Shifting the Blame Game

October 11, 2019

When I work on a prose story I tend to do so in a nonlinear fashion, meaning that I jump around to write the scenes that I know and then come back to fill in the bridging pieces that go in between. When creating a computer game of the complexity of Sleuthhounds: Cruise it’s not as simple as that. Cruise features what I’ve come to call micro choices; small decisions that the player makes that has some impact farther down the line in the game’s story without too radically altering it. Such choices generally require the game be implemented in chronological order to ensure the impact of those decisions can be accounted for. However, as I’ve been drawing ever closer to locking down the dialog script for the game I recently returned to one critical path scene that I’d opted to skip before. A scene that had stymied me on a first pass and nearly stymied me again upon revisiting.

In Act 4 of the game, the Sleuthhounds are closing in on discovering the perpetrator of the sabotage aboard the cruise ship. At one point they find the opportunity to sneak into the captain’s quarters to search it. Upon doing so they break into his old sea chest and discover something they need to confront the captain about. Heretofore in the story the captain has been an impediment and quite outspoken against the Sleuthhounds’ investigation.

My original conception was that, after the player searched the sea chest, the captain would return to his cabin and catch the Sleuthounds in the act. This posed a problem because I needed the captain to get to the point where, although not being a fan of the Sleuthhounds, he needed to ask for their assistance. See the difficulty? It wasn’t credible to have a character who already disliked the Sleuthhounds and just discovered them searching through his things, to turn around and ask for their assistance. It was much more credible to believe he’d call the ship’s security and have the detecting duo thrown in the brig.

On my original implementation pass through the game I couldn’t resolve this scene. I couldn’t see how to get from point A (the captain dislikes the Sleuthhounds and finds them searching his cabin) to point B (the captain asks for their help). My solution on that first pass was to just skip over the scene. It was bogging down production and I needed to move on. As a result, I set the scene aside with the intent of solving it later. The only problem was, when later came I still didn’t know how to solve the scene.

As I’ve been filling in the various side quests for Cruise over the past few weeks, I’ve also been revisiting a couple of scenes, like this one, that I either skipped over on the first pass or wasn’t completely satisfied with. This particular one really became troublesome. I just could not figure out how to get the character of the captain to essentially turn 180 degrees around on his opinion of the Sleuthhounds. I couldn’t even figure out how to not have him call security, let alone get to the point where he asked for their help. It was too far for the captain’s character to go in a single scene. Unfortunately, because I was now completing the last of the missing bits in the game, I didn’t have the luxury of skipping over the scene again.

After a lot of head scratching I came to the realization that the big problem I had was that the encounter between the captain and the Sleuthhounds at this point, by its very nature, had to be a confrontational one. Now, people who are angrily confronting one another don’t typically ask each other for help. It occurred to me that if I had some way to bring the stakes down, even just a little bit, that I might be able to credibly get through the scene. That at least gave me a more focused view on what wasn’t working with the story here, even though it didn’t actually solve the problem. Not at first.

The big break came one morning when I was working on something else in the game completely unrelated to the scene with the captain. I’m sure there was something I’d seen or heard or read that triggered some thought process to reach the solution, but for the life of me I don’t know what it was. Whatever it was, it suddenly struck me that the confrontation I’d been intending to put between the captain and the Sleuthhounds was a private one. That is, it happened in the captain’s cabin with no one else around. But if I moved the scene to the bridge (to which the captain’s cabin is connected) then the scene could suddenly become very different because now there was the audience of the bridge crew. To accentuate that audience factor, I even brought the owner of the ship, Sir Reginald Price, to the bridge as well.

Captain Windwhistler confronts the Sleuthhounds.

All of sudden, the pieces started to fit into place. Instead of encountering the captain in his cabin, the Sleuthhounds would come out to the bridge just as the captain was returning there. The captain would know they broke into his quarters and would still be angry with them. However, what changed was that now I could have the Sleuthhounds either be confrontational with the captain, as I’d originally planned when the scene was in his cabin, or I could have them be rather more circumspect, referring obliquely to what they discovered in his sea chest.

With an audience looking on – especially the boss, Sir Price – the captain would be worried about his dirty laundry being aired. If the player decided to directly confront the captain, although he’d be angry with them, Price would be even angrier with him. That would shift the confrontation over to the captain and Price, allowing the Sleuthhounds to retreat (and closing off what I came to realize was a side investigation in which the captain asks for help). On the other hand, if the player was more discreet, the captain could ask to speak with the Sleuthhounds in private and would have a certain degree of gratitude for them for not revealing all of his secrets to Price and the bridge crew. To me that felt like it lowered the tension, lowered the stakes, enough to allow the captain to ask the Sleuthhounds for help.

I don’t remember how long I spent trying to crack this scene the first time I came to it. I suspect not very long. This time around, it stymied me for the better part of a week. It was only when I shifted my focus to something else and just let my mind rattle away on the problem in the background that the solution presented itself. Like most solutions to these types of story problems, this one was deceptively simple. All it required was taking essentially the same scenario – the captain and the Sleuthhounds confronting one another – and shifting it one room over so that instead of being an argument in private there was a very public audience. The scene has posed no further challenges and I’m now in the process of putting the finishing touches on it. With only a couple of scenes and side quests left, I’m already thinking forward to the next steps in the game’s production (art, sound, etc.).

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