“A Place for the Unwilling” is a story that lasts three weeks and, needless to say, the city must change during each of those days. How does a small team like ours manage something like that? Well, let’s talk a bit about our process and learn about the way we structure our content.

First of all, you need to understand that it’s impossible to change the whole city in each of those 21 days, and it doesn’t make sense story-wise either. So every day you wake up in the same city, but it’ll have some changes. We asked Ángel, our narrative director, to give us a list of events that it’d be cool to have in the game. After taking a closer look we tried to come up with a basic structure that allowed us to build as many of those quests as possible. We then set a blueprint for them (a template if you will). Basically, a “quest” is a list of changes that the game does to our world while the quest is active. We decided there would only be three types of changes: assigning a different dialogue to (one that isn’t the default) a certain character, assigning a new routine/schedule to a certain character and creating/deleting a certain item.

So imagine having this deck of cards that, when pulled out, apply some changes to our city (changes that can only be like the ones explained before). Now you just need to make sure they don’t overlap and try to modify the same element but, since in our game we have a wide cast of characters and 21 days to spread these events, that’s not an issue. It’s a simple solution but it still works. We don’t have enemies going around or a level progression that needs to make sense. Most of the action takes place during dialogues, so just by switching the location of a character or an item (and their associated dialogue file) we can change pretty much everything.

Sure, we do have some restrictions as our quests aren’t completely unrelated, most are part of a bigger whole and must appear in a certain order that makes sense. So it’s nothing like “Animal Crossing” or “Harvest Moon”, where you can just have any event appear on any given day, but we still have a lot of freedom. When you think about it, having a world that changes over time isn’t that different from having a regular open-world, it’s just that not all the content is available all the time. Sure, that’s rarely seen in mainstream games, not letting the player access a certain content whenever they want, but you know, indie games, we get to do some things a little bit different.

And how do you schedule the amount of content available? Well, you set an “opening” and a “closing” hour to each one of these lists of changes (or quests). That’s basically and in-game time frame in which those changes are applied (or not) to the game. We track the player progress in each quest, what they did, the output they got and if they completely missed it (or part of it).

Everything needs to be in this “deck of events”, from the big stuff that can last a whole week to the subtle details that will disappear in a couple of hours, if it’s making any changes to our world it’s important to make sure nothing overlaps.

As said before, in our project we have some restrictions regarding how and when events pop up, but it’d be interesting if another game (one that doesn’t have a central story like we do) used the “deck of quests” concept and took it a step further, adding some controlled randomization. Then again, it’s nothing we haven’t seen before, but there aren’t that many projects out there exploring it.

And with that we end today’s text. We’ll be back in two weeks with one of those big updates we publish every few months, so don’t go too far!