Thread by @CotretJulien

One thing we learned the hard way while writing on @CryingSuns with @IanReiley is how important it is to playtest your narrative onboarding. Here is a small story about the infamous “Missing Cargo” ⤵️

#narrativedesign #IndieGameDev #whatwentsouth

Crying Suns starts with the main protagonist, a clone of a famous fleet admiral, being unfrozen by a strange AI. To sum it up roughly, he learns that he is in a super secret facility on a remote planet and that an AI awoke him because they didn’t receive their usual shipment.

So something might be very wrong out there because the empire is NEVER late. They need him to go take a look about what’s happening, explicitly telling him that it’s not about the shipment but about making contact with empire authorities.

Within 10m of gameplay after this, the players discover that the Empire has fallen and that it’s in a post-apocalyptic state, triggering a long quest for answers and trying to save the galaxy.

So nothing exceptional here, we created this pretext for the hero to go out there on his journey, felt pretty straightforward to be suspicious about resupply being late, and soon enough they learn that there is indeed something VERY wrong.

So, happy with our nice onboarding, we went on testing the first hour of gameplay. We were evaluating their understanding of both the gameplay and the story, through post playtest interviews and a survey.

“What is, to you, the main objective of the game?” we asked. 80 freakin percent of the time the answer was “Find the missing cargo”. That was… not what we expected! 😭

Within this first hour there were some other very important information like, I don’t know… 90% of the population being dead? The empire outpost being destroyed?? All AI being non functional for the last 20 years???

Ok. Maybe were we a bit unclear about this. So we went back to writing and added some line to make it clearer that at some point the shipment is literally the least of their problems and that “THE MAIN ISSUE NOW IS TO FIND OUT WHAT HAPPENED” (yes we almost used a megaphone)

We did a few iterations of rewrites/playtests but it never improved, whatever we tried to add. We even considered at some point adding a bloody Cargo! “Ok here is your cargo! You happy? Can we go on now?” 😬

We never understood really why it stuck that much with players. My personal hypothesis is that players are quite conditioned by fetch/delivering quests and that once they give themselves that goal, they focus so much on it that other information “bounce” somehow.

Anyway, we accepted this reality and went on to remove those lines and replaced them with non received communications (a non physical item). To be fair we should have come to this much sooner, there was no reason to hang on to this pretext that long. Some ego maybe?

It did the trick, now the playtesters, finally free of “The Missing Cargo”, got into the story and understood all the items we felt were important for the remainder of the journey.

The moral of the story? Always test your narrative onboarding on real people, that’s the only way to ensure that what you are trying to communicate goes through. In video games a lot of things can go between what you are trying to say and how the players receive it.

Players are never wrong if they don't understand what you expect them to, it's your job to make it work, so don't take any chances!