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Iron Danger: The Story of the Story

Story beats and dialogue are finally seeing the light of the screen.

A conversation between the characters tells the player that the healer can be found nearby.

The development of Iron Danger proceeded in an equal combination of fits and starts on the one hand, and leaps and bounds on the other. From the writer’s point of view, the most interesting step appears, as story beats and dialogue, written months ago are finally seeing the light of the screen. All the while I’m going back to those earlier pieces of writing, updating them to conform to changes in the game’s mechanics, level design, characters, enemy roster, and so on. As a result, the script is constantly in flux which is an interesting aspect of game writing. Nothing is set in stone before the game is finished and shipped, but then again, without a solid script, there’s no way to make progress on the actual levels in such a story-driven game. So in this article, we take a look at the process of writing the story that we started building our levels on.

It Starts With A Secret Ingredient When I first started working on Iron Danger, I talked with our lead designer about the story, and he gave me the kernel of it. He had been planning the game for a while and wanted the story to have real emotional resonance, not just one event after another. His insight was that to guide our writing and design in a direction that would produce that resonance; the story should have an underlying metaphorical level: we should treat the story as an allegory of an inherently resonating core metaphor, like a symbolist painting or poem. I thought that was a brilliant approach, and we agreed immediately to construct the story on his core metaphor. We would not make the core metaphor explicit, but its dynamics would provide us with a foundation, on which to construct a coherent story and game experience. The events of the game and the supporting characters, seen from the point of view of our heroine, would symbolize experiences and forces, respectively, relating to this core metaphor. What a kooky, romantic way to write a game!

The dynamics of the core metaphor provides us with a foundation on which to build a coherent story and game experience.

Concept To Outline The core metaphor provides us with an idea. But ideas are cheap, as any writer will go out of their way to tell you. So, the next step was to turn that idea into the outline of a story. For this purpose, I wrote up a sequence of major events over the course of the game, in a table with one column for gameplay events, and a second one for the underlying meta-level meaning. This table went through a number of revisions until I was happy with the logic and structure of both sides. The meta-level was instrumental in making the surface-level story work. Whenever I was in doubt about an event, or some element seemed off, I looked at the meta-level meaning and used the logic of that side to figure out how to fix the surface-level problem.

When I was happy with my table, I turned it into a 3-page prose synopsis, divided into chapters. We dug into this synopsis with the lead designer and other members of the team, seeing how it could be improved, and translating it into an idea of the kinds of game content we would need. If I had invented a character or a place, someone needs to turn that into a game asset. And if I had written an event, say “Kipuna collapses from pain”, that implied another entry on our coders’ and animators’ checklists. Based on such considerations, we moved some of the characters and events around, fusing or removing extraneous ones, and tightening the whole skein a notch. Throughout it all, we kept the meta-level story in mind, to make sure we didn’t lose sight of the emotional core of the game.

To give the player hints, we can get the characters to look at something, or we can have them talk about it.

Scenic Route Once we had a good story synopsis, it was time to refine that into a list of actual scenes. We think of movies consisting of scenes, but games, of course, are made of levels. Right? Well, the approach we took was that from the story point of view, a level would consist of one or more gameplay scenes, interspersed by shorter, story-focused scenes that would just advance the narrative instead of serving up actual gameplay. I went through the prose outline, splitting it up into scene-sized chunks. These I labelled either:

cutscenes, in which the player would more or less passively watch a short presentation of information,

gameplay scenes, the meat and potatoes of actually running around, fighting enemies, and solving puzzles, and finally,

interactive cutscenes in which the player would control the main character in exactly the same way as in core gameplay, but with the focus on dialogue.

  These were further arranged into levels, sequences of scenes that would carry from one to the next seamlessly, each level separated from the next by a cut implying the passing of time.

The spreadsheet containing all this became one of our main tools for managing the production, with required assets listed for each scene, and each one assigned to a specific level designer. Although we all collaborate on each other’s levels, one person finally bears the responsibility of bringing the level to completion and making sure it hangs together. (Yes, I’m one of the level designers too, as are the lead designer, the producer, and the lead concept artist; nobody wears just one hat in our team.)

One of the earliest features that our programmers built into the first Iron Danger prototype was an examine action.

Two Steps Forward, One Giant Leap Back Of course, no big project — even a moderately big one like ours — proceeds from point A to B in a straight line. Time and time again, I find myself going back to the story outline with revisions, and small changes to our level spreadsheet are always ongoing. That’s how it should be, too! A game isn’t a piece of writing, and its story isn’t told when it’s written down: it’s only when we’re actually playing what we’ve built that we can figure out what really works and what doesn’t, and so we jump back frequently and make the changes to the story that our experiences with the game, half-finished as it is, tells us are needed.

So, what is the core metaphor? It doesn’t matter. If we’ve succeeded, the story will be entertaining and evocative, and if not, only knowing about it would not improve things. It’s nothing unique — on the contrary, it’s almost universal — and once you know it’s there, you can probably guess when you’ve played the game if we’ve done our jobs right. Now, I’ve got to fix some dialogue to take out references to an enemy we replaced with another one — seems like the right time to add a more in-depth look at the fundamental practices for creating dialogues.

The characters learn and make decisions through dialogue.

The Three Goals Of Dialogue  Aside, of course, from providing work for voice actors, the dialogue in Iron Danger serves — you guessed it — three purposes:

Providing gameplay information to the player

Carrying the story forwards

Displaying the personalities of the characters and background information about the game world

  Those are three goals that sometimes might not have anything to do with each other, while other times being intimately connected. So I want to show you how we were trying to hit those goals when writing dialogue.

The three goals of the dialogues have not been set up in a vertical hierarchy, because each one flows into the others.

It’s Over Here, Dummy You might not think so, but communicating stuff to the player can be really hard. On the user interface side, pointing out the relevant slab of pixels can involve moving it, putting a highlight around it, making it blink, enlarging it, changing its colour… the list goes on. These are all tricks that use the inborn tendencies of our eyes and brain to guide our attention in the visual field. But we’re more complex than the average mammal, and we have an additional mechanism that most of them don’t: we tend to pay attention to what other people are paying attention to. There are two ways we can use this in our game: we can make the characters look at something, or we can have them talk about it. That latter option is one of the main uses we put dialogue to.

Of course, it’s not just about telling the player where to look; it’s at least as much about providing information the characters have, that the player does not yet have because of the limitations of an artificial game world. That’s why one of the earliest functionalities our coders built into the first Iron Danger prototype was an examine action, for when the player wants to inspect something the heroes come across during the game.

We wanted to have an experience reminiscent of older point-and-click adventure games and isometric RPGs, where the characters are surrounded by a large variety of objects of interest that the players can inspect at their leisure. While we don’t focus on complex puzzles, inventory management or the like, examining objects is still a core part of gameplay, giving the player advice on what to interact with and how.

The conversations should advance the story, give the player real information about what to do next, and round out the characters and setting.

What’s Going On A large slice of Iron Danger’s total word count (I’m not sure if it’s actually a majority, but it’s a lot) is in the form of back-and-forth conversations between two or more characters — that is: actual dialogue. Much of the story is presented in this form: the characters learn and make decisions through dialogue.

It’s all skippable… but if you do skip it, you’ll probably miss a big chunk of the story. In fact, we don’t want to put in any story-carrying dialogue that’s redundant in combination with gameplay. If we decide to tell something through player action, we don’t need to recap it with dialogue, except occasionally to clarify something.

Put In Some Flavour! You could say these three goals are arranged in order of necessity: players need vital information to play the game. They want to know what’s happening in the story they’re playing. And the rest? Character personality and background? It’s just nice to have. You could say that… but I’d disagree with you. These goals haven’t been set up in a vertical hierarchy. Each one feeds into the others, making them more meaningful.

The background details and personalities motivate the player to care about the world and the characters, so the events of the plot gain emotional force. And the plot is vital to motivating gameplay: if you know that the heroine is looking for a shard of ancient power, you, the player, are going to be looking for one in the game. And going all the way around the circle, the gameplay is what brings out little details of the game world and the characters.

The short examination notes are written from the perspective of each specific character, and different characters notice different things.

Mix It Up In addition, the interdependency of the three goals brings us to one core aspect of dialogue that works: it serves more than one purpose. Information that only helps gameplay is almost always dry. Dialogue that just advances story is typically boring, and usually skipped outright. And chit-chat that does nothing except show off the characters or the setting is useless. But combine two goals and nail both, and you’re, well, not guaranteed that the dialogue is worth the player’s time, but at least it’s a start. And if you manage to hit all three, you’re doing something right.

So, optimally, we’d like our conversations to move the story along, provide the player real information on what to do next, and round out our characters and setting, all at the same time. Whenever I write an exchange that manages to do that, I pat myself on the back.

All About The Point Of View The examine action is, again, one way we try to approach this target of hitting two goals at the same time. When the player examines an object in the game, this prompts a short piece of text — a bark — from the currently selected character, just a line or two. But these barks are written from the point of view of that specific character. And different characters notice different things. Sometimes it’s even worth your while to examine the same object with two different characters, to gain twice the insight, both into whatever you’re checking out, and the characters!

Joel Sammallahti Lead Writer

Joel started out in the game business as a concept artist, drifted into designing narratives and game mechanics, and came onboard Action Squad in 2017 as the lead writer. He’s mostly responsible for the game’s storyline, level progression, and dialogue.

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