Articy: Please introduce yourselves and tell us about the team working on The Siege of Jeomdo at Studio Hip Sword
Saylor: Hello! We’re Studio Hip Sword, a small indie team originally founded in New Zealand. Although, we have the privilege of working with creatives from all around the globe! We’re a team of mostly self-taught game devs, with little to no industry experience, working toward our dreams in the few free hours found between work, study and the whims of life. I’m Saylor, the lead writer and co-founder of the studio. I wouldn’t have the courage to pursue this wild dream without an amazing team behind me.
Articy: The Siege of Jeomdo places players in a desperate last stand where every decision can affect the survival of the village. What originally inspired the story, and why did you choose this kind of grounded, pressure-driven narrative?
Saylor: The films ‘Seven Samurai’ and ‘The Admiral: Roaring Currents’ served as the most immediate inspirations for the setting and tone of The Siege of Jeomdo. Speaking for myself, I’ve always been interested in roleplaying games with branching dialogues, interesting characters and inventive worldbuilding. In that way, BioWare’s Dragon Age & Mass Effect series have been hugely influential to me.
The text-based approach we ultimately decided on was in large part inspired by Gareth Martin’s Citizen Sleeper – the gold standard of the genre. Fortunately, I played Citizen Sleeper soon after we made the difficult decision to cut the combat system from our game. It gave us a lot of confidence that we could still achieve an interesting RPG without one. Hence the high pressure narrative. If there isn’t a combat system to challenge you, then our dialogue decisions should give you pause, make you consider their consequences, etc.
On being “grounded”, I’ve found that much of the fantasy genre doesn’t draw nearly enough from history. More often than not, it echoes its own works; running the risk of becoming textureless. There is a lot of richness to be found in historical sources. Joseon Dynasty and wider East-Asian histories helped lend our setting its aesthetics and general believability.
Articy: The game features a large cast of characters whose relationships, loyalties, and survival can change based on player choices. How did you approach maintaining character consistency across branching paths while still making decisions feel meaningful and reactive?
Saylor: It was a learning process – right up until the script was finished. Knowing when to push the reactivity versus when to pull back and let the illusion of choice work its magic wasn’t something we adequately planned for. We tried our best to write unique branches for major changes: the death of a character, the outcome of a battle or breaking someone’s trust etc. However, the moment-to-moment reactivity comes from “flavour” text, that acknowledges the player’s agency in more measured and “micro” ways.
Although, mechanically, there are a number of characters where integer variables (Pluses & Minuses) are tracked throughout the game as a result of the players’ actions. Dokgo’s confidence for example can fluctuate throughout the story, leading to different outcomes in certain scenes.
Articy: The requisition system tightly connects narrative decisions with time, preparation, and resource management. How early did narrative and gameplay systems begin influencing each other during development?
Saylor: After the inception of The Siege of Jeomdo, originally titled ‘Defend the Village’, and the quick shift away from the aforementioned turn-based combat system, we never did differentiate “narrative” from “gameplay”. To us, they were the same.
Though funny you mention the Requisition system. That mechanic was a relatively late addition to our 4-year development cycle. How late? I don’t care to admit… But it really helped round out the amount of content we could explore without writing dozens of bespoke (but potentially missable) scenes.
Articy: You previously used articy:draft on HipWitch, but much more extensively on The Siege of Jeomdo. What changed in your narrative workflow or team collaboration this time around?
Saylor: Unlike HipWitch, we knew we wanted Siege to feature an engaging branching narrative from the very beginning. In so doing, we had to master articy:draft’s entity system which we used to great effect to create the Requisitions, Characters, Locations and more. We stored all relevant resource values, item descriptions and artwork in these entities. Custom nodes were produced to denote various types of scenes and functions. The list goes on, articy:draft’s toolset is not to be taken for granted.
However, forgoing a typical and repeatable gameplay element meant that a lot of emphasis was placed on the written word – perhaps more so than we were prepared for. Especially since Siege is my first long-form written work – advice to follow!
Articy: Looking back now, what advice would you give other teams attempting branching narrative at this scale for the first time?
Saylor: Plan better! Having a tightly constructed plot draft with more careful consideration as to the level of effort required behind each branch (Is X character alive? Does X hate you? etc) would have helped us immensely. Think of a linear plot draft as the skeleton’s spine. Now, if you’re working with a branching plot, be sure to draft out the ribs also.
This is all the more important if you don’t have a combat system, puzzle mechanics or exploration to help carry the burden.
The Siege of Jeomdo is available on: Steam
