Sidling into Side Quests

August 2, 2019

Since reaching the end of the critical path in Sleuthhounds: Cruise I’ve turned my attention to integrating various side investigations and storylines. In prose a common metaphor for writing is that of the iceberg. The writer includes the 10% of the information representing the tip of the iceberg but 90% remains hidden beneath the surface, informing everything else. Occasionally, you’ll run into a book where at least some of that 90% makes its way in in the form of footnotes or appendices. Side quests in a game are kind of like appendices, except the can be integrated right alongside the main storyline as long as they’re clearly signposted as optional content.

I first encountered character driven side quests in Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. As a roleplaying game, KotOR is adventure game adjacent. I really enjoyed the side quests that centered on each of the NPCs that could accompany the player character throughout the game. Each one of these characters had their own separate storyline to follow. One of the things I particularly liked, was that it was possible to not finish or to completely miss these sides. That may seem like an odd thing, finding it good that content could be missed. However, to me that made the world seem more alive, as if things were happening that I might only accidentally become aware of as opposed to having everything presented to me straight out for consumption.

It’s with that mentality that I’ve been tackling the side quests in Cruise. The sides can only be triggered at certain points in the story. Some of the sides can only be accessed if players have (or haven’t) done certain things in the main storyline. As much as possible, I’ve been trying to have side quests span multiple acts in the story, which helps make them seem bigger and have more weight without requiring a ton of extra work. More bang for the buck, as it were.

As side quests are only available on medium and hard difficulty settings in the game, and as they’re not key to solving the overall mystery, I feel there’s more freedom to provide a little less cluing and direction on the side quests. This should make them a bit more challenging to solve than otherwise comparable sequences within the main game. At the same time, because these are side quests there isn’t the same imperative to have to resolve them before the game’s end. With the main game, regardless of what players do, I want them to get to a satisfying conclusion. That ending may be nuanced and subtly different depending on choices made, but it should provide a resolution. Side quests too should provide a decent resolution if their endings are reached. However, by their very nature there’s no guarantee the player will reach the ending, unless they’re paying attention and following up on events as appropriate.

From both storytelling and technical implementation standpoints, the trickiest thing about adding the side quests is finding the spots in the story where they can interweave successfully. For instance, there’s a rivalry between ex-military man Colonel Forsythe and ex-naval officer Sir Reginald Price. There’s also a tactical board game that the two characters both play. It made sense to develop a side quest that would ultimately bring them into a confrontation over the game board. However, there are certain character developments in Act 4 that would make such an encounter seem out of place if it were to occur afterwards. As such, there’s a storytelling limit that the final showdown between these two characters must occur before that point.

Testing as well gets a little tricky with the side quests. Since they tend to be spread across multiple acts, it necessitates having to play through sizable chunks of the game just to follow up on and test the storylines of the side quests. While it would be possible to code the game in such a way that I could jump from one scene to another, which I have done on occasion, inevitably the side quests must be tested within the context of everything else going on. This is not a bad thing as additional testing is never a bad thing and has, in fact, already uncovered a number of bugs in the critical path implementation (which have all been duly noted to be addressed at a later date).

Throughout development I’ve tried to keep an eye open for opportunities to add more life into the game world as adventure games have a tendency to be pretty static. I’ve already got some background animations, tailing of suspects as they wander through the ship, and certain already-in-progress scenes that the player walks in on. Adding side quests that players may complete fully, partially, or else miss altogether helps to add another layer to that goal. And they will maybe provide additional reasons to replay the game upon completion.