Beyond the Western Deep

Theo looks very impatient there–and Yurk clearly doesn’t know that coffee machines need to be plugged in to work. SUPER SPECIAL THANK YOU to Jerome Jacinto for this wonderful intermission image :)

Apologies to everyone who was looking forward to the next page of TSatS–but Jayelle hasn’t been feeling too great this past week and we both decided it would be a good idea for a little break. We’ll be back next week with the regular page, but I don’t want you to go away empty-handed, so I’d like to share a Western Deep-related project that I’ve been working on for a little while:

Whoa, what? What is this? It looks like COMPUTER STUFF!

So, for those readers who know my non-Western Deep work, I’ve been working in the video game development industry for over 10 years now. In that period of time I’ve helped design action games, RPGs, racing games, and more, and I’ve written for all sorts of games up to and including Guild Wars 2 at my current employer, ArenaNet.

One of my dreams has been, for quite some time, to work on my own Western Deep-related video game. I’m absolutely enamored with a specific sub-genre of adventure games reaching back to the old Quest for Glory series published by Sierra On-Line between 1989 and 1998. My favorite of the series, Quest for Glory IV: Shadows of Darkness, was in part an adventure game and also partly an RPG, taking elements of games like The Elder Scrolls and The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask to craft a very small, very intimate open world.

The basic structure of these games thrust you into fantastical plots taking place in open micro-worlds inspired by various world mythologies. QfG1 focused on European, Brothers Grimm-style stories, while QfG2 had a more 1001 Nights vibe. QfG3 was focused on African mythology, and QfG4 was themed around Eastern European mythology, tinged with a bit of Lovecraft for good measure. Part Witcher, part Ravenloft. It’s pretty neat!

But the thing that really caught me as a kid were the open-world systems at play. I first played Quest for Glory IV in 1994, a full seven years before I would play Morrowind and truly experience an open-world game for the first time. Heck, it would be another four years before I’d play Ocarina of Time and have a 3D open world experience at all (Hyrule Field blew my mind at the time). So this was the first “open world” game I’d ever played, where day turned to night, characters had schedules, and I could truly go anywhere and solve puzzles in any order.

I wanted to take these concepts and build them out into an adventure game–something I haven’t seen done in quite some time outside the Quest for Infamy and Heroine’s Quest games, both of which were directly inspired by Quest for Glory in artistic style. I wanted to build a game like this, but in OUR style.

Enter War of the Western Deep, a story that Rachel and I considered doing as a webcomic while we shopped the original Beyond the Western Deep story to book publishers way before we started it as a webcomic. While that story itself never really panned out beyond a few thumbnails and character concepts, I always liked its tamian protagonist: Mirren. Reader Atelier Bagur has done a lot of fan art with the character, actually, and was nice enough to contribute some artwork for this game project (a sampling of which can be seen above).

So, why is my art so terrible, temp, and placeholder? Well, game development usually involves an early period we call “grayboxing”, where we quickly iterate on the mechanics and the gameplay until we’re sure we like how everything works. This period can take a very long time, and require art to change constantly. For example, in the above screenshot, if I wanted to move that piece of hanging rope and put it in another scene, I could easily do that with my terrible temp art. If Rachel was doing the backgrounds at comic art quality, making those kinds of minor changes on a regular basis would pile up real quick. And that’s saying nothing of MAJOR changes, like…what if a scene was indoors, but I needed to change it to outdoors? Or I needed to add a window? The lighting would change completely, and those kinds of things are time consuming to fix.

But if it’s just my terrible temp art, it’s easy to lock things down this early and get things to where they need to be. And trust me, there’s plenty of work to be done even before the art starts coming in.

Using the Unity engine and the Adventure Creator plugin (https://www.adventurecreator.org/) I was able to very quickly get playable scenarios up and running. This one conversation from the video looks simple, but features many individual moving parts.

Every interaction in the “scene” or “room” requires a separate ActionList (a flowchart-based system that Adventure Creator relies on for most if not all of its interactions. As you can see, I have a great many interactions here, from examining items to using them, to using inventory items on things in the environment as well.

Once I’ve decided I want to have a conversation with this lutren skeleton, I have to start building that out line by line (none of this text is final, by the way–consider literally everything you see to be placeholder).

The conversation also relies on a variable check, which runs before any text displays and sees if I’ve already talked to the skeleton once before (this is a common exercise to prevent long stretches of dialogue from repeating ad nauseam).

Obviously this is just a surface-level glance at the “adventure” element of the game. One thing that Quest for Glory also did differently than other adventure games was that they all had battle systems, letting you engage with enemies throughout your journey to increase your stats, find new items, or progress the plot.

I’m actually not a huge fan of Shadows of Darkness’ combat system (which was inspired by side-view fighting games popular at the time like Street Fighter), but the idea was certainly intriguing. I have my own ideas for how to approach this, but it will be a long time before I prototype that out, since Adventure Creator really doesn’t support this kind of action-packed system and I’d need to work with some other folks to get it in the right place.

ANYWAY, that’s just a crazy small sampling of what I’m working on here and there. This little demo will feature three rooms and a couple of simple puzzles, but just getting them to feel right and operate properly will take some time, and once they’re locked in, getting the artwork integrated will be another story altogether.

What I’m saying is, this is a long-term project with no real set end-date. It’s a fun hobby that I plan to continue evolving into the foreseeable future, but don’t expect to see it on Steam anytime soon :)

See you all next week!