Suzerain
Torpor GamesTorpor games is a small indie studio with a big mission: to create thought provoking entertainment. During the development of Suzerain, the team needed a scripting tool to help them handle the massive amount of text and miriad of choices and consequences that came with it.
Find out in this exciting showcase how Torpor Games used articy:draft to iterate faster on story changes and triple their development speed:
Articy: Please introduce yourself and tell us about the team at Torpor Games.
Ata: Hello. I am Ata the Managing Director of Torpor Games and the Producer of Suzerain. We are a new indie video game company based in Berlin that focuses on creating thought-provoking entertainment. Combining a wide variety of disciplines and experience, the team of seven are working on our first game, Suzerain. The team represents five different nationalities from four different continents.
Articy: Suzerain is a text-based role playing game unfolding a political drama set in the 1950s. How did the story come to be, what inspired you?
Ata The primary inspiration of Suzerain comes from the life experiences of the dev team that lived through the transformation of different countries. This profound experience caused us to question as well as entertain why such events do happen and what lies behind the doors of politics which is usually not observed as closely or keenly by the general public.
We found common psychological reasons behind leaders and wanted to focus our game on that aspect while challenging the human in the player. The 1950s was a specifically interesting period due to the bi-polar situation of the world. The future of how humanity would evolve was still in question. Additionally, the fact that it is a connectable but not fully understandable recent past created the perfect timeline to paint on.
We wanted to take the player away but not create a full-on fantasy universe. The universe of Suzerain is fictional on purpose to make sure we leave the near-term realities and focus on the issues without too much of the current biases. A new angle perse.
Articy: In Suzerain players are faced with many difficult choices that affect not only the politics of Sordland but also personal life. How deep do the consequences go? Is there any one choice that can take the country to its knees or bring your marriage to an end ?
Ata: Our game is based on consequence as we track and give feedback to most if not all decisions made. From the early start of the project, we decided to make sure the game responds to the player while taking them on an immersive journey. Something that we as gamers always enjoyed in roleplaying games for example. This element of consequence extends to the Rayne family too.
Sordland is mostly a conservative society and the First Lady Monica has ambitions to use her position to promote women’s rights something which has political consequences throughout the game. It is an example of how political pragmatism and idealism clash in Suzerain. Certain choices also can cause the marriage to end, sour, or flourish as well.
A similar aspect extends to Anton’s son Franc who is influenced by the political choices of his father, the player, quite extensively later on in the story, No single action in Suzerain brings the country to its knees as all major consequences are dependent on a string of choices. This applies to the family too.
Articy: While in development how did the team manage to keep track of all the choices, reactions and consequences? Do you have any advice for smaller studios on how to tackle this?
Ata: Lots of lots of design and planning. Then lots and lots of deleting old designs and planning anew. We roughly knew how the game should be like but it always was a challenge to nail down the exact specifics. My best advice for smaller studios is to set cornerstones of a complex narrative or technical structures and allow for iteration and experimentation of content in between these. It is very natural in the development of something to allow for wiggle room to improve and expand. Never shy away from designing concepts, implementing them and, deleting them to improve.
Articy: Sordland’s Status for Law, Economy, Military, Welfare and Order is constantly changing. How do these statuses affect the overall story?
Ata: The player choices change the country’s policies and situations. These affect the overall story in different ways. Dozens of policy choices affect factors like public opinion, unrest, character relations, and the narrative. The Country Overview serves as a communication tool to reflect the player choices in the dialogue. The choices themselves are what have an impact on the elements listed. Our design checks all types of game decisions to respond to player action.
We have 350+ choices in the game. Some are of course more major than others but that is still a lot of choice.
Articy: At which point in the development process did you decide to use articy:draft?
Ata: We experimented with other tools in 2017 but decided that we needed a better visual scripting tool to make writing easier and to quickly be able to iterate on our story changes. We began switching to Articy towards the end of 2018 and fully adopted it in 2019. It roughly tripled our development speed compared to before.
Articy: Can you tell us a bit about the way you are using articy:draft? Which features did you find the most useful for your development process?
Ata: Our primary usage of articy draft is to break the game into visual sections, use character entities to map out the dialogue, write the dialogue itself, track the choices through variables and reflect on them with conditions. We also use the integer variables for grander values like the economy, budget, public opinion etc.
The most important feature for us has been the search tool that gives us direct and easy access to sections of the project, the easy export of the database, and the understandable visual scripting logic that allows even someone new to quickly grasp the logic and usage of the tool.
Articy: The game has an impressive 400k words worth of branching political drama and intricate conversations. How did you manage to keep an overview of the story with so many intricacies?
Ata: We have a little more than 400k which is a little bit of insane. We managed to keep track by dividing the types of dialogues into categories, placing them in the bespoke story turns and linking them together with different variable sets. Our team also used design diagrams to assist said structure since it is absolutely massive and difficult to keep track of everything.
Articy: If you were to give one single piece of advice to a new studio that’s just coming together to work on their first game, what would that be?
Ata: Make a list of your weaknesses and strengths. Try to cover for your weaknesses as much as you can and try to bring forward your strengths as much as you can. Find a unique concept that comes from the heart and iterate on it through your own capabilities with user feedback early on. Find the right tools and people for the job.
Be prepared to work incredibly hard and to be challenged to the absolute limit. The journey of indie game development is full of trial and error. It also is a journey that mostly does not end in success so be prepared to fail from the get-go. Enter this path for the experience and self-expression. It will never disappoint if those are the reasons.
Articy: What is next for Suzerain?
Ata: The team released 4 hotfix patches after launch to stabilize the game and ensure everyone enjoys it without interruptions. Now we have moved on to the first minor content patch 1.0.5. It will address most of the player concerns and will include minor new content like some new dialogue branches, reports, and news. We are also adding a military strength bar to the other country overviews. Some endings are being improved from a design and narrative perspective. Balancing changes, dozens of bug fixes and hundreds of other smaller improvements are also a part of the patch.
We are already looking for the next round of feedback on top of these changes. The Torpor Games team also sends thanks to all the players who supported us and gave detailed feedback. The same thanks is also extended to Articy and all our other partners that helped us turn our launch into a success through varying degrees of support.
If you haven’t already, give Suzerain a try and see what type of Sordland you can build. A Morgna wes core!
Suzerain is available
On Steam on GOG on HumbleWant to try out our narrative design tool for yourself? Get the free version now!
Get articy:draft X FREE
*No Payment information required
Follow us on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn to keep yourself up to date and informed. To exchange ideas and interact with other articy:draft users, join our communities on reddit and discord.