Unforeseen Incidents
Backwoods EntertainmentFor this showcase we had the pleasure of talking to Marcus Bäumer from Backwoods Entertainment about their recently released adventure game “Unforeseen Incidents”.
In the video interview below we spoke about how the process of writing cooperatively influenced the development of the game. What makes a good adventure puzzle and why Backwoods Entertainment chooses to use articy:draft in developing their debut title Unforeseen Incidents.
Articy: Please introduce yourself, Backwoods Entertainment and tell us what your role was on Unforeseen Incidents.
Marcus Bäumer – Writer and Game Designer: I’m Marcus and I am the writer and game designer of Unforeseen Incidents. Backwoods Entertainment, we are three people – Matze, Tristan, and me. Matze made all the graphics for the game, Tristan sound and music, and he does a little bit of programming, and I also helped with the programming on Unforeseen Incidents. We made Unforeseen Incidents together with a publisher, Application Systems Heidelberg. We had help from them as well, we had an additional programmer from Application Systems Heidelberg, and we had an additional co-author on the team, and an additional freelance animator, and this is how we made Unforeseen Incidents.
Articy: You were writer and game designer. Two roles often separated. Does holding both roles help or was it rather a problem?
Marcus: I think it helps a lot, because if you make a narrative driven game like we do, I think it’s rather important to have the roles of the game designer and the writer combined if possible, or they should work as closely as possible together. Because the writer knows the story and the characters very well and he or she knows where you can interrupt the story, the game play, the flow, where you can throw obstacles towards the player. Players have to solve puzzles in our game and you always have to decide in which part of the story can we place those puzzles, where can we stop the player from the gameplay. And this is far easier when you know the story, and also you know the plot, you know where you can do that, you know which puzzles would make sense, you know the motivations of the characters very well, so I think, yes, combining those two roles is very helpful.
Articy: You wrote together with Alasdair Beckett-King. How would you describe the experience of writing cooperatively?
Marcus: Very good, I think, because when I write alone I never know when an idea is very bad, or I know it after a few days. In that first moment I think that is a good idea and I try to work with it. Firstly it speeds things up, you get feedback all the time, you get to know when your ideas are bad or when your ideas are good. You get other ideas of course you could never have worked out on your own, because you have another opinion on the writing team. I think that’s very good. Also writing with Alasdair worked very well, because we got to know each other very well, and we got along very well, and so that worked out. Also this as you said previously another control instance for writing dialogue for example. When I wrote a piece of dialogue and I sent it to him and he gave his feedback and wrote own pieces of dialogue. Working with him together worked out very well.
Articy: While writing together, did a lot of things change in contrast to how they were planned initially?
Marcus: Yes. We had an initial draft for the story and I wrote down the whole script at first and I sent it to Alasdair and we nearly redid the whole thing. And we started writing the characters from scratch and then we approached the story again from a different angle. We did a lot of rewriting all the time in the first six months or more. So, yes, the basic initial idea changed a lot.
Articy: Is rewriting one of the most crucial work you have to do in order to improve the story?
Marcus: I think it helped the story. If you rewrite something you do that because of a reason, because something is not working´out properly. As long as you are able to do that, I think it is good, because everytime you do that you probably improve your story and this is why I think it was a good and fruitful process.
Articy: What ingredients make a good and challenging, but not unfair puzzle? And how do you approach developing such puzzles?
Marcus: It depends a little on the game. It is a difference if I make a game like we did or if you make a really comedy game where the game play is comedy as well. In our game, for example, we have no comedy gameplay, we have comedic characters, we have funny characters, and we have humor in the game in the dialogues, but we don’t have humor in the gameplay. We don’t have combinations that don’t make sense. In other games it might make sense to have combinations of items that are crazy and that are a gag itself, but if you make a game like we did, for us it was always important to make logical puzzles, and one thing we always tried to think of was: Would the solution to this puzzle be possible in the real world? Would I be able to solve this problem with these items or these objects in the real world? And if so this was the first sign for us that this puzzle was fair. And then of course, we did a lot of testing and we got a lot of feedback from many testers, and we implemented the feedback we got, and I think this way we got to write fair puzzles for the game. It needs to fit the setting and the world of the game.
Articy: How did you develop the art style of Unforeseen Incidents or did you find it, more or less, by accident?
Marcus: It was a long process. The first graphics are, I think, seven years or older. Yes, seven years old. In the beginning when we worked on Unforeseen Incidents we did this on our spare time, so we had a pre-production phase, I don’t know, of six years or something like that. In this time of course the graphics style changed again and again, because we came back to the project after doing nothing on it for half a year or a year, and then we came back to the project and thought, okay, that doesn’t look good and we need to redo it. It changed, there was a long process, and at some point we had a graphics style we liked, and I think there was one key moment as well, when we had a very first playable demo and we got the first people playing the demo, and there was one screen that was really finished and the other screens were still concept art. And the really finished screen looked a lot like Monkey Island 3 and when players played it they said: Okay, that looks like Monkey Island, but those other screens, they look different, they look good. What’s with this style, why don’t you use it on this room? Yeah, because it was not finished. But then we decided to take another approach and work with a graphic style that is more concept arty, more rough, and more sketchy, and more comic like. And this is basically how we ended up with this comic style.
Articy: You used articy:draft developing your game. What was the decisive reason to use it for Unforeseen Incidents?
Marcus: We had to use some third-party assets, because we are a very small team and we had limited time and resources. We needed to look at different assets, or different software you could use that helps us developing the game, and a dialogue editor was something that we definitely needed, and there are not many dialogue editors that fit our… what we needed, so we looked at articy:draft and we looked at other programs as well, but in the end we decided that articy:draft was the best software we could use for this, because we needed something to write our dialogues in. articy:draft exported in a format that we could read very well and interpret very well on our end, and we could work collaboratively with articy:draft which was important for us as well, because I wrote it together with Alasdair.
Articy: Did you have experience with articy:draft before you used it for this game?
Marcus: Not really. I tried it a couple of times, but Unforeseen Incidents was the first real project we used it on.
Articy: Was articy:draft easy to get comfortable with?
Marcus: In the beginning it is a little… you need to get into it. There is a process and there are features you can use in articy:draft I didn’t understand at the beginning, but I got a lot of help and I understood everything at some point. And then it was really ease. Once you get the grasp of how it works, it is really easy to use.
Articy: What was the most important feature of articy:draft for you?
Marcus: We wrote all our dialogue with articy:draft, and we also in the beginning played around with building locations inside articy, but we didn’t really need that, so in the end we “just” used it for writing dialogue. But we wrote, I think, 8000 lines of dialogue so we used it a lot.
Articy: How did you implement articy:draft into your pipeline and was that an easy task?
Marcus: As I said, we had limited time and resources, and we used assets from the Unity asset store, and at the time when we began working on Unforeseen Incidents there was no Unity plugin from articy directly, so we used Adventure Creator for Unforeseen Incidents and we used the Dialogue System, that is another plugin from the asset store. And Dialogue System could import the articy:draft export. So that was easy – until we realized , okay, we also have to do voice recordings and we also have to do localization into other languages. And then we wrote our own little program that was between articy and Dialogue System. It read the data from articy, then we did something with it, also for the localization and the voice overs and then we exported another file that was basically a manipulation of the articy export and imported that into Dialogue System. Writing this was a lot of work, but in the meantime articy has a Unity plugin, we are using that for our new project. We are not sure if we are able to do localization and voice recordings without our program in the middle, but we will get to that at some point.
Articy: Was there any kind of customization you used while using articy:draft?
Marcus: Yes, I said we had this program in between. Otherwise in articy itself we used articy templates, where we could own fields to lines of dialogue, for example movements in the eyes, or gestures, we could apply while writing the lines and that was read on the other end in Unity. That’s basically it.
Articy: Is there anything you wished you had done completely different in the development process?
Marcus: Yes, a lot (laughs). I think mainly… If possible it would be good to do things in sequence rather than having to do it at the same time. Because in the beginning we did not have much time for developing a first prototype or developing a press-playable demo to Gamescom where we exhibited, and we had to basically start making the graphics while writing the story and we had to throw a lot of art away in the beginning which was annoying, because it was a lot of work to do these graphics, so being able to do this more in a sequence would have been a good idea. Especially also for voice recordings and for testing, because we worked on chapter 3 and 4 while we tested chapter 1 and 2, and we also started voice recording for the first chapters while we still wrote the end which was really heard, but we had to do it this way. But if possible next time I would plan more time to do this, also I would schedule more time for the progression, for the release. When the game is done we need some extra time for more polishing and just more press contacts, and getting it out before it’s out. I think we mainly learned that we need more time to do a project like this. It’s possible to do it in the time we did it, but if could have gotten better if we had more time.
Articy: What part of the game you are the most proud of?
Marcus: I think we can be very proud of the looks of the game. It looks very beautiful. I think the dialogues have turned out pretty well and I also like the voice recording. It has been a huge challenge to do voice recording. And all of this is the first project, but I think it feels very professional and it feels good, and I think it is a fun game to play.
Articy: During the journey developing Unforeseen Incidents, what was the most important thing you learned?
Marcus: I learned that it is hard. When you make your first game, everybody tells you make a small, short game, and so it is a very amateur mistake to not do that, but we made a huge game. But we wanted to have this feeling of these old LucasArts games, and where you explore, where exploration is also a part of puzzle solving, and to achieve that you need to do a lot of screens and you need to create big environments, but you should never underestimate how much work that can be. I think that is something we took away from the development.
A big thanks to Backwoods Entertainment for their hospitality. If you haven’t yet, check out their upcoming game, the interactive mystery short story called RESORT
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