6 years later, an unknown entity leaks protected information, proving the security of the network had been compromised.”

View of Tesseract police cars racing through the dark alleys and bystanders continuing to walk, their hood drawn, looking at the cars only sideways.

EXT. THE CLOUD DISTRICT – DAY

Narrator 

“The Keeper AI is now running autonomously and opens information contained in the private sectors to all.”

Image of people lounging in basement cheap chairs, smiling sick smiles. They look as if they were on acids, getting their brain fried over information that pours through their plug from the previously locked sectors.

EXT. THE UNDERGROUND SECTOR Z – DAY

Narrator 

“No one is guiding you through the maze anymore. No one is regulating your access anymore. Everyone’s life, secret and memory is exposed; if you can find it.”

Big transition (strong music beat with a change in the lighting. We travel through the alleys at top speed and stop behind a hooded figure standing on top of the stairs in the pouring rain with a pink neon sign blinking behind them. They pull a small plug out of their sleeve and bring it to their head and before it plugs in, we end the video.