#not what this was inspired by but yoko taro is a gift that keeps on giving with the things his games/stories portray

[st-hedge]

Many such cases

[writingsofawanderingwonderer]

Game Postmortem: The Heart of Tales

Hello, and welcome to the Behind the Scenes article for my game, The Heart of Tales.

Quick intro here. This will contain spoilers for the game.

I've sorted this article into different parts: WRITING, ART, MUSIC, and the POST MORTEM. Each of those parts has different sections, and so on. You can skip ahead to the sections you want to read about.

Also, I'll refer to the player character by her default name, Hiro.

I tried to keep everything short, but it ended up being this long.

Now with that out of the way, let's begin.

=====WRITING=====

Inspiration: From Baldur's Gate to Tolkien

The Heart of Tales is inspired by various RPG games with medieval fantasy settings. Worlds where swords can talk, and you can take mysterious items to a shopkeeper to identify them. I decided to make The Heart of Tales follow similar "rules" to RPGs than to, say, medieval Fantasy television series. Because of that, The Heart of Tales is more eclectic in its nature (pulling from Greek Mythology, Arabic folklore, etc.--like many Dungeons & Dragon games) than historic or purely medieval European.

Some notable inspirations include the games Icewind Dale, Baldur's Gate, Neverwinter Nights, and Undertale. I was also inspired by Tolkien's novels and the German folklore surrounding the jester/trickster character, Till Eulenspiegel.

Icewind Dale

In Icewind Dale, there's a scene near the climax of the game where the main villain gives a big speech of how powerful they are. Like in The Heart of Tales, the player character in Icewind Dale has the option to reply to the whole speech with, "Woah."

Undertale

Undertale inspired the idea to let the player choose whether or not Hiro goes back to adventuring or stays retired by the end of the story. To me, it was important that the player was happy with Hiro's choice, so I didn't want to make the choice for the player.

Princess Maker 2

The line in the game where Hiro is rumoured to have been "born from the sky" is a reference to Princess Maker 2,

12 Kingdoms

The idea of a world or continent being divided by 12 kingdoms is a common trope in fantasy stories. In The Heart of Tales, I pictured that the continent is made up of 12 kingdoms, and the closer you are to the 1st kingdom, the more rich and upper-class the inhabitants are. The 12th kingdom would be the poorest.

Jester Till

I like bards. Bards are one of, if not my favourite, class in Dungeons & Dragons games. Neverwinter Nights used them to a good effect (meaning they have a balanced character build), but many other games overlook and/or don't include the bard class.

Till Eulenspiegel is a character who brings bards and jesters into the forefront of storytelling, by making the main character a jester.

Route Designs

I learned from Three Guys That Paint that having three love interests complicates things compared to two love interests. If you give the player three "A or B" choices, then the possible results can be three points to A or B, or two points to A or B. But adding a third love interest creates a programming problem: What if the player gives one point to each possible love interest? Then the game doesn't know what to do! And adding a fourth choice would add further problems.

That's the problem I had when I added Sareth's route.

I fixed this by making Sareth's route unlockable. The player had to pick New Game+ and that transports them to the "gift" choice, skipping the first choice. So instead of three choices, the player gets two. To add difficulty for the player, if they give one point to Sareth's route and one to Mithamoore or Cole, they fall into Mithamoore of Cole's route instead of Sareth's.

Making Sareth's route unlockable also implies that Aemza gets stronger and stronger with each playthrough, which is why he gains the ability to possess Hiro in Sareth's route.

Writing Process

The writing process was very similar to how I wrote Three Guys That Paint and Must Love Jaws. I started with a plot summary of the whole story. I separated the plot summary into scenes, and then I expanded each scene's summary into dialogue and narration. There were about 20 scenes total, and I wrote each scene in chronological order.

Then I took it all into Ren'Py and added coding like sprite movements and sound effects.

Theme: The Art of Violence?

Even though I've never been able to play any of his games (due to platform issues), I admire that Yoko Taro as a creator who makes video games that use the medium to help tell the story, such as giving plot explanations for the player character's ability to save and reload. The game mechanics have an in-universe explanation and the characters have an awareness of it.

In a video interview, he says the following (though note that this is an English translation), "[While working on the original Drakengard,] I thought about the meaning of "killing." I was looking at a lot of games back then, and I saw messages like "You've defeated 100 enemies!" or "Eradicated 100 enemy soldiers!" in an almost gloating manner. But when I thought about it in an extremely calm state of mind, it hit me that gloating about killing a hundred people is strange. I mean, you're a serial killer if you killed a hundred people. It just struck me as insane. [...] You don't have to be insane to kill someone, you just have to think you're right."

Anemza: Writing "True Villains"

I've also been noticing this change in storytelling, particularly in Western animation: More and more stories are having villains who are either:

a) Misunderstood and not really villains underneath, requiring the hero to "defeat" them through non-violent means. The hero instead has to show empathy and defuse tension when they face the antagonist (examples: Moana, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, and Steven Universe),

Or b) The villain turns out to be a character who was originally displayed as "nice" or "meek" and was thus overlooked by the hero (recent examples include Zootopia, Frozen, Wonder Woman).

At first, I was really frustrated with this; I missed "true villains" from the Renaissance Era of Disney and I didn't know what to make of this new trend with antagonists. I missed villains who had a lot of build-up and screen time. I missed villains like Megabyte (Reboot) that had a grand sense of presence. But then I realized why this change was occurring: It's important to teach people, especially young children, the importance of not just being brave and standing up for yourself. It's also important to teach them the importance of knowing that you can defuse confrontations in pacifist manner.

So even though I gave the game a "true villain" I also gave the message that for every act of violence, there's a consequence.

He's defeated because he couldn't have been changed: A person has to want to change in order to change.

Body Count: Is Hiro a One-Woman Army?

Hiro tells Cole that she's killed at least 447 beings before she "lost count."

To put this into perspective: The average kill count for the RPG D&D game Baldur's Gate is said to be around 1,500 for its full campaign. In that game, you are usually playing as a party of six characters.

Theme: Faith

I was very concerned about getting the romance routes in this game right because I think the romantic elements in my earlier game Three Guys That Paint were one of its weakest points.

So I realized that I had to focus on a specific aspect of relationships. For this game, I focused on the idea of faith in your partner.

Relationships are about sacrifice. It's about changing the idea of "me" into "we." It isn't just about liking what your lover is like. It's also about liking what you're like when you're with that person. Some partners bring out a certain strength in their partner.

The Meaning of 0451

0451 is a "Easter Egg" number used in a variety of games. Originally created as a reference to Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, the number is generally used to state that the developers of the game in question (usually an immersive sim like Bioshock, System Shock, and Thief) has themes of an ideology going wrong. For more information on this number's history and significance, I recommend checking out Errant's Signal's video essay on the topic.

One of the themes in The Heart of Tales is the idea that the main character is suffering from being put on a pedestal--and an ideology--that she no longer believes in. She is 0451. That's why during the climax of the game in Sareth's route, she says, "I am nothing. I am the fourth. The fifth. And lastly, I'm the first..." (Which translates to: "Nothing/Fourth/Fifth/First" = 0451). I mean, a lot of games in general are about a fantasy world going wrong, but I still thought it was an intriguing reference. An ideology crumbling.

Rejecting "Kindness Coins"

"Kindness coins" is a term used in visual novel development that refers to the "points system" often used in romance VNs. The player makes choices to unlock a romanceable character. The more choices they make to please the love interest they're pursuing, the more likely they'll unlock that route.

The term is not thought of highly and is generally used in a negative context: The implication is that, so long as the player acts nicely to the love interest and says what the love interest wants to hear (rather than being honest or properly roleplaying as the player character), the player will "earn" a romance with the love interest.

Which is a rather odd design mechanic, since in real life, being nice to someone to get something from them is not true kindness. And romantic partners in real life are often opposites who don't agree on some things.

In The Heart of Tales, Anemza tries to call out Hiro on her choices, saying that a few simple choices lead to the various routes she walked down. And if Hiro fights a possessed Cole or Mithamoore, they also accuse her of manipulating them. The game raises the idea of "kindness coins are bad"... only to reject it. Because Hiro ultimately defeats Anemza and wins the heart of her love interest, with little to no consequences.

This is because I find the idea that "using kindness coins makes the player a manipulator" is untrue, and that punishing a player for playing a romance game is rather... a bit much.*

It's because I find it similar to the idea that violent video games leads to violent people (which I think is utter tommyrot). People who kill in video games are not killers. They are actors reenacting a play. They are roleplaying. You may as well punish an actor for playing a villain.

The player in The Heart of Tales may be making choices to get a certain outcome (or they may not), but at the end of the day, they are still playing Hiro. And Hiro is the one who falls in love.

* (Footnote: There's only a few games I've seen that have managed to pull off this idea of punishing the player for their well-intentioned choices. And it's usually for playing the game a certain way, rather than playing the game at all.)

Hiro: The Difference Between a Grump and a Jerk

I tried to make sure that players liked Hiro, despite her wanting to turn away Mithamoore and Cole, as well as deceiving to them to try and get rid of them.

To me, there's a huge difference between being a grump and being a jerk. Hiro is written as the former, which I think makes her empathetic to players.

I don't like writing jerk-type characters, so that helped.

Mithamoore: Making a Likeable "Bad Boy"

A great irony with The Heart of Tales is that my last completed game, [redacted] Life, pokes fun at character archetypes found in otome games, including the "bad boy" archetype. Yet in The Heart of Tales, the tropes are played straight, rather than deconstructed.

I wanted to make Mithamoore intense yet likeable. It was a challenging balance to make (after all, he does begin the game wanting to kill Hiro). I think what helped was showing his vulnerability. He's unused to being human, and unused to reacting to feelings of romantic love.

I also had each love interest introduced one by one. I wanted Mithamoore to be introduced before Cole because Mithamoore is more aggressive and therefore would probably be harder to like. That was my theory at the time, but I've discovered that Mithamoore ended up being one of the more-popular routes.

Cole: Putting Heroes on a Pedestal and Hero Worship

Cole's character was influenced by the character Leo from Scrapped Princess, one of the first anime series I ever watched. Leo is a knight errant who struggles with the meaning of chivalry, as he gets torn between his duty as a knight and wanting to protect the main character, who is a princess wanted dead by the kingdom to prevent a dark prophesy from fulfilling.

When I was writing Cole, I wanted his character arc to be about overcoming his hero worship of Hiro. He's placed her on this pedestal that she can't possibly measure up to, and he has to learn to accept that and love her for who she really is.

Cole as a Fighter

Cole constantly quoting from the Knight Errant's Mantra was inspired by the character Double H from Beyond Good & Evil, who often quoted a fictional manual called Carlson and Peters.

His maneuver and defence names, Durer's Defence and Wallerstein's Codex, are references to famed engraver Albrecht Dürer (of the German Renaissance, who made many illustrations on sword fighting techniques) and the Codex Wallerstein (a compilation of three 15th-century combat manual manuscripts). Some illustrations from both can be seen here.

Cole as a Cook

I liked how I made Cole a good cook and made Hiro bad at cooking. In terms of gender roles, the stereotype is usually the opposite. Clinging to stereotypes just doesn't feel as believable to me.

"He Didn't Actually Blush"

I made sure that the characters never blush at any point in the story. Falling back to blushing as a way of showing romance is a big pet peeve among writers. I'm okay with others using it in moderation, but I decided to not use it myself.

Sareth: The Final Piece

Originally, Sareth wasn't a love interest. But after I started posting work in progress information on Twitter and Lemmasoft, several people lamented that they wouldn't be able to date the talking sword.

And the more I wrote the story, the more I thought about Sareth becoming a love interest. And the more it made sense. I slowly went from, "I'd be crazy to write this," to, "I'd be crazy not to write this."

So basically, I blame all of you for Sareth's route. ;)

Inspiration Behind Sareth

The biggest inspiration behind Sareth is Enseric the Longsword from Neverwinter Nights: Hordes of the Underdark. Neverwinter Nights was the first RPG I ever played, and it's one of the reasons why I love RPG games.

Enserric was a weapon you obtained during an early section of the game (a dungeon created by a mad wizard). Enserric is a talking sword, is one of the most powerful weapons in the game, and had an entire, elaborate backstory (he was originally a mage who got his soul trapped within the sword and left for dead by his fleeing companions). I've also heard rumors that a side-quest was cut from the final game, which involved finding a body for Enserric before his consciousness completely disappeared within the sword.

Like Sareth, Enseric could taste the blood of the enemies he fought, and had a very inflated opinion of himself.

Anemza's Plans

Anemza explaining his plans on what he was going to do to Hiro (before he decided on his final plan) were actually some of the ideas I had before deciding on the idea I went with.

The Shopkeeper is Based on a Real Person

The ambiguously-gendered, mysterious shopkeeper is loosely based off of Ibn Battuta, a Moroccan scholar who widely travelled the medieval world, including Africa, the Middle East, India, Central and Southeast Asia, and China. He has been described by author John Green as "probably the most well-travelled person before the invention of the steam engine." During the twilight of his life, he wrote an account of his journey, referred to as The Travels, which provides a picture of medieval civilization that is still widely consulted today.

[images: Ibn Battuta and the shopkeeper sprite]

What's in a Name?

I actually came up with Cole and Mithamoore's names pretty late. While I was writing the game, I labelled them as Knight and Dragon.

Hiro's Name

Hiro as in hero, get it? Ha... heh... (sheepishly grins)

The following events happen if you try to name the player character these names:

Choosing nothing, or choosing Hiro/Hero:

"Her name was Hiro. And that should have been the very first clue. [name]."

Naming her Mithamoore: "Her name was Mithril. Named after the beautiful metal used for the armour of heroes."

Mason: "Her name was Morgan. Named after the beautiful gemstone from the darkest caves."

Cole/Caldwell: "Her name was Nicole. The name that stood for 'victorious people.'"

Sareth/Sword/Claymore: "Her name was Sara. It meant 'princess.'"

Anemza: (The music suddenly stops.) Anemza's dialogue goes: "I AM THE DEMON THAT COMES WHEN YOU CALL MY NAME." (The game proceeds to automatically quit.)        

Shopkeeper: "Her name was Shoppy. A name that evoked merchants and traders."

Jester/Till/Bard: "Her name was Tilli. Named after the famous jester, Till."

Adventurer: "Her name was Farryn. It meant 'adventurous child.'"

Villager: "Her name was Mariko. It meant 'true village child.'"

Poop/Sh*t: "Her name was Showell. It meant 'to shovel.'"

Anti-swearing feature. If you type in some swear words: "Her name was Liliha. It meant 'to angrily disregard.'"

Dave/Davette/Ogu Pigu/OguPigu: "Her name was Davette."

Mithamoore's Name

I looked at Skyrim dragon names to help come up with a dragon name. I wanted something long yet easy for me to remember. ^^;

The idea of giving him the title of Mithamoore the Earthburner was inspired by The Hobbit's Smaug and his various titles.

Cole's Name

Cole's name was probably from Cole Phelps from the game LA Noire, where Phelps is a very straight-laced, follow the rules-type young detective. I wanted to invoke that feeling.

Anemza's Name

Anemza's name I basically came up with by doing the following:

Start with the name Jasmine.

Remove the first letter: Asmine.

Reverse the remaining letters: Enimsa.

Change some of the letters to other letters that sound phonically similar: E into A, I to E, S to Z: Anemza.

What really settled it was when I realized that Anemza sounds like the word "anemic," which can mean "lacking blood or warmth."

So yeah, Anemza is basically the name Jasmine put through a blender.

=====ART======

Inspiration

The Heart of Tales' overall art style was inspired by games like Princess Maker 2 (detailed illustrations with a pixelated texture), Undertale (giving each background a limited colour palette, and associating home with the colour yellow), and older games like Psychic Detective and Phantasmagoria (using smaller CGs in framed boxes).

Art Process

Preproduction

Before I start production work on any game, I create a folder and fill it with images I've found that give me ideas on what the game should look like. I've only learned recently that this called a "swipe folder."

Then I start drawing sketches on paper, and use those as concept art for the final sprites, backgrounds, CGs, and user interface.

 [Image: My paper notes]

Index Painting

I used Dan Fessler's wonderful tutorial on creating pixel art through HD index painting.

Basically, the steps are like so:

1) Paint the artwork in Photoshop like you normally do, but using no colour. Only use shades of grey.

2) Apply a Dither layer on top using the Paint Bucket Tool.

3) Add a Black and white Adjustment layer on top of that.

4) Add a Posterize adjustment layer on top of that.

5) Add a Gradient Map adjustment layer on top of that. Edit it to get the colours you want.

I basically reverse-engineered Dan Fessler's Photoshop file that he provides in the tutorial.

Hiro's Design

I wanted her outfit to imply a bunch of different possible backstories, so I gave her puffy sleeves (bard), a tunic with light-coloured trimming (noblewoman), a tunic (adventurer), and a symbol that resembles the game's mouse (implying that she has her own personal symbol).

Mithamoore's Design

I'm not sure where I got the idea for his outfit. I wanted the outfit Hiro gives him to make him look like he values art, culture, and good craftsmanship.

I think I based his hair on Benedict Cumberbatch playing Sherlock Holmes. Which is ironic, because Cumberbatch also played a dragon in The Hobbit.

Cole's Design

Cole's armour design is loosely based off of Leopold Scorpus from Scrapped Princess.

I made Cole the tallest character and gave him armour that looks a lot bigger than himself. I like the "Popeye-arms" effect it gives him.

Anemza's Design

I wanted Anemza's design to look like a creature from another dimension. I looked up animal and monster designs medieval tapestries and manuscript. There are some really bizarre, amusing, and creative designs, so I gave Anemza the body parts of various animals. I made a conscious decision to make Anemza the only animated character, to make him feel more otherworldly.

I was influenced by Terry Gilliam's Monty Python cut-out animation, as well as the designs of the witches in Puella Magi Madoka Magica, and "Omega Flowey" from Undertale. 

[images from Monty Python's Flying Circus, Puella Magi Madoka Magica, and Undertale]

I specifically avoided using rigging and tweening when I animated Anemza, to give him a more stop-motion quality. I animated the body parts frame by frame in Photoshop CS6.

I also programmed Anemza's sprite to "glitch" at randomized intervals, and in different ways.

 [Image: Just a few of Anemza’s “glitching” animation frames]

=====MUSIC=====

The OST music was created by the wonderful Noyemi K.

I asked Noyemi to create seven leitmotifs:

1) A romantic theme.

2) A sad theme.

3) A scary theme.

4) Mithamoore's theme.

5) Cole's theme.

6) Anemza's theme.

7) Anemza's hopeful theme.

I gave a description of each of the characters, and I specifically asked for Anemza's "hopeful" theme to be a remix of Anemza's "scary" theme. Noyemi creating a "glitching," stuttering sound effect for Anemza's theme to give the idea the Anemz's mere presence is breaking the game.

=====POST MORTEM=====

What Went Right

The Characters

I'm glad that players were okay with the idea of dating a dragon and a sword. I'm glad people embraced that.

Portraying love

Ever since Three Guys That Paint, I've been skeptic and unsure about whether or not I could write love stories. The romances were the weakest part of Three Guys That Paint in my opinion, so I wondered if I needed to try again, or if writing romance just wasn't going to be one of my strengths. I'm glad that people liked the romances in The Heart of Tales. I think a lot of it comes from the love interests feeling more fleshed out to me here than Arthur and Terri from Three Guys That Paint.

Original Music

Working with Noyemi K was an absolute pleasure. Players commented on how much they liked the original sound track. I plan on working with Noyemi on a future project.

Persistent Data

"Persistent data" is a term I discovered while making [redacted] Life. Persistent data allows a Ren'Py game to remember previous choices a player has made, and keeps that information, even if the player reloads or deletes their previous progress.

Although I didn't use persistent data nearly as much as I did with [redacted] Life, I did use it for some of Anemza's dialogue (he notes that he knows about players' previous playthroughs). Many players commented on how they were impressed by that detail.

What Could Have Been Better

Getting Ideas Last-Minute

The pro to it was that there was less research notes I wrote that I needed to read through.

The con was that I usually like to come up with an idea and mull over it for about a year or more. After that amount of time, I have a better idea of where I want the project to go.

Here, I had to make quick decisions like adding Sareth's romance route and realising the theme of the central game was faith in others. Feeling my way through the story as I was writing was slower.

Coincidence

The Heart of Tales relies on a lot of coincidence (Mithamoore and Cole meeting Hiro on the same night, Hiro's companions finding the goblins, etc.). Avoiding coincidence is something that I'll have to try to avoid in my future games.

What I Learned

Ren'Py's New GUI

This is the first game I've made using Ren'Py's updated user interface design (I've tinkered with it on Eight Sweets, but at the time of publishing this, I haven't finished making that visual novel). It took a while getting used to it (and a lot of question-asking on the Lemmasoft forums!), but I've ended up really liking it. I feel much more confident using it.

The Three Act Structure is Good for Revisions -- Not First Drafts

An age-old question among writers is, "Is using the three act structure useful?" I think I learned during this project that you can't shoehorn the three act structure into your story. You just plot out the thing, and then you look at it and see if it feels complete. Our subconscious is so used to the three acts that your story will have them anyway.

But if you write the first draft of the plot outline and find that the story feel incomplete, you can go back and use the three act structure to find out what the problem is.

Basically, I had to do that for The Heart of Tales because of how fast I came up with the story for the game jam.

Le Morte d'Author/The Death of the Author

I think it's this game that taught me that there's a point at which I have to stop explaining things to the audience through social media. Either a player "got" what I was trying to say, or they did not, and I failed to explain or show things in a clear enough way. Or the player interpreted something in a way I didn't even think of, and I shouldn't take that away from them because they're using their own experience and viewpoints to interpret the game.

I see this as a fun challenge, because I know that the audience is smart. As Pixar's Andrew Stanton said, "Don't give [the audience] four; give them two plus two." I'll still answer questions if they're directed at me, but I also feel more comfortable to say, "It's up to your interpretation."

I also feel more comfortable letting the viewer "do the work" when it comes to interpreting a thing that can be interpreted many different ways. For example, I never give a clear answer to the hero's origin story. Was she a princess? A farm girl? A bard? Did she come from the sky? Every player will have a different answer to that question.

I think Davey Warden's 2015 game, The Beginner's Guide, made me think about this more. The idea that the player's interpretation often says more about themselves then it does about the creator or even the work itself.

Audience interpretation is a form of interaction.

We Don't Create Our Work in a Bubble

I've been thinking a lot about how my work affects people, and how work I see affects me. I learned that what I create is not made in a bubble. My own experiences and viewpoints affect the work. To paraphrase an old saying, every painting is a self-portrait. I feel like I have a kind of responsibility to make sure that my art helps people rather than hurts.

The Heart of Tales involves themes of the consequences of violence, yet the climax involves fighting a demon to save the day. I guess trying to defuse situations through talking only works if the other is willing to listen too? Like Cole and Mithamoore? Anemza is the personification of evil, after all.

It's also made me think about how time-sensitive my current and future work's becoming. If I made The Heart of Tales a year earlier, it would have been written a lot differently than how it's ended up now. And not just because I learn and gain developer's experience over time.

I know a lot of artists who have said that they are struggling with finding value in their art, or have completely come to the conclusion that creating art to change people for the better is a futile effort, but I don't buy that. I don't buy that because artwork that I've seen, made by other people, has changed me. And improved me. Stories have made me think about judging others by their appearance. About what it means to be Good, with a capital G. About what it means to try and follow your dreams. And stories have been doing that ever since I was a child.

Surely I'm not the only one who's been affected by art in that way...