'Sunless Skies': A Narrative Postmortem

[Music] thank you hello everybody I'm Chris Gardner narrative director at fail better games and these are my comically enormous headphones and this is my talk on Sunday skies and what we learned while we were making its narrative so uh we are fail better games we are a small British Indie company of 17 people and we made these games all set in the same universe of weird Victorian Gothic horror we began with Fallen London our web-based text-based uh role-playing game which is still going strong we moved on to sunless sea and its expansions of Mariner which was our first foray into Unity games and most recently we released on the skies the spiritual sequel to Sun the sea

as a company we're known for our writing and the atmosphere of our games which lies somewhere at the intersection of Whimsy and horror and I became narrative director in 2016 about halfway through the zamariner expansion before then I had been a writer and then head writer at fail better so Skies was the first project of this scope that had narratively directed and I would like to talk about the approaches that we took and the things that we learned so some of the Skies is a narrative roguelike RPG um you play the captain of a space train in a world where the Victorian Empire goes to space finds it riddled with Cosmic horror and then makes it worse and the game combines two modes of play a real-time exploration mode where you have direct control over your space train and you fly around and explore and fight enemies and gather resources and

then when you interact with the discovery or dock at a port we switch to an elaborate interactive fiction mode where the player gets to explore the location in a text-based interface sunless guys was well received both commercially and critically here are excerpts from some of its reviews including the poignant and haunting I underestimated the bees from CG magazine and haven't we all at some point in our lives underestimated the bees so this story had a happy ending but at the start of the protests the task in front of us seemed pretty alarming um we knew that it would be a successor to send a c and so it would be similar in a number of ways including that split between real time and interactive fiction modes but the team that started out on Skies was nearly four times bigger than the one that started out on C so we knew we wanted uh less centralized creative Direction more opportunities

for team members to contribute ideas to the game and for departments to feel confident in working more independently and the scale of a narrative task in front of us was was pretty daunting so the it took place in a setting that by then was eight years old and had millions of words dedicated to it um the Fallen London Universe law Bible is about 137 pages long and they are 137 pages of complicated and dense law and we didn't want that to put players off we wanted Skies to be a good entry point into the universe it was also set in a broken unfamiliar environment so some of the Skies is set in space but not as we know it it has wind and sentient malevolent sons and starlight that drives you mad uh so players and ourselves on the team couldn't rely on common science fictional assumptions to make sense of

it it was also we would we knew going to be really big um specifically it ended up being 800 000 words big which is 1.6 woman pieces or the first two and a half Game of Thrones books or 19 seconds of Twitter uh which which is a nightmare we should just stew on for a little while um and so to achieve that we knew we would need to use not only our internal lighters but freelance writers as well and that they would bring their own voices and also have varying levels of familiarity with our tools our law and our approach so today I want to talk about how we got from that very large very terrifying blank page to those lovely reviews and I'm going to focus on three ways we approach this uh beginning with establishing and communicating a tone and I'm going to spend most time on this one because it was quite difficult to get right

I think I should mention that as a narrative driven company story plays a role in development earlier than it may do for many other Developers so for us an early goal was to achieve a firm Mutual understanding of the game's tone that was shared by the whole studio we um we can't expect other departments to have to digest million words of enthusiastic law but even if people don't know all the nitty-gritty if they understand the tone of the game we're at least all on the same page even if we're not on the same line and we used a range of techniques to achieve this foreign so to begin with we established a set of narrative pillars um uh I can't take credit for doing this um this was a recommendation by Michael Adler of BioWare Ubisoft and now Yellow Brick who suggested creating a short list of core principles that we would

use to guide The Narrative of the game and they would have three main functions they would act as signposts to tell us what's important and provide Direction when we were lost they would act as creative prompts to help Inspire new stories and new angles on stories and they would work as tie Breakers in the case of disagreements so that might be a disagreement between two members of staff on what's the best way to go about something or it might be a disagreement in your own brain if you've got two different ways a story could go to help you work out which is the best way to to which which of those options would fit best in the game when it came to deciding our narrative pillars we were fortunate in that uh a couple of years earlier our communications director Hannah Flynn had done a load of work with us to establish a sense of what our work is and what was essential to the games that we made or at least the games that we had made up to that point so we when we started working on Skies

we got uh the lighting team in a room with a representative of the comms team and we looked at all that uh original work and decided what of it we wanted to carry over in disguise what of it we were prepared to lose and what we would replace it with um those last two went hand in hand we there was already a lot of complicated law in Fallen London and send the sea and we didn't want people to have to know that in order to enjoy Skies uh and then half Skies had a whole bunch of extra complicated stuff on top of it so we operated sort of one thing in one thing out policy to try and keep um try and keep it simple we uh from that discussion we distilled it all down into five uh narrative pillars that might be one too many but Skies was a big game so it ended up being okay and these are the pillars that we came up with and they would act as uh

instructions and guidance to the writers and also act as prompts suggesting what sort of fiction to write about what topics to write and we found that they worked best as Punchy even slightly provocative statements like this and let's go through and take a look at what each one of those meant in the context of Summer Skies so the first one stake your claim meant that the player should have the opportunity to leave their mark on the world um they should be able to uh make decisions that would change the state of the world and uh because that Captain can die and then you could create a new captain to replace them that new captain would inherit much of the state of the world that the prior Captain had left behind but it also pointed us towards uh a number of occurring themes in the game uh which would be power grabs and territorial feuds and conflicts between rival competing factions our second pillar was uh who are you in

the dark um and this we this was important to us because we wanted the player to be able to construct a sense of who their Captain was through play and through the decisions that they made uh but then the in the dark Clause there uh made it a little more specific because we were particularly interested in how who you were might change when the laws that you were used to are weak or absent and when the world that you are in is completely unfamiliar and different from the world you left behind our third pillar was conceal your hand and this was a reminder to us to find new angles on familiar stories and to look for unexpected consequences to player choices and we also wanted to layer the world with Mysteries um and the answers to many of those Mysteries aren't explicitly revealed in the text of the game the player has to

find Clues to them and then piece them together themselves and fictionally we knew that we would want to have lots of ulterior motives plots and schemes and big conspiracies uh to address in our stories our fourth pillar was mind your manners and this was important to our Victorian setting to help us emphasize Victorian manners and hypocrisy but it also acts as a reminder to us that the denizens of uh space uh the the victorians would encounter would have customs and traditions of their own uh what would happen when uh the Victorian traditions bashed into those um uh those Celestial traditions and and what would be the Fallout from that and our final pillar was nothing is sacred uh and this was a prompt to us to take nothing for granted um we knew that we wanted in the game's story to make changes to fundamental

human Concepts like time and death so time in Sun disguise is not linear and reliable and uh death is not the end but it was also uh a reminder to us to use both humor and holler um I spoke earlier about how our uh lighting style uh often relies on this combination of horror and Whimsy and both humor and horror contain an element of transgression to them I think and they work very well together you can contrast them uh to create a kind of a more effective sort of oscillation of experience for the player and a well-paced moment of humor can uh underline or puncture a moment of horror and vice versa so I'll come back later to look at some specific examples of how those pillars guided different aspects of the game's narrative um but first I want to talk about how it became obvious to us that the pillars were

great for identifying tone and for having productive discussions about it but they weren't so great for uh communicating it they were too high level too imprecise so to communicate the tone requires a strong narrative documentation that gives uh the people reading it a lot of context so we created a fairly simple set of documents we didn't want people to have to read too much and we started with an introduction to the high Wilderness the high Wilderness is the name for space in our game and that looks at what this environment was like uh and what the player's experience of it would be and once we've done that we moved on to outline the four separate regions of the game um we knew that we wanted four different regions of the game Each of which would feel like a different experience to the player both of those documents we did in pre-production and then once we moved into production we would do a more detailed document on each individual region as uh as we went through

and that let us learn each time we did one we could learn from the lessons of the ones we've done previously the uh actual process for making this narrative documentation was fairly simple as well um I would write an initial draft of them for the detailed documents about each region that would be preceded by a concepting session where a writing team would uh all get together in the room and everyone will be able to pitch ideas for ports and enemies and stories and discoveries in each region and then I would take all that material and pass it into a single a single document when I was working on those documents I was always Guided by The Narrative pillars and tried to draw them out and emphasize them and once they were done I would publish them and invite everybody in the company to read comment and discuss so everyone in every Department could contribute to them

and then after all that discussion and feedback I would take it all and uh incorporate it into a revised version of that document and while we were working through this process we quickly learned some useful tricks um that the aim here I should say was to encourage buying and engagement from all different uh departments to the to the tone that we were trying to create and some of the tricks we developed for doing that uh included uh so the first one was look for recurring feedback uh when people responded to the documents um that might be lots of people saying the same thing or it might be a bit more indirect it might be that a particular topic or concept uh is very easily misunderstood or that you have lots of questions about that single topic and this is useful stuff because the questions that your team asks will also probably be questions that the players would ask

and once you've identified them it's important to address them in the revisions that you make to the document and a couple of useful ways that we found to do that uh included these so first when you identify an important concept State the three most immediate and important things about it um so an example here from our narrative documentation the the team response made it very clear that we needed to concisely convey the way in which the high Wilderness our environment was similar to and different from actual space uh so the way we did that was by saying uh that it was cold like spaces windy like space very much isn't and wonderful uh not wonderful in a nice way wonderful in the sense that a fairy court is wonderful it's fascinating it's consuming it's terrifying and then we would go on to uh specify three things that it definitely wasn't because ungoals are important it is

crucial to communicate what you don't want as well as what you want so in this case the key things that it was important to make clear were that the high Wilderness was not a vacuum that it was not an impartial environment that its laws weren't uncaring like the laws of physics they were laws that were made by Grand sentient entities uh as the result of legislation they were the result of argument and compromise and politics and the third thing that the environment definitely wasn't was easy it was going to be uh frightening and challenging and difficult and the Third Kind of trick we learned uh to make the documentation more effective also was very useful when it came to actually making the game and it was to identify showpiece Concepts which uh are useful for heading off questions and assumptions that people will have when they encounter the game and they also help you communicate what is special about your game so

here's an example I mentioned earlier that the high Wilderness was windy and because that was such an important point that uh space this our space has an atmosphere we really wanted to drive it home so to do this we implemented a number of wins into the game that had mechanical effects So Not only would they push your locomotive about as you were trying to fly around uh but the peacock wind for example caused your food supplies to burst into horrifying growth and like they would grow these disgusting nodules on that were filled with milk and sometimes those nodules would grow little mouths that would sing little songs um so mechanically that would increase the food supplies that you had on board while you were in the wind but it would also increase your Captain's Terror and when Terror got too high horrible horrible things would happen incidentally if you ask your art Department to draw a wind that looks like a peacock you get a filthy look and this so uh you should be very careful what you wish for

um the second showpiece concept that we settled on that I want to talk about uh we implemented this uh very early in the game it kind of made a big deal of it quite early in the game because we wanted to use it to help undermine player assumptions um and it was that time is a resource that is manipulated by the Victorian Empire to achieve the things that they do um and the the aim was we wanted to introduce that early so the player would ask well if time doesn't work how I expect what else might not work the way I expect and we also use this concept to justify a lot of fictional nonsense in the setting it was uh used to explain how London managed to build their empire in the space in space so quickly how the player can travel these vast Interstellar distances how the Queen Victoria managed to manage to retain her power over uh over her Empire and so on and here are some of the ways that we um

we brought that in uh very early on in the game so an early character the fastidious inspector uh it's her job to ensure that it is the same time across all corners of the uh the empire uh despite the fact that different places are manipulated time in different ways and this was inspired by the early train Network in Britain where before the train Network came in it didn't really matter if Manchester was 10 minutes ahead of London um because travel times were so great but as soon as you had a train Network in place and it mattered to the minute when trains arrived and left it suddenly became very important for everywhere in the country to have exactly the same time um and we also put this uh into the economy of the game so a trade good that you can trivially buy or sell at markets is a barrel event season hours so um those are three kind of tricks

that we we learned as we went on to make our documentation more effective effective here means clear concise and digestible uh so now we've talked about that process I want to talk about how we use the pillars to give each region in the game its own distinct identity um so Skies has four regions which you can see here uh this map also includes two of their cities in those regions and each of those regions is linked by a Transit relay which is a big device that catapults you across the sky and we wanted each region to be a very different experience for the player so what we did was we ended up separating them by picking two of our content pillars and saying they were particularly important for that region so our starting area was the reach which is this wild Untamed Frontier originally we intended the game to start in London but the we found that the reach had a more familiar kind of um trading space game experience and it gave players a bit more of a solid

footing to experience the game on when it was they were surrounded by all this other weirdness so uh here we repaired State your claim with who are you in the dark because uh the region somewhere that London is trying to claim and expand into uh so it's full of settlers and gold rushes and Claim Jumpers uh but it's also a place of few laws uh and you have a lot of freedom to choose who you're going to be there and which side you want to be on because the region is driven by a conflict between the independent settlers the tacitis and the London loyalists the stovepipes and the player can choose how they want to get involved in that conflict and while we were doing this it became clear that combining The Narrative pillars with the visuals of the region that we wanted gave us a great way to uh to focus on a different sort of horror for each region and so the horror that we settled on for the reach was the horror of the natural

world and the natural world fighting back and we were inspired by things like the cordyceps fungus which infects ants and colonizes them and turns them into zombies and makes them climb up trees and kill them and then they spread their spores to places the fungus wouldn't otherwise be able to reach and things like those weird deep sea nightmare fish that you see on nature programs but the theme of The Reach was very much that nature is terrible and official weird and an example story that we set in the reach that expressed these themes uh was written by our own James Chu uh and it was about the parsleyville which was London's first exploratory vessel to the reach that uh we met a tragic end and was colonized by a sentient fungus so this is an example of London trying to stake a claim to the region failing and the way James wrote it is a sort of story of sloburn horror that has an ending that is at once quite tragic and rather funny and after it the player has a wide range of choices on how they want to respond to it all of those choices are valid and

all of them say something uh quite meaningful about who the character is foreign was Albion which represents the city suburbs and outskirts of London um so whereas the reach was a Wilderness uh Albion was very civilized and populated and the two concepts here were mind your manners and conceal your hand because we knew this is where we wanted to lean into Victorian formality and politeness and how it concealed ambition and inhumanity this is an Empire founded on secrets and full of plots and schemes and this led us to the concept of social horror which is better exemplified I think in an example Port from the region called the brabazon Work World which was written by one of our uh writers and editors Olivia wood and the work world's obviously based on Victorian workhouses where the poor were essentially imprisoned and uh given room and board but forced to work in in

return for it in very poor conditions so we wanted to take that idea and magnify it so they went from work houses to work worlds and in addition the Empire has engineered it so that time moves quicker on work worlds than outside it so that means you can send someone to a work world and extract a Year's labor from them in a month and people will enter the work worlds as uh young healthy people and emerge from them a few years later as aged and decrepit and this is the foundation of albion's expansion this is how it was able to build itself up so quickly um and the mind your manners pillar comes in because this is part of society this is accepted and normalized by this Society it's even seen as a charitable thing and conceal your hand comes in because the Work World puts on a palatable face and they even allow carefully staged tours of them and the player gets to go on these tours and they will only see the truth if they look for an

opportunity to deviate from the tour and see what's really going on our third region is El eutheria where the sun has rebelled and plunged everything into darkness and this is a place of revolutionaries and pliers where things no longer work the way you expect them to and there's nothing to keep you honest but your own conscience it's a place of Temptation and opportunity and the two uh pillars that we wanted to rely on here where nothing is sacred and who are you in the dark and this all led us to the hollow of the unknown um partly uh of getting lost because when you arrive in El eutheria the transit relay leading back to where you've come from is broken so when you arrive there you are trapped and you have no idea where you are or how to get out uh and the second aspect of the horror of the unknown we explored a lot was the fear of the dark which we explored a lot in the enemy design for the region so there is one class of vessel called the Dowsers

who worship the dark and will attack you if your headlight is off and there is another class of vessel that will attack you if your headlight is oh uh oh I've got that the wrong way around the dices will attack Dives to the worst of the dark so they attack you if your headlight is on and the other class of vessel uh will attack you if your headlight is off because then they assume you're a dowser so your headlight here becomes a banner signaling Your Allegiance and if you encounter both enemies at once you have a decision that you have to make very very quickly foreign we also created the grievas uh which are a monster that is inactive unless your light shines upon them at which point they wake up get very angry charge you and explode into caustic Ikea and one of our writers described them as like being attacked by an angry prolapse which is very much the sort of approach that we we pay her to create and we also added invisible enemies so the undeparted will stalk you throughout the region until they can Ambush you and

they are only revealed when you shine your light on them so together these enemies create kind of competing pressures to have your light on and off to create this tug of war of tension that means you can never quite relax in the region and our final highest level area was the blue Kingdom which is one of the domains of the Dead um so death is not a state of rest or Grace here uh you can recruit the dead as crew uh souls are a currency and it's home to a remorseless alien bureaucracy and uh this led us to the concept of cosmic and bureaucratic Horrors and we found that both those sorts of Horrors work very well together because they both rely on making the individual feel insignificant and one way we explored that in the region was that everyone that goes there is assigned a status and that status determines what ports you can access and also what enemies are hostile to you and when you first write a view of the

invisible status which means you can access hardly anywhere and everything is hostile and you have to gain access to one of the other statuses in order to change that so you might become anti-deceased which means you will be dead one day and it's technically only a matter of time and that makes you like a it's like having a visitors Visa you're basically a tourist in the region uh another uh status was yoked which means you perform some functional service for the bureaucracy but you're kind of like a roadie uh you do important work but you're not meant to be seen by the audience and the last date as well as the ephemera which are basically the customers they are the spirits of the Dead who are being prepared to pass beyond to some unknown uh purpose and Destiny and none of these statuses grants full safety or full access so you do have to switch between them as you explore the area yeah so I hope those examples show how we use narrative pillars to identify tone how we develop narrative documentation to

communicate it and how we used pillars to emphasize the differences between regions and to give the player different experiences as they play through the game okay so having spoken about how we established and communicated a tone I want to move on to talking about how we put an emphasis on effective pitching and how we used effective pitching to ensure that that tone that we had created carried through to the game um I think or I suspect we probably do fewer rewrites than many companies do which is both good and bad and we certainly do do them one mistake we made during the development of Skies was we tried to write too much finished content too early and we were writing ports and stories before we could see what that content looked like in situ and as a result of that our writers James and Olivia had to go back towards the end of development and do quite extensive revisions on the content that we'd written first to bring it uh in line with the sort of content that we've written later

uh but on the whole I think one way we managed to get away with doing fewer rewrites is by heavily investing in the pitching process and by the pitching process here I'm just talking about whatever process it is whereby a writer shares their initial concept for a story and gets feedback on it um for us that generally meant the writer pitching the concept to me the narrative director sometimes with another writer present um if I was writing content I would pitch to one or more other writers um so throughout this section the examples that I gave I refer to writer and director I basically just mean pitcher and pitchy there and exactly who that is will will depend on the specific content and the different company um but I think that a successful pitch has a number of specific goals um the first of which is it ensures consistent tone and storytelling this was particularly important to disguise given the range of voices that we're going to

be providing content for it we wanted uh those different white writers we wanted that range of voices to make the game uh more expansive more inclusive and more interesting but at the same time all the different stuff that they wrote had to fit into the whole it all had to be congress with the world that we built a successful pitch also helps ensure that a writer can do their best work this is your opportunity to identify what a writer needs to write this piece and you can use it to even out differences in writer's familiarity with your law your game your systems and so on and at the end of the pitch both the director and the writer should have a reliable picture of what the final content will look like um so I like to think about a pitch as having three distinct phases to it uh and the first of them is to provide a solid Bedrock for discussion and the aim here is to ensure that the writer and the director both understand the story

that the writer wants to tell so the writer's role during this phase is to communicate the shape of the piece using whatever aspect of it are useful to do so and it can help to run through it as the as the player would experience it meanwhile the director's role is very much to shut up and to listen not talk and let the writer communicate the piece as they want to without interruption and getting distracted um I'd like to just sit quietly and take notes once the writers cut finished you can then move on to asking questions um questions are magic asking a question is often more effective than just raising an observation or criticism um and frankly the writer is the expert on the story here even at this stage the writer spent more time thinking about the story that than the director probably ever will so it is appropriate for the director to approach the writer with a spirit of respect and inquiry not judgment

the second phase is about distilling the pitch down to focus on the core story and to trim away non-essentials uh so the director takes the lead in this phase and their feedback its aim should be to emphasize the strengths of the piece this is a collaborative process not a confrontational one so you should respect the writer's intent uh understand what the writer is trying to do and support it you should also try and remove uh distractions from the piece that doesn't mean stripping out everything that doesn't directly serve the core story because stories are improved by Nuance but do look at how each piece supports the whole um the director should also propose ways to tie this content in with other content in the game the director is the one who has the overview of the content as a whole and has probably seen many pictures from many writers and so knows

what's going on in the rest of the game and the more connections you can make between uh sections of content the more satisfying and convincing the world will see the director should also advocate for the player um so what do I mean by that well the director is the first set of external eyes on the story and so they should look at it from the player's perspective is one ending more disappointing than another could a plot point be misinterpreted is one section particularly confusing is there an obvious option the player might want to take that's been missed out and at the same time um think about if there is any other content that what's been described to you might contradict or conflict with uh again the the director is the one with the overview of the content as a whole the lighter is focusing very much on this specific story and like this so meanwhile The Writer's role during phase two is to advocate for the story

um advocate here doesn't mean defend every decision to the deaf uh what the writer presents in a pitch should be intentionally malleable not a final product so they should hold on to it lightly and they should actively look for ways to improve it to uh they should be prepared to accept and suggest changes to it however uh when a change that's been suggested would hurt the story the writer should be prepared to stand their ground and explain why and this is where the narrative pillars come in because when you have a disagreement like this you can refer to the narrative pillars to help resolve it the third phase is there to ensure that there are no surprises that both the writer and the director are expecting the same thing to come out of this so now the writer's role is to make sure they understand what changes need to be made and they've got a record of them and if there are any lingering uncertainties if there's anything the director hasn't addressed if there's anything the writer still needs now is

the time to resolve them the director meanwhile the first part of their role is to contain the scope um a lot of feedback would have been given and too often it can look like the answer to a story issue is to add another thousand words but no it almost never is um and realistically you need to bear in mind how much the writer will be able to do well in the time they have available for it so the director needs to help the writer prioritize the content so that if the any of it needs to be cut it's easy to identify which bits can be cut uh and the data should also be clear about the changes that you've agreed and revisit and symbolize them just as a belt Embraces method to make sure that you're both on the same page so good pitching we discovered uh has a a number of benefits so it has production benefits it reduces reduces the amount of content that has to be

Revisited and revised um it also makes writing easier uh writing is a painful and usually lonely process a good pitch at least can help make it less painful it anticipates and addresses problems before their lives there will always be new problems otherwise but if you can get rid of a bunch of them early it's much much better and finally um we learned that productive and collaborative pitch discussions help writers develop their skills um they they take lessons from them and then they Implement Implement what they've learned the next time they write something uh and I should be clear that we got to this policy and this approach to pitching over the course of many many many many pictures over the course of developing Skies we didn't start out this strong I think um but we had a lot of experience doing it and so we got here in the end and I think we've benefited a lot from it okay I'm going to move on to my third and final topic now uh which is the

targeted consultations we did to support the narrative in Skies um so to write well about something you need either experience or knowledge and if you lack personal experience or knowledge you need to do research to gain secondary knowledge about it we tend to think of research as reading books but basically it means Consulting expert sources and those sources can be people so in some disguise we did four major consultations um on the following topics we did one on colonialism one on transgender and non-binary representation one on structuring horror Mysteries uh and one on how to invent an appalling Cosmic bureaucracy um that was one specifically intended to help us invent the uh narrative structures for the blue Kingdom that I discussed earlier and we recruited Emily short to consult on that one Emily short is now currently our creative director

um but she's extremely experienced in writing interactive fiction and uh complex puzzles and she has also had to navigate the UK's labyrinthine immigration policies so she has a lot of experience of appalling Cosmic bureaucracies I'm going to talk about a couple of case studies from these consultations to show how they worked and what we got from them um so the first one I want to talk about our colonialism consultation so why did we consult on colonialism well sunless guys was about the Victorian Empire going to space so it was about colonialism whether we wanted it to be or not and therefore it was important that we represent the issues here sensitively and with nuance we approached uh Magna Giants to consult with us on this uh she had already been a freelance writer for us before so she was familiar with how we worked and she was familiar with our setting and the format we used was that we gave

her access to a build of the game and all our narrative documentation uh time to go over them and then we just let her lead a discussion on them and we got a whole range of benefits out of doing this the most obvious one was that we got pages and pages of new story ideas and angles on stories that we never would have considered otherwise uh just so much stuff more than we could ever put in the game it was brilliant um and uh we also received excellent guidance on other sources to consult to deepen our knowledge further a consultation isn't the end point of you trying to gain this information it's often the beginning uh and it gives you a it accelerates the process but it is not the end uh and the other major thing we got out of it was a a concept that is widely applicable to much of our work and that we've come back to again and again um and it's who is paying for this so colonialism tells the lie that its benefits come without a cost but someone is always paying for them Colonial

colonialism and Empire separate the beneficiaries from the people that are paying for something and hide the people that are paying for it from the beneficiaries so it's important that you represent that and that connection uh it's not only responsible but it also makes a great dramatic stories our second case study that I want to talk about was on transgender and non-binary representation um lgbtqa plus characters feature extensively in our games um but if we want to continue providing good representation we have to keep pushing the ways in which we do it um and in particular for Trans and NB characters we'd often struggled with finding the line between being too subtle in their presentation and too bold in it

um so how can we make clear that a character is trans or non-binary without doing so in a way that's preposterous or blunt or ridiculous or harmful um and we approached a body called clearly represent me to run this consultation they were excellent I can't recommend them enough um and the format that we used was a workshop which started with a discussion of several officer stories that we had written for the consultation we knew we wanted these offices in the game we didn't have full outlines for them uh but we wrote up uh some outlines specifically for the consultation um and we wrote them on topics that we wouldn't have been confident putting into the game without expert advice um but the consultation was a safe space to explore them and have fruitful conversations about them and work out how we could make this work

and then after we talked about that uh we went into a consultant-led discussion on other content we'd given them a build of the game that all the Consultants on the panel had had a chance to play it and they'd all come with topics that they wanted to talk to us about we got a whole bunch of benefits out of doing this here's a one that was very easy to do but had a big effect um the Consultants quickly raised the issue of terms of address so the terms of you can choose a term of address for your captain the terms of address that we'd inherited from Sunder C were fine but they were quite gender binary they're like my Lord my lady um there were citizen in there which is very neutral but on the whole they were strongly gender coded so the recommendation we received was to add more terms of address that were either non-gendered or at least less extremely gendered so it was on more of a spectrum uh the Victorian period that we were setting the game in made this difficult uh the Victorian period had a very

gender-coded pattern of employment but we did find a whole bunch of new options uh which are underlining red here though we added to the game and it turned out that these new options were popular with all players not just once hoping to create a non-binary captain um representation improves things for everybody uh another benefit we got was so one of the officers outlines that we had provided for consultation was on the Freeland eccentric here who is a transgender character with Fantastical elements um I'd written an outline that I was not at all confident in but which I thought would probably prompt a valuable discussion and uh when we came to discuss it uh one of the Consultants Ash McAllen uh discussed it very eloquently and then uh immediately suggested like half a dozen ways that we could write the story that were drastically better than the version that I had come up with um just leagues ahead of what the my original

draft um so it became immediately clear that they were the best person for the job so we uh hired her on a freelance basis to uh co-write uh this officer with us uh and she did a great job and Ash would later return to consult with us on other content so consultations can be great ways to find uh people to work with and uh another example of a benefit this is a I include this wasn't this one as an example of how detailed their consultation could get um The Prudent secretary is a character firm early in the game they were very significant early character and when we introduced them it was just with that white block of text there the red block of text wasn't present um so we introduced them like this the secretary's gender is the subject of some debate in the company canteen the secretary's Prudence however is not now uh this was a poor way to do it um

the secretary is a powerful character but that introduction made them the subject of company gossip and that takes power away from them um however we didn't want to just cut that line uh one of the Consultants uh made the point that they personally sometimes quite enjoy it a little bit when people are a bit off balance about their gender so the revision that they proposed and that we immediately implemented uh was the line in red underneath it which we just added to the end of that paragraph um both these facts provide the secretary with a great degree of satisfaction so that revision puts power back in the secretary's hands and is much more true to the character uh and this discussion led us to uh discuss another uh principle that's become a very common feature of our work and it was a principle that came up in the colonialism consultation as well and it's this where does the power lie in this scene so when you are representing the marginalized you have to ask that question because

you are always making a statement about relative power in a scene and therefore it is better to be intentional about it and make sure that you're saying what you intended to you want to make sure you're not disempowering a character accidentally you can look at is there a form of power they could seize in the scene that will let them assert their agency um so having talked about those case studies I'm going to talk a little bit about how we went about uh organizing these consultations um and I'm going to start with the aims of a consultation and what you want to get out of them so the first thing we want to get out of them was to uh upskill our writers and to improve their ability to write sensitively and effectively about more topics however consultation also makes your own research more effective they basically give you a leg up on it an expert in the field can suggest sources that will be particularly good or complementary and as a newcomer to the field it would

probably be hard for you to find and identify those sources and finally a consultation can give you uh expert feedback on specific content that you've written and how to improve it the question of when to look for a consultant is a uh is a difficult one um and it requires some humility you have to ask yourself uh do you still struggle to write a particular topic do you lack confidence on it are you feeling clumsy or under-informed uh when you do it um if you're not able to recognize that uh it's going to be difficult um but you can look at how other people feel about your work on that topic do they feel it's cliched or simplistic or unrepresentative and once you've worked out that you will benefit from a con a consultation you need to be able to convey

these weaknesses clearly if you don't know what to ask for people can't help you finding a consultant can be difficult um a good approach is to look for representative and expert organizations um clearly represent me that I mentioned is a good one people of coloring play we've also had good results from um consulting or talking to igda special interest groups they've helped us find people as well you can also approach experts you're aware of who have written or spoken informatively on the topic um I think uh gain fluency in a consultant is a significant Advantage uh it helps if they understand the constraints that we're working under um but it's not vital I think uh if you find a consultant that isn't uh

experience with games you may just need to do a bit of extra work to help to help them to understand where you're coming from um how you work what you can do what you can't do and you should be prepared to go through several layers of contact before you find someone someone you'll sometimes you'll reach out to someone who uh can't do it themselves or they're not available or they're not interested or they're not suitable but they are happy to point you towards someone who can and as long as you keep following that chain sooner or later you'll you'll find someone just keep going so once you've found a consultant you need to ensure that they have what they need first you need to be able to give them a clear brief which means explaining your goals for the session and what you want out for how to want to get want to get out of it you also need to provide them with access to the game and guidance for how they should engage with it there's no point throwing a 40-hour game at them

and saying just play um Point them at the bits of it that will be useful for the consultation similarly you should share the relevant uh narrative documentation with them um but you should be selective uh don't just share everything their time is precious uh share the stuff that's going to be most useful for the consultation you also need to give them plenty of time to prepare uh to play the game to read the documents to formulate their thoughts to prepare any presentation and you need to pay them appropriately these are experts and this is expert work the structure of a consultation will depend on the topic and the consultant and you should discuss it with them and agree something that works for both of you uh it is it is well worth investing time up front to do that the kind of model that we've used a few times that's worked quite well for us is uh half day workshops which

um may start with a presentation or a discussion then go into a q a session and then go into a a period where you get feedback on specific samples that you've uh you've provided to the consultant so there are a great many benefits to doing these consult consultations um the first one is that it will elevate your work the whole point of this is it brings expertise that you don't have you will as a result of consultations you will be able to write stories that you wouldn't have been able to before and you'll be able to do a better job of it they're also creatively energizing they act as this amazing injection of new ideas and perspectives they're incredibly exciting and every time we've come out of one everyone involved has been absolutely buzzing and kind of excited to to put what we've learned into into practice

foreign they also we discovered actors very valuable training for writers what you learn in a consultation will carry over into a little work and while I focused on narrative consultations here uh we found that they are often valuable for other disciplines too um so we did a consultation recently that uh someone from our art Department came along to and they asked a bunch of art focused questions on good ways to represent a particular topic uh sensitively and accurately so uh that is uh that's the sum of it uh you have now experienced the creation of some of this guy's narrative on a one-to-one scale it is like you were there um but I hope I've shown how we uh developed a clear communicable tone to get the team on the same page how we used a strong pitching process to ensure that that tone carried all the way through to the game and how we use consultations to address

areas of weakness and to elevate the work uh to make it something that we wouldn't have been able to do without doing those consultations um no talk is complete without an appearance by one of Sunday's guys in-game mascots uh the unadvisably large dog here he is he's a very good boy and uh thank you very much for attending I hope this has been useful and that you've enjoyed it take care everyone [Music]