#need to set up some sort of diagram for me to more coherently organize my thoughts

[darudedogestorm]

I need to get back into worm brain mode after i'm done with plants vs zombies brain, no clue when that'll happen but i'm sure by this time next year something will be different

[hglog]

PBTA Spelljammer GLOG Thing?

Recently, my father dug up his old Traveller and MegaTraveller books for me, and after having a lot of fun reading through them, I can definitively say I don’t ever want to GM the system. But it got me in a space-gaming mood and my mind turned to two things. First, the Uncharted Worlds game I was once a player in, which seems to have borrowed a lot of the good aspects of Traveller and put them into a PBTA system, which I love very much. Second, the AD&D setting Spelljammer which is an amazing science-fantasy fever dream that I’ve unfortunately never gotten to experience firsthand. Naturally, I decided I’d make an RPG. And, ever since I discovered it, GLOG has basically consumed a large part of my mindspace whenever I think about RPGs.

Now it’s about a month later, and I have a lot written, but even more still to write. My biggest issue is getting my thoughts organized. I’m always a lot neater when I know other people are going to see my work. So, in a hope to make things more coherent for myself, I’m going to let you in on what I have to far.

What I like about Spelljammer

Science fiction minus the science

Practically any science fiction trope you can think of fits into the setting, but when it comes to the actual science, it’s this weird-ass mix of a classical Greek and medieval alchemist understanding of the cosmos.

You don’t have to worry about players “um, actually”-ing you about what happens in the vacuum of space, because it’s actually not even a vacuum!

Magic = FTL

Despite the previous point, its science is actually still relatively “hard” when it comes to internal consistency and logical consequences to its different laws of reality than our own. The magic, on the other hand, is magic. My headcanon is that the speed of light imposes a hard limit, but magic is the one thing able to ignore it.

While people could theoretically pull off a no-magic spacecraft launch (if they had a few thousand more years of technological development), for the most part, if something is in space, it’s probably because a wizard decided they wanted it to be in space.

Weird-ass spaceships

Since a spaceship is “anything you can put a spelljamming throne in,” you get a delightful mix of regular boats, classic pulp sci-fi or space opera spaceships, weird organic tentacled things, and whatever else strikes your fancy.

What if a dragon died and all the kobolds that worshipped it somehow got enough spell slots to just pilot its corpse into space and start fucking shit up?

Sadly, Spelljammer doesn’t offer a lot of customization, instead just relying on a wide catalogue of weird ships used by different aliens.

Wizards

What I like about PBTA

Adaptable to basically any setting

There is a great wealth of hacks I can draw from

These two points go hand in hand. I haven’t, however, been able to find a specifically spelljammer-inspired PBTA hack, so that’s why I’m doing this.

The PBTA games I’ve read through in creating this (so far) are  Uncharted Worlds, Dungeon World, and the original Apocalypse World.

Encourages little preparation

My biggest challenge in running a game that’s interstellar in scope is my instinct to pre-prepare everything, which is already problem if I think I need to make an entire country, let alone an entire planet. But now we’re talking not only a planet but every planet.

While you can do worldbuilding as the GM for a PBTA game, you can also not do any, and let the players do all the work for you upon character creation. Dungeon World is especially good at this.

It’s fun

I’ve enjoyed every PBTA game I’ve been a player or a GM for, no exceptions (so far).

It’s extremely easy to teach people

Most of my friends are not as into learning new systems as I am. But most of them have already played at least one PBTA system, and if they haven’t, it wouldn’t be as much of a hassle as say, AD&D or Traveller.

What I like about GLOG

The four-template class blueprint

If PBTA character sheets are streamlined, I don’t even know what I’d call GLOG character sheets.

I don’t know if I’d shave my classes down quite as much, but I’m definitely taking notes from GLOG’s designs.

GLOG spellcasting

This is one of the things I like most about GLOG.

Spell dice to power FTL? Maybe 1 die per 30 light years or whatever, and the sum determines how fast the trip can be made? Doubles and triples can be malfunctions or space pirate attacks or something.

A shit ton of classes

I think I’d like to limit it to 10 or so classes, but I’m definitely going to get inspiration from some of the weirder GLOG classes along with the classes fighters/wizards/rogues.

An emphasis on interesting problem-solving

I think this is more just good game design than GLOG itself.

Encourages taking a weirder spin on fantasy lore that’s often taken for granted

Again, this seems like it’s just good worldbuilding, but a lot of GLOGgish writings do this, and I’d like to follow in their footsteps.

What I like (and dislike) about Traveller

I don’t like how obtuse it is

Reading the book sort of overwhelms me. It’s like they didn’t even try to make it accessible. It’s just endless black text on a white background, tables and diagrams strewn about haphazardly, and no art, not even just at the beginnings and ends of sections. The cover is a black void to symbolize the state of my mind after reading three pages.

When it comes to spaceships, I like a lot of crunch and granularity in their design

Something I found myself wishing for when playing Uncharted Worlds was a more involved ship design process. While they did clearly take notes from Traveller, it’s nothing like the original.

I don’t know what it is about spaceships. Characters I like simple and streamlined, but I guess reading through power plant matrices and choosing software and balancing it all on a budget gets me into the headspace I actually believe a spaceship creator would be in, whereas I don’t think the creation of a person usually involves that sort of design process.

I'm neutral on the crunch for everything else, but I think it's at odds with PBTA sensibilities

Plus, as I sort of mentioned in the PBTA section, I want my mostly 5e-playing friends to be willing to test this with me.

I like the psionics

I really like psionics, and I think Traveller properly captures the feel that I like for them.

However, I’m not a fan of “anyone can test their psionic abilities and then roll to maybe get powers.” I’m going to have a psionic class, which a character can start in if they want to have psionic powers, or they can multiclass into later if they want to discover their psionic potential later on. If they don’t want their character to have latent potential, they can just never take any levels in the class.

I dislike the highly-defined setting

I know it’s supposed to be adaptable to most sci-fi settings, but the books reference their own universe and history so much that it doesn’t really feel that way.

How do I synthesize this all into one game?

Setting-wise, I’m mostly drawing from Spelljammer, as well as Star Wars, Numenera, and my own imagination. I don’t want to define many specific planets or empires or sectors or whatever since I prefer most of the worldbuilding work be done by players during character creation. Also, if you know of any very low-science space fantasy fiction that I should read, please send it my way.

I do have very specific ideas about how I want spaceships and space travel to work, which I think need their own post later. You might get a pretty good sense of what I’m going for from the Spelljammer and Traveller sections, though. My plan is to take advantage of something like Traveller’s very granular and in-depth ship creation to let players make their own completely batshit Spelljammer-style spaceships. I think a ship needs its own character sheet.

I’m doing the PBTA thing where each class has a character sheet. I haven’t decided whether I’m doing the standard 6 stats or making up some weird ones. The former is definitely easier to sell to people but I think the latter is cooler.  Also, since you need a spellcasting class to have FTL what do you do if nobody picks one? I don’t want to get in a situation where I have to tell them “one of you needs to switch classes,” that just feels bad and could create animosity. A solution I’m slightly leaning towards is having only one of each character sheet, then making sure there’s always one fewer non-spellcasting class option than there are players, so by pure mathematics someone will end up able to power the ship, and I don’t need to force anyone to change on my own. The issue there is then I can’t have more than 3-5 non-spellcasting class options depending on party size, and I’d prefer a larger and more varied class pool. Another option would be to have magic hirelings available, but I want spellcasters with the ability to do FTL to feel like these big, weird, and powerful personalities, so having them just available as hirelings sort of it cheapens that in my opinion.  Maybe it’s not actually important that the party always have access to their own interstellar travel? I could see the PCs being like a bunch of interstellar hitchhikers. Very Douglas Adams. 

That’s just about everything that I don’t think needs a separate post. I hope you enjoyed it, and if you have any thoughts about this potential horrible chimera of a system I’d love to hear them! You can reach me here through Tumblr or at Robot_Face#7919 on the OSR discord server.

[tender-history]

Fic Plotting 101: How I Start from an Idea.

Hullo, hi, welcome! It’s Plotting 101 with Dee: Part One!

 Before we get started, here’s why I made this post:

 1) I get a lot of CCs asking how to approach plotting, pacing and especially story flow, and I wanted to link them all to something useful,

2) I see a lot of people wanting to write plot but unsure how to approach it because it can be overwhelming,

3) Google Searching ‘how to plot’ can be EXTREMELY scary.

 Let’s take Number 3 first. If you’re going to Google ‘how to plot’, you’re going to end up with advice on everything ranging from ‘don’t plot’ to six sheet spreadsheets with fifty columns each that wants you to put down everything from your character’s eye color to what exactly they think of instant noodles. You’ll end up with diagrams, beat sheets, templates, storyboards, and find guides that range from six-step plotting techniques to fifty-steps. And I’m not saying you shouldn’t follow that method - sometimes, if you’re a person who likes character design and questionnaires a lot, you’ll love that method. But I’m not like that, and a lot of writers I know aren’t like that either. There’s nothing I hate more than some spreadsheet asking me my character’s weight and height. And if you go down that road, chances are that you’ll just go down the rabbit hole of intricately designing your characters and settings for AGES instead of actually writing anything at all.

 So - if not through spreadsheets or beat-sheets, how DO you plot?

 If you ask me, the best plotting method is to do WHAT WORKS FOR YOU.

 How do you find what works for you? You try things. I tried many different ways of plotting before I decided what worked for me. So this is going to be less a guide on how to plot and more an explanation of the ways I plot, with the hope that maybe you can find something in here to help you.

 > For me, step ONE is the IDEA.

 This is your big shiny nugget. Your driving force. This is EXTREMELY important, because no one idea is equal to another.  Some ideas are better, because they can help you do something unique, something only you can do, which makes you stand out. For the sake of demonstrating this whole thing, let’s take The Tender History of Tides. Tender History lived on my Ideas folder in my Notes app for months before I began writing it. This was my one-line quick jot-down: ‘what if I wrote non-royalty historical fantasy set in Joseon Korea?’

 Done before? Yeah. Can be done in a unique way? Heck yeah.

 Your idea is very very important because it’s the axis on which you’ll pivot your entire plot. It’ll grow and develop and change if you just give it some thought.

 So, plotting suggestion #1 right here: Keep an Ideas folder. You WILL forget your idea, however shiny it is. Keeping it all in one place helps in more than one way: 1) You know it won’t disappear from your mind, 2) Sometimes ideas can overlap, come together, and turn into a whole new story.

 For Tender History, the historical fantasy set in Joseon Korea idea very, very quickly merged with another idea I’d had: taegi dark-fic with sea-monster Tae and monster-hunter Yoongi. They were disparate thoughts, things I thought of at different times, things I then put together to create something more unique than what they would have been individually.

 I often generate ideas this way. I’ll consult my Ideas folder for thoughts I’ve had in the past, then see if they can be combined with something else to make a better shiny.

 Few examples:

 1) vhope magic shop au + but what if the whole thing is set in a game arcade?

2) taegi vampire au + but what if this was set in the fashion world?

3) vmin library au + but what if they went to a magical school?

 Combination is one way of idea generation. Other ways of idea generation that I sometimes use:

 > Use images. Go on Pinterest, check out some aesthetics, let your imagination run wild.

> Use online prompters. There are so many prompt generators floating around! For Fantasy, I use Seventh Sanctum sometimes (they have hundreds of different sort of prompt generators, and some are really good if you’re stuck on banal things like naming, or a quick character design). For fan fiction, there are prompt bots on Twitter. You can even google writing prompts, there are several websites that offer one per day, which you can then use to kick start your imagination.

 > Now you have your idea. Step TWO, for me, is developing the idea.

 This is the step where you can really stand out in the crowd when it comes to plotting. It’s great having a unique idea, but this is the part where you flesh it out.

 Here’s how I do that:

> Scribble down a skeleton of what you think the story will be: In my case, for this Taegi fic, the skeleton looked something like this:

taegi, yoongi is a detective, tae is a supernatural being of some sort, setting is joseon korea, time period is (???), wintry, monsters and murders, dark, atmospheric, there’s a romance and it’s both soft and dangerous, side: noble seokjin, scholar namjoon, doctor jimin (?). they’re in a village and there are these murders and everyone is keeping secrets. 

This, as you see, is a ramble. It’s just whatever’s in my head, being committed to paper. Now, plotting is WORK. Putting what’s up there - that ramble, that mess of ideas - into a functioning, well-paced, structured, organized plot requires you to put work into it. It’s not easy. But it’s a lot of fun. And when it starts coming together, you really feel very good about your writing and your story!

So, moving on to the actual work now:

> Write a 250 word pitch of the story. Organize your ramble into something coherent, meaningful and easy to absorb. Imagine that this is exactly like the back blurb on a book. The back blurb on a book is meant to entice you to read it. IF it’s enticing enough for you to read, then you can imagine that it might be enticing to a reader. But first - you have to make it enticing for YOU. As the writer, YOU have to feel like, ok, this is gonna be a killer story if I tackle it.

 The objective of this pitch is two-fold:

1) You have to be able to tell three things from it: the idea, the characters, and the main conflict.

2) A complete STRANGER - i.e., someone who has no idea about your story - should be able to look at this pitch and tell what exactly the story is about.

 I can’t stress the importance of this step. Often times, it’s not until you force yourself to explain your plot in 250 words that you find possible issues with it.

 Here’s how I explained Tender History in 250 words or less:

 “In late 1700s Joseon Korea, a string of strange murders sends Inspector Kim Seokjin to a frozen northern province. Accompanying him is Min Yoongi, once a scholar of the supernatural, now an indentured laborer until a debt for his crimes against the palace can be paid. Quickly taking on eccentric artist Kim Taehyung as his assistant, Yoongi sets out to find the monster that’s terrorizing the land. But there’s more to both the icy lakes and the people here. More to Taehyung and his unflinching ease at drawing scenes of death. Yoongi just needs to figure out what.”

 Note a couple of things here.

A) You as the writer knows who the important characters are, because they are named.

B) You know the setting: 1700s, Joseon Korea, icy, winter.

C) You know the characterization and how they play into this world: inspector Seokjin, indentured worker Yoongi, artist Taehyung.

D) You know the conflict: murders, monsters, secrets.

E) You ALSO, if you look deeply enough, know the inner character conflict - Yoongi has debts, he has no free will until he pays them.

 If I show this to you, a stranger, you should ALSO be able to glean these basic details from this 250 word pitch.

 It’s not easy. It just looks easy. I spent hours putting this down in a way that was completely right: precise, simple, yet very explanatory. This pitch will force you to confront what is the story, its actual plot and actual characters, and what is only set dressing. You can’t ramble about it anymore for hours. You can’t have a bunch of disconnected ideas anymore. You HAVE to fit it into something concise, something easily absorbed - not just by you, but by a reader who can’t see into your mind. 

You will also know, by putting this down, if the characters aren’t developed enough inside your head. Because why would anyone go to a wintry frozen land to catch a monster? You can’t answer that unless you know, by forcing your thoughts into coherency, that oh, Yoongi has no real free-will here.

 > Step THREE, marry external and internal conflict.

 Or this is step 1.5, actually. You cannot plot a story without both external and internal conflict. Or, you can, but then you won’t touch your readers as much as you would want to.

 What do I mean by this?

 Your external conflict is something that exists outside of your characters - your regular villain, say. This is your Darth Vader, your Voldemort, your Capitol.

 Your internal conflict is what your character feels. This is HARDER. In Hunger Games, Katniss ponders and combats her own ruthlessness. In Harry Potter, Harry’s desire to fit into the world and live a normal life continuously contrasts with his own fame and the symbol of hope he becomes.

 In Tender History, my external conflict is very fancy: murder, monsters, scary villages, etc. Internal conflict is a lot less so: Yoongi in this fic continuously has to wrestle with feelings of guilt and unfairness, with wanting to do good but feeling too burned by the system. If you’ve read Murmuration, the external conflict is the Scarab, but the internal conflict is their own ambition, their guilt over what they had to do to survive, their (terrifying) loyalty to each other.

 Internal conflict is where you find your character voice. If I’d set Tender History Yoongi in a celebrated position at his job, he’d be a much different character. His voice would be much different. He has power! He has resources! Versus this Yoongi, who has nothing, and hence has to trust the people he’s allowed to work with to tell him the truth.

 Think of it like peeling the layers:

 1) The Idea,

2) Develop the Idea,

3) Fill in the External Conflict,

4) Fill in the Internal Conflict.

 I have a few major rules I follow at this point of plotting. They’re like this:

 1) Are these the right characters for my story? - This means I do a round of thinking about whether these people are the perfect vehicle to tell this story I want to tell. Great, I want to tell a story about wintry Joseon Korea, and monster-fighting. But. Is indentured-worker Yoongi the best person to carry this? What if I make him a village leader instead? What if he’s a runaway prince? What if he’s the monster? Depending on what you want your story to be, you have to think of your character to fit the telling. In Romance of Old Clothes, I chose Tae POV for the whole thing because I wanted to illustrate his reading of people vs. other people’s reading of him. Taehyung’s internal conflict in that fic was that he lies to himself extensively. He’s got this idea of who he is, which is untrue, which is then broken down in a climactic moment. He’s my perfect character to tell that story, because of his obliviousness. Similarly, in Tender History, Yoongi’s the perfect character to tell this story, because of who he is in society, his internal troubles, and his monster-hunting experience.

 2)What are some details I would add to this world? - I have a basic idea of the conflict, the world, and the characters now. This is where I take out a chart or a notebook and get to work. I do this like a mindmap: I jot down anything I can think of - say, okay, Joseon Korea: food, art, paintings, caste system, civil examinations, scholars, winter, roads, Confucianism, shrines, religion, music, monsters, gender roles. Then I begin detailing it. ‘Food’ for example: royals eat different food from commoners eat different food from untouchable castes or peasants. Summer food is different from spring food is different from winter food. When I read about food for this fic, I read about the ‘barley gap’ or the gap between barley and rice cultivation during winter. People historically starved during this time. If my story is set in winter, this is an important detail.

 Let’s take something more contemporary. I’m writing about a vintage clothes store. Details I would need - clothes, brands, size of the shop, layout of the shop, how do they procure clothes, how do they test authenticity, what are their customers like, who do they interact with, where is their shop in the city, what does being in that locality mean, what seasons are busy for them.

 A mindmap is just a page full of words, questions, things you know, things you don’t know. Filling it up is the next major step.

 3) What is character development going to be? - This is very important. Okay, you have an external and internal conflict. Now, start of the story being point A, and end being point B, what exactly is A and B for my character? What do I want them to become? In Romance of Old Clothes, Taehyung at Point A is lying to himself about his own nature. By Point B, he’s able to identify that he needs to let people in, open up more. In Wonder Woman, Diana at the beginning of the story is rather naive, believing that if only she could destroy the God of War, the whole war will end. By the end, she understands and admits that things are not that black and white - that people sometimes fight wars because they want to, not due to some external influence.

 You have to know this to continue.

 Step 4, in how I plot, is to put down a starting scene, a few story beats, and the rough idea of an ending.

  But I’ll get into that - and more, including pacing - in Series 2 of this series of posts! Please let me know here or on twitter if these are helpful, or if I’m just rambling too much.

Since I am now struggling a lot to balance writing with work, and if you want to help me keep on writing posts like this, please consider donating to my ko-fi.

I also made a post on how I world-build, the tools and templates I use for the same: it’s over here!

 https://tender-history.tumblr.com/post/185910085044/on-research-worldbuilding-and-culture

[aurelliocheek]

Writing and localization of Ghost Of A Tale

What makes a good tale? Memorable characters you can relate to? Check! Thrilling adventures? Check! A world brimming with stories and legends? Check!

SeithCG‘s »Ghost of a Tale« has it all, and it‘s no wonder the game was critically acclaimed for its writing by gamers and game ciritics alike. But how do you create a world so rich and immersive with a team which can be counted on the fingers of one hand? And how do you make sure your story meets its audience across borders? After all, great tales are famous because most people have heard of them…

In this interview with Lionel Gallat and Paul Gardner, we dive into the writing and localization process of Ghost of a Tale, a stealth-RPG in which players follow Tilo, a mouse minstrel on a quest to find his beloved. From early drafts to last minute font issues, the two creative minds behind the game’s impressive lore look back on a 5-year journey.

Hi, Lionel, thanks a lot for taking the time to tell us about the writing of your game. I know you started working on Ghost of a Tale’s artistic assets back in 2013, but when did you actually start working on the game’s story, world, and characters? LG: I’d been thinking about this world for many years while I was working on all those animated features. But the creation process of Ghost of a Tale is a very holistic one. The art I was creating, the models I was rigging, the technical tests I was doing, all of these were aimed at creating a sort of cushion for what the game would become. I had even written a script several years ago with a friend of mine in hope of maybe pitching it to a movie studio. However, ironically, when I started developing Ghost of a Tale on my own, as a game, the whole story changed and characters disappeared. Only Tilo remained. In older drafts he was younger and not quite the main protagonist. Of course, all of this evolved as Paul got involved in the project.

Magpies alone possess a set of Codex Feathers, concealed beneath their wings, and preened in such a way as to function as a mnemonic system. It’s said the Codex contains the knowledge of their forebears, and the history of all things.

Hi Paul, thanks for joining us. So, how did you get to work with Lionel? PG: We were introduced by Mike Evans, a mutual friend. Mike and I had worked together at Namco, and one day he told me about this guy who was making a game by himself. We met with Lionel on Skype, and we ended up talking for around three hours – it was a really good conversation. I was just really fascinated by his concept, and what he was trying to do. I promised I‘d help in whatever way I could. Initially it was just casual, giving feedback on design and story ideas or whatever, but later Lionel asked me if I would help out with writing and design on a more formal basis. Still, we didn‘t meet in person for more than a year.

Pangeia, the fictional world in which Ghost of a Tale takes place, has a pretty tangible past and hosts myriad animal species. It’s also a relatively dark world, which contrasts with its rather cute inhabitants (for the most part). Where does Ghost of a Tale draw its inspiration from, and what is it fundamentally about? LG: The game is obviously inspired by older animated movies from Disney, and particularly by »The Secret of NIMH« (both the book and the movie). It touches upon several themes, like casual racism, prejudices, and loss, but at the same time it does so very organically, through humor and empathy. We’re not preaching anything: the animals that are the characters in this story are but a mirror to us human beings. And through them we talk about what it means to know the past.

PG: »History is built upon the ruins of the truth.« Tilo is told this by one of the characters he meets in the keep, and for me it summarizes one of the most interesting themes of the game. The decision to make the protagonist a mouse really profoundly influenced the design of the game. It gave us a vulnerable protagonist, not physically strong, which meant he wouldn‘t be using combat as his primary way of interacting with the world. Every other design and story decision started from there. Using animals to tell the story helped us in a lot of ways. It makes what otherwise might be a pretty grim story much more accessible. The established relationships between creatures, the hierarchy between them – who‘s predator and who‘s prey, for example – gave us something to work with, or subvert. There‘s also a level of abstraction that comes from using animal characters, so any parallels between our history and Pangeia‘s history are made less directly. We can write about subjects and themes allegorically, without straying too close to real world events.

Was the story clear in your mind from the start? How much did the lore, characters, and plot of the game change from your initial idea? PG: The heart of the game hasn‘t changed since the time Lionel and I first spoke. Tilo has always been a minstrel, searching for his family. We‘ve just expanded on that core, sort of fleshed it out. I always really loved that we begin with a classic video game scenario – escape from jail, and rescue the princess – and then kind of subvert that over the course of the game. Because we were starting from such a strong foundation, there was actually not that much revision, which is really rare.

Players are given the choice of reading footnotes that provide further information on the lore.

This certainly explains why everything from the game’s world feels so genuine and coherent… Ghost of a Tale was unanimously praised for the richness of its lore and the quality of its writing. What’s your creative process like? How do you ensure everything meets high quality standards? PG: The very first time Lionel and I met in person we spent a few days developing Tilo‘s story and the history of the world, and figuring out where our characters fit into it. From that we wrote a long, exhaustive timeline that became the foundation for everything else. Lionel and I talk through everything in a lot of detail – motivation, tone, meaning, etc. – before I start writing anything. I try to get the dialogue into a state where we can review it in-game as quickly as possible. Once I have a solid draft, Lionel will go through it, giving comments and feedback. It‘s an iterative process.

There’s a lot of humor and poetry in the game, which was both a challenge and a real pleasure for our team to localize, given the great quality of the original material. What’s your secret for writing a moving story and witty dialogue? LG: One thing I said to Paul at the beginning was: we’re treating the game dialogue the same way it would be written for a movie (or TV series) script. Every line needs to be necessary or else it’s out. I personally hate it when, in an RPG, I get three pages of text for something that could have been expressed with two sentences. Also, we paid a lot of attention to characters’ voices. The way they express themselves. Although there are no voice-overs in the game, we made sure the lines could be read aloud by an actor and not feel overly written or fake.

PG: One of the first things we did when we were developing the story was map out a dialogue for Ravik, the Magpie. Looking at it now, it‘s pretty bad, but it let us quickly find out what did and didn‘t work, and helped us find the right tone. We realized brevity was really important to us – avoiding unnecessary dialogue and exposition as much as possible – so the player wouldn‘t be wading through pages of text. Actually the idea of writing footnotes to efficiently incorporate lore into the main text came from creating that first dialogue. Overall we worked hard to make sure the story remained honest, that the characters behaved in an internally consistent way, that things remained simple, and that the tone never got too melodramatic. The jokes are almost all contextual, and come pretty naturally from understanding the characters, and how they‘d respond and react to each other and their situation. We wrote biographies for each of the characters that we could always refer to, to make sure we were never straying too far from who the character was.

»Every voyage I took with a Mouse on board ended in tragedy – and there was always a Mouse on board.« Kerold Redwhiskers

I guess you don’t come up with a game like Ghost of a Tale that has such impressive lore and colorful characters with just a couple of days of writing and sketching. How long did it take to write all the game’s content? PG: We wrote and designed the game in parallel, as much as possible. Ideally the two disciplines should influence and inform each other. In that respect we were writing and designing pretty consistently for around three years. Lionel designed and implemented the dialogue system relatively early in production, which enabled us to start seeing the flow and structure of the dialogue in-game. We did a lot of planning of the game‘s structure and story, first on paper and later in flow diagrams. Every so often we‘d stop for a reality check, and try and rein in our scope a bit. But I think almost everything we cut actually made it into the final game in some form or other.The game‘s content was locked not long before the game was released. Level Up Translation really helped us organize our schedule to give us as much time in test as possible.

You told your fans early on that you wanted to give the game proper localization. Why was it important to localize your game in the first place, and why did you need professional localization? LG: Well, after spending five years carefully developing the game and its lore we were not going to hand it off to a non-professional staff. If players were not going to read our words because they’re not fluent enough in English, then they would get the next best thing. And as you know, that requires professionalism and dedication!

PG: It was, of course, important to localize the game so we could reach as wide an audience as possible. Lionel and I would write in English, and we used a lot of puns and wordplay. Sometimes Lionel would joke, ›The localization team is not going to be happy‹. I‘d worked on a number of games before where that was an issue, but in my experience the best localization teams are creative individuals in their own right. You have to be available to answer any questions they have and give feedback, of course. But if they‘re given the freedom to run with it, a great, professional localization team can create a true adaptation of the story. The wordplay and songs still work in the target language: it’s not just a literal translation.

Fun fact: In the Italian version of the game, Merra (Tilo’s wife) became Marna because »Merra« sounded very similar to an Italian curse word.

How did you decide which languages to localize your game into? PG: We had fans of the game requesting that the game be localized for their region for a long time, and we’re still receiving requests to add new languages. Also, because two-thirds of the core team is French, I always assumed that the game would be localized, at least into French. We found during our initial IndieGoGo campaign, and later during early access on Steam, that so much of our support came from Europe and Russia, so it made sense to do the work to try and reach that audience.

With 80,000 words, Ghost of a Tale is pretty »wordy« for an indie game, which represents quite an expense in terms of localization and a financial risk for a small studio. How did you evaluate the profitability of localizing your game? LG: It simply came down to the fact that we needed to be able to sell a certain amount of copies in a given language in order for it to make sense financially. We simply budgeted for as many languages as we could at the game’s release. Localization is not a cheap process by any means, but we didn’t want the result to be cheap either! So let’s call it a carefully planned gamble, a financial investment based on how many copies we expected to sell in each language. I’m happy to say it all paid off! We always emphasize the importance of keeping localization in mind and including it as early as possible in the development. When did you start preparing your game for localization?

PG: We‘d had some preliminary discussions about the best format to use earlier in development, and decided on using a parallel series of directories – one for each language – each containing localized copies of our text files. A good week before the localization process began we discussed it with Damien at Level Up Translation to test our workflow and make sure we were providing files in an appropriate format.

What was your localization process like? PG: Due to the nature of our dialogue tools we ended up with a lot of individual files – one for each quest, one for each dialogue, one for each book page, etc. Fortunately Level Up Translation‘s tools were able to keep track of each of these files, including any changes we needed to make during localization. Damien had created an exchange folder where I uploaded batches of files that were ready for localization. He would then give me an estimated time for delivery for those files, and I would retrieve them from the exchange folder when they were ready. Whenever the localization team needed further information, they logged a query in an online Q&A file, or Damien would reach out on Skype if anything was urgent or required clarification. Once the translations were ready and implemented into the game, our engineer Cyrille and his partner, who spoke four of our six languages, were our first line of defense when testing the localized files. This was supplemented by bilingual members of our GoaT community forums.

Game development is very much about problem solving, and localization comes with its own share of challenges. Can you tell us about some problems you bumped into? PG: The localization process itself went surprisingly smoothly, thanks to regular communication with Level Up Translation throughout the process. One thing I hadn‘t really considered while writing, though, was the issue of having gendered words in other languages. We have a character that everybody assumes is male, but is later revealed to be female. Originally the reveal of that information was an optional thread in the conversation, but that made localization into some languages impossible. So I had to rewrite that thread, to make the discovery of that information unequivocal. Our dialogue trees were created in a mind-mapping application that Lionel wrote a parser for. The external application gave us a lot of functionality, and made the process really visual and intuitive, but its text editing functionality wasn‘t great and caused some problems during the editing process. In fairness, we were using it for a purpose it wasn‘t intended for, but that‘s something we‘d like to address in the future.We also had a last-minute issue with some of the fonts we used, which were not compatible with Russian and Chinese.

Test your fonts in all languages: A couple of days after release, the team discovered that some of their fonts were not available in Cyrillic.

I know your team actually developed custom tools for Ghost of a Tale. Can you tell us about the documents and tools you created to make the game’s writing and localization easier? LG: I wanted Paul to have all the tools he needed in order to have a fine degree of control over each aspect of the dialogue, so I wrote a fairly simple in-game dialogue system that evolved over the course of the development. Towards the end of development Paul could actually script game logic directly from the dialogue itself. In other words, Paul could work in an unrelated external mapping tool, but everything he did in there was parsed at run-time and translated into game logic. In a sense it was neat, but in the future we’ll eventually have to develop a proper dialogue application that will be integrated into the game’s inner code more tightly.

PG: We provided the localization team with as much information about the game as possible before they started their work. In addition to keys for the game itself, we created a style guide that gave an overview of the story, and provided references that helped give a sense of the spirit and tone of the writing. Since we had branching dialogues, we gave the team PDF copies of the dialogue trees so they could follow the conversation and have a better understanding of context. We also provided the team with our character biographies, and created a lexicon that gave a definition for any unfamiliar or made-up words and names, including the gender of the word.

This is the »1 million copies« question every indie developer asks themselves before taking the leap: was localizing Ghost of a Tale worth it? LG: Yes, without a shadow of a doubt. The return on investment was almost immediate. I can’t share any numbers, but almost half of our sales came from non-English speaking countries.

PG: Absolutely! Many of our reviews came from the European press, and the fact we had localized for those countries meant we received a lot more exposure than we otherwise would have.

If a dev team with a project the scale of Ghost of a Tale came to seek your advice regarding localization, what would you tell them? LG: From a technical point of view, localization is not an afterthought. Right from the beginning of the game we planned to support multiple languages in all of the game’s text elements. At first it felt a bit like overkill; after all, we could have just included the English text and been done with it. But we had heard about the importance of planning early for localization support and I can say it’s one of the best decisions we made at the beginning of the project. It’s a time investment that we recouped MANY times over when the moment came to swap languages.

PG: Start thinking about localization early, even if just at a high level. Talk to the localization team as soon as possible, to establish workflow.Give the localization team as much background information about your game as possible, before you begin – character biographies, a glossary of any names or words unique to your game, etc. Make sure you take time to discuss the style and tone of the game with the localization team. Be available to answer any questions the team has. It will make the project stronger, and allow the translators to move forward with confidence. I really enjoy this part of the project, as you get a good sense of how others see what you‘ve written.

The game’s upcoming release on PS4 and Xbox One should be the last stage of this 5-year journey. Is there anything that didn’t make it to the final product that you regret? LG: The game reflects exactly what we were able to do with our limited budget and (speaking for myself) experience. I’m actually proud that we were able to bring this project to fruition without getting lost on the way. I think we created something special here. And on a more personal note, I got to meet and work with terrific people like Paul, true professionals who dedicated their creative energy to making Ghost of a Tale what it is today simply because they believed in it.

PG: Sure, there are a few game mechanics and enemies that didn‘t make it into the final game, but we told the story that we set out to tell. If you look at what we originally planned, it‘s very close. In that respect this is the happiest I‘ve ever been with any project I‘ve worked on. Working with Lionel has probably been the most fulfilling creative experience I‘ve ever had.

Can we expect a sequel to Tilo’s adventures? PG: Well, we have the rest of Tilo‘s story mapped out. I hope we get the chance to tell it.

LG: It would indeed be wonderful! ;)

Interviewer: Damien Yoccoz www.leveluptranslation.com

Lionel Gallat is Creative Director of Ghost of a Tale

Lionel Gallat’s professional background is in animation. Lionel worked many years for DreamWorks on their first 2D (»The Prince of Egypt«, »The Road to Eldorado«, etc…) and then 3D movies (»Sharktale«, »Flushed Away«). He was also the animation director for movies like »Despicable Me«. And then one day he thought, ›Hey, why don’t I make a game?‹

Paul Gardner is Writer and Designer of Ghost of a Tale

Paul has been writing and designing for games for almost 20 years now, and he has worked on games like »Crash Twinsanity« for Traveller’s Tales, »Afro Samurai«, »Splatterhouse« for Namco, and »Marvel vs. Capcom: Infinite« for Capcom. He’s currently based in the Bay Area in California.

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