NPC Biographies

July 6, 2018

Last week I reported running into a bit of writer’s block while working on the story and design for Act 2 of Sleuthhounds: Cruise. Taking some time to step away from the story and design helped me to realize what wasn’t working so that I could go back and fix things. Creating a space in which to think wasn’t the only thing that helped me to get unstuck though, especially when it came to the stories of the non-player characters in the game.

Sleuthhounds is a series of detective mystery games following in the pattern of similar mystery stories like those by Agatha Christie. Such stories are interesting in that they actually generally consist of two stories. The main story concerns all of the characters that are suspects in whatever the mystery is. Their interrelationships lead to the circumstances that set up the crime that is the focus of the main story. Into that story enters the detective or detectives as interlopers. Their story is the secondary story as they try to piece together the narrative of the first story. As such, I felt it was necessary to flesh out the non-player characters in Cruise just as much, if not more than, the Sleuthhounds themselves, Jane Ampson and Pureluck Homes.

As the working title implies, Cruise takes place on a cruise ship. This is a great setting for pulling together a bunch of disparate characters. However, they can’t be too disparate or else why would one (or more) want to commit a crime against another? To help develop the character personalities and motivations I sat down and wrote a series of biographies for each of the suspects in the game. These bios are each roughly a page in length and detail the background of the characters. They describe the influencing factors and important events in the characters’ lives from childhood up to the point that the characters boarded the ship.

By working on a given character’s biography independent of the story of Cruise itself, as well as those of the other characters, it means that I’m completely focused on that one character. That helps to develop them far more than if I were just assigning traits or archetypes to the character based on the roles they need to fill in the game itself. From a story standpoint, the result of all this is that it makes it easy to see where characters have shared or similar experiences that might cause them to naturally gravitate to one another. Or conversely, it helps to see where characters would come into natural conflict. For example, the hard working female doctor who made it in a man’s world would naturally be disdainful of the “silly-headed” flibbertigibbet socialite belle of the ball.

Being able to see where alliances and conflicts naturally arise is useful in any form of storytelling. However, the backstories have an extra benefit that’s particular to making games. In the case of Cruise, as with the other Sleuthhounds games, in addition to the main investigation, there are various side errands and investigations that players can choose to go on. The backstories of the non-player characters have proven quite useful in identifying what these asides might be. For instance, one of the characters wants to be a rather snoopy reporter while another, already established reporter, wants to stop this from happening. It’s a conflict unrelated to the main storyline of the game, but one that the player could step into to resolve one way or another, especially as the player character Jane Ampson used to be a reporter herself.

With over a dozen major non-player characters, writing a page of backstory for each is a little time consuming. However, that time has been a great investment as it’s helped to develop those characters more and provided many opportunities to bring in interesting gameplay scenarios that I likely wouldn’t have thought of otherwise. At the end of the day, the bios are just another tool to help deliver a high quality final result.