Interviews and Interludes

November 8, 2019

Progress continues to be made on the outstanding story scripting in Sleuthhounds: Cruise. This has mostly been focused around side investigations in the game, optional things that don't have to be completed by players but that provide a little more depth and insight into the story and characters. The big push the last week or so has been on finishing up the interviews that Ampson can conduct with various suspects.

Throughout the game there are several sections where Ampson must conduct interviews in order to progress. These are mostly found in Act 3 and 4 of the game. However, earlier on it’s possible to conduct interviews that are not strictly necessary to progress. I had mostly left these blank at the time I got to them on the initial coding pass. I knew that as the rest of the game took shape, key plot points and character decisions from later in the game would need to echo backwards to these earlier interviews.

Finishing off these interviews is part of a broader effort of working through the story to ensure that things set up early on properly get paid off later and that events that occur later in the game do not contradict events from earlier on. The initial critical path scripting of the game took over a year to complete. That’s a lot of time to keep all of the little nuanced details of every scene in my head. So this pass is to ensure that all the little bits and bobs intermesh properly and don’t create any glaring plot holes.

One fun aspect of this, is that I can now go back and put in small little scenes between different non-player characters. These are short vignettes that players can come upon as they’re exploring the ship. Seeing NPCs in places they don’t normally appear and having interactions with one another independent from what the player is doing is a great way to add life into the world, with the NPCs seeming to act autonomously. These types of scenes are also a good way of building up the mystery around certain characters as well as providing more background on those characters. With over a dozen prominent NPCs in the game, a lot of their individual stories have to be experienced in little snippets and subtext. As big as the game is, there just isn’t the room to focus on each character across the entirety of the story, although each character does get their chance in the spotlight at least once.

To be sure, dealing with the side quests and other related story items has taken a lot longer than I had anticipated. This part of the process was supposed to be done late August to mid-September and now here we are in November. The outstanding items on the To Do list for this phase of production are pointing to all this work now being done by the end of the month or possibly early into December. It’s the nature of a creative project that sometimes things take longer than expected. However, if that’s what the story of the game demands happens then that’s what needs to be done.