Lore — do you need it and where to start?
It’s not uncommon, even on large games, for story to be an afterthought — something that’s hastily assembled at the last minute with some poor soul having to wrangle discordant scenes into some kind of coherent narrative. With smaller games, it’s even more tempting to forget about story, viewing it as luxury, at a time when it’s not even clear that the team will make it through production at all.
Setting aside a little time near the start can reap benefits though, giving the whole team (or even the lone dev) a better grasp of the world and a unified direction to move in.
Starting early will mean that the story and setting may have to be open to change later on, but it can help to set the tone, which can then permeate through the whole game.
Starting late will limit how much the story and setting can influence the rest of the game, but should mean less rewriting before the end. Of course, there is always the risk that there simply won’t be time and narrative can fall by the wayside, during the struggle to simply get the game finished.
In my opinion, it’s far better to start early, before the horrors of production suck all the optimism from the team…
How to create the lore:
Not all games need full-on lore, but you’d be surprised at how many benefit from some kind of world-building and backstory. Even if it’s not explicitly told in the game itself, it can help to inform the art and character design, and even lead to new design ideas. Hero shooters, like Apex Legends and Overwatch, have shown that lore and characters can be very important to players, even when they have little direct impact on the gameplay itself.
If you’ve decided that your game would benefit from backstory, where do you even start? That will depend on the type of game it is, how much detail you’ll want to go into, and whether your focus is on the world, the characters, or a mixture of both. Also, as with many creative endeavours, you’ll have to find a method that works for you. Some methods I’ve used in the past are:
Creating a timeline: This is great for if you’re really digging into a world’s history, or even if you just need to detail the exact set of events in the characters’ previous week. If your thought process is very linear, you could get away with writing it out in a notebook, but I like to be able to change my mind and add detail as I think of it, so I usually begin on my whiteboard. Once I’ve worked out the broad strokes, I move into OneNote, as that lets me move elements around easily. If the timeline is long and complicated, then OneNote gets cumbersome, so I’ll move into Aeon Timeline, which allows for multiple simultaneous timelines, nested events, zooming in and out etc.
Articles and short stories: Writing short stories about aspects of the world and characters can be incredibly helpful, as they can convey tone and feeling in a way that a dry timeline won’t. Even just writing out the events that you previously planned in a timeline can lead you to consider new aspects of them. Or you could pick a defining moment and follow a character through it. Having to think of the specifics of an event, when you’re right inside it (so to speak) can highlight flaws, things you hadn’t previously considered, or just spin you off in a new direction. Don’t write just one either: try different events, points of view and styles (narrative, magazine articles, even poems and songs, if that works for you); whatever you write can only make the world richer, even if the players never see a word of it.
Character biographies: I’ll go into more detail in this article but if you’re making a game about characters, it goes without saying that you need to plan them out well. How they speak, react and dress depends on their personality and past, so it’s well worth taking the time to think that through.
Delivering lore:
You’ve spent all this time on planning the world in which your game takes place, so how do you get that across to the player? Sometimes you don’t need to do anything specific: the world is set in your (and your team’s) mind, so you know how that affects the art style, how the characters will speak and emote, how the levels will look.
If you want to add more lore, into a game where that lore isn’t the focus, then it’s best to do it in a way that’s easily ignorable. Much as I love lore, there’s little more annoying that being forced to sit through lengthy, turgid, unskippable cutscenes.
An often used method is that of text or voice snippets: diary entries, news articles etc., generally unlocked by visiting a new area, or collecting an item in the world. These are good, as they make it very easy for interested players to gain greater knowledge about the lore, but are very easy to ignore, especially if the playback can be stopped. However, they have been increasingly maligned in recent years, something which I think comes more from the poor standard and excessive length of a lot of them.
A general rule for scenes is to “get in late and get out early”: that is to identify the main point of the scene, start the scene as close to that point as possible and then get the hell out as soon as it’s done with. In my experience, this is often ignored in these kinds of narrative elements. That would be annoying in something that had the consumer’s full attention but, given that playback of these elements is often while the player continues to do other things, losing the player’s attention means that they may as well not be there.
Keeping them short, dramatic and to the point should keep players engaged with voice elements. Text elements can be longer, as the player may not read them at time of collection, but should still only be as long as they need to be, to get their point across.
All that still applies to a more narrative-heavy game, although the value for “short” will obviously be longer. If you’re making a narrative-heavy game, where it’s important that the player keeps track of events, it is still good to keep the scenes as short as possible, unless you include a system to allow the player to scrub through them.
Another thing to keep in mind is that players can often ingest these story elements over a long period of time, so it’s important that it is easy for them to keep track of who the characters are and what is going on in the narrative, especially if that narrative is delivered to them in a non-linear format. There are a number of different ways that these problems have been overcome and which one you use depends on your game’s requirements.
Tacoma had a good method for keeping track of faceless characters, by colour-coding each of their silhouettes. Jedi: Fallen Order collates all of the voice logs you unlock, putting the transcriptions into chapters and numbering them, so that players can see where the gaps are.
Even without specific lore entries, a game can tell its story through the environment. A player enters a house, sees a half-eaten meal on the table, a broken glass on the floor and a knocked-over chair. That scene tells a tale, without a word of dialogue or prose. If you have a world planned out well, these kinds of environmental storytelling can illustrate the richness of the world, even to those players who have no interest in lore.
