Hey everybody!

Three months ago we published a devlog update called “The many voices of the city”. Those who missed it can read it here.

In that update we announced that we would work with a team of 15 writers. Back then we had only a small profile of the characters who appear on “A Place for the Unwilling”, about 300 words for each of them, in which we described personality, short background and the details we felt were most important.

Some of you have asked us what happened to all that and how it’s influencing the game, well, here we are today to explain it!

We sent them a document with many questions to answer about the character they had been assigned, but some of them decided to prepare a short tale instead or just a monologue. After a few months all the writers had their texts ready. Each of them had written a super-detailed background for each of the characters (about 5.000 words long). We now have plenty of small anecdotes, stories and behavior details that will improve dialogues a lot, making interacting with these characters way more interesting.

We put everything together and turns out that, in this stage of development, we have over 80.000 words of lore for the world of “A Place for the Unwilling”, a bit more than “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone”.

As this content kept growing it became rather daunting(and hard to manage!). Imagine having to go through all those documents every time you need to double check a fact before writing a dialogue or creating a new asset, “What kind of clothes does Doris wear? Huh, I think there was also some info about here on Thomas’ file”. It was confusing and took too much time, so we finally decided to create a private wiki! Setting up everything wasn’t easy, but searching info about a certain topic, location or person is easier now.

We don’t want to unveil too much about the background of our cast… but let’s go ahead and share one of the tiny anecdotes the writers sent us (one that we like a lot!)

You already know good old Lucas, one of the first characters we ever showed. He’s kinda crazy and owns a library in the rich quarter. He is highly introverted and tends to stutter, usually choosing only short sentences. But turns out there’s a solution for his speaking issues, he doesn’t stutter while singing. He’s an opera expert and, whenever he wants to explain something, he simply plays music and sings along. So if a client walks into his shop he might play a piece from Wagner while talking to them.

You won’t get to really know a character the moment you meet them, that’ll take many in-game days, but you’ll slowly discover who they are. The more they trust you the more things they’ll tell you.

The writers didn’t only work on the backgrounds, they also provided us with more ideas for quests as well as specifying how a certain character might react to a certain player action or decision. Their next task will be to come up with the books that players will be able to find and read while exploring the city (these will cover lots of topics).

Since the writers don’t directly work on the dialogues they can work at their own pace, without needing to be coordinated with the rest of the team.

-here’s the video we published a few months ago featuring the writers-

And that’s all for now! There’s a small surprise we’ll announce soon, stay tuned and say hi on twitter or through email ([email protected]) if you feel like it!

See you in two weeks :-D