Disruptive Director

July 20, 2018

A couple of weeks ago, I posted about how I was writing biographies for all the non-player characters in the upcoming Sleuthhounds: Cruise game. Although a little time consuming, that process was going well and was giving me a lot of ideas for both critical path puzzles and side investigations for the game. That was until I got to the cruise director, Skip Masterson.

[Skip Masterson, a difficulty cruise director.]
Skip Masterson, a difficulty cruise director.

The cruise director is a critical position in the game as he’s responsible for coordinating all the entertainment activities for the guests. I had several specific activities in mind that the player would either have to participate in to progress the story or could optionally participate in to help with various side investigations. I knew that I absolutely needed a character to fill this position.

The problem was, when I came to write Skip’s bio I got stuck. The backstories for all the other characters came together quite easily but not so for the cruise director. A large part of my difficulty was that I was only considering the character for his function aboard the ship, whereas all the other characters I started with a sentence or two describing who they were as characters in their own right.

One of the aspects that I wanted for the backstory for each character was something that they’d want to keep secret. Something that, as the Sleuthhounds started probing around the edges of who a character was, would make that character look suspicious. Nothing I thought of for Skip really felt like it fit. The secrets I came up with either weren’t logically consistent, brought in too many complications, or were too close to the secrets I’d established for other characters already.

Computer games are rife with thinly drawn characters so it may seem like a lot of work (and agony in this case) that I’m going to detailing all this backstory for the characters. However, it’s an important part of my writing process in any medium. Without an understanding of who a character is and where they came from I have trouble integrating them into my stories and even difficulty writing dialog for them.

I went around in circles several times trying to figure out what deep, dark secret Skip could have or coming up with some manner of backstory that just didn’t feel like it would connect to Skip being a bubbly, gregarious cruise director. It was at that point that I hit upon the thought of working backwards instead of forwards, by which I mean figuring out where Skip was at in life immediately before becoming the cruise director. And where was he in life immediately before that and so on and so forth. It’s a method I’ve never used before but one that paid off here. After struggling with Skip’s story for several days, the pieces finally fell into place.

I now know who Skip is, how he got to the point in his life where he became the cruise director, and what his hidden secrets are. More importantly, with that knowledge I now know exactly how to write the character in terms of what he’d say and what he’d do in any given situation. I still have a couple of other characters to finish up but at this point for the bulk of the characters I could easily write a story/game that specifically starred any one of those characters and have it be an interesting and complete story in itself without being framed within a Sleuthhounds case. That should make each of those characters interesting to investigate when Cruise is finally completed.