On Companion Design
Hi, I'm Nathan Long, lead writer on Wasteland 2 and one of the writers on Torment: Tides of Numenera. Kevin has asked me to talk a little bit about how we develop the companions that can come along with your journey through the Ninth World, so let's begin, shall we?
The goal for the companions is to give them each their own distinct personalities, voices, character arcs, and lots and lots of reactivity - which of course means lots and lots of writing. Lots.
So where do we start?
Well, though I had the honor of developing one of the companions from scratch, more than half of them were created by our fearless leader, Colin McComb, who wrote up a series of what we are calling CDCs, Companion Design Constraint documents. CDCs are bare-bones descriptions of the characters and what role they are supposed to play in the story and the party. They are two or three pages at the most, with a paragraph each for appearance, personality, history, motivation, a few sample lines to get the feel for the character's voice, and a brief outline of their arc and how it hooks into the Last Castoff's story.
Aligern is one of the companions Colin came up with - a crusty old Aeon Priest weighed down with guilt, who uses the tattoos that cover his body to power devastating attacks and daunting defenses - and a few weeks ago Colin asked me to flesh him out and start writing the barks, banters, and dialogs that he'll have throughout the game.
My first step was to read carefully through Aligern's CDC and then expand it into a CB, otherwise known as a Companion Brief, a ten to fifteen page document that goes into more detail about Aligern's back-story, his goals and personality, and gets specific about where and when in the game the Last Castoff will meet him, at what locations his story will advance, and how many different possible endings he will have. Most of these things had been figured out in the abstract long ago, but I fleshed out the details.
Once I put together something I thought felt pretty solid, I showed it to Colin, Kevin, George, and Adam, who gave me a raft - several rafts actually - of notes, and we had a flurry of email and Skype conversations as we discussed their suggestions and the best ways to implement them.
After several revisions and reviews, Colin and the others gave me the okay to take Aligern to the next step, the Companion Design Document - or CDD for short - which I've never ever confused with the CDC or the CB. Never! (We also have ZDCs, ZBs, ZDDs for Zones and MDCs, MBs, MDDs for Meres. Is your head spinning yet?)
The CDD is a 50 to 70 page behemoth of a document where the character's back-story, personality, and story arc are finally turned into actual dialog. Within it are endless lists of situations that the character will be able to react to in the game, from the moment they first meet the Last Castoff:
POSSIBLE SPOILERS:
"Do you know me?" Aligern grabs your collar. "Look me in the eye! Do. You. Know. Me?"
To battle cries:
"Let's get this over with."
To threats:
"Never cross a man with nothing left to lose."
To reacting to the environment:
"That orifice is... looking at me."
To banter with the other companions:
Aligern - "How many have you killed, assassin?"
Matkina - "Who keeps track?"
Aligern - "Does it weigh on you, their deaths?"
Matkina - "I'm not you, old man. I never killed anyone by mistake."
To moments of revelation:
"You're lying. I refuse to believe he meant it innocently. It's impossible!"
To moments of treachery:
"You'd give me to these butchers without my consent? If I ever had any doubt about who you are, I don’t now."
To leaving the party:
"I'll see you, castoff. Though you might not see me."
And normal dialog is just one way you can interact with your companions. There are also the companion's Reflections, who you can meet in the Labyrinth, and who may tell you secrets about them their real-world selves won't.
Filling in the CDD takes a while, but once it's done and reviewed to make sure I've captured Aligern's voice and kept it consistent, I move on to the last step of the process: creating Aligern's Global Dialog. Some of the companion writers, such as Chris Avellone and Patrick Rothfuss, don't continue on to the Global Dialog creation. We don’t need them to become experts at the conversation editor, and a full time designer can use their CDD to implement the dialog. (Though the original writer later does a pass on the implemented content to make sure it stayed true to their voice.)
The Global Dialog for each companion is typically a massive dialog tree, into which go the conversations that companions can have with the Last Castoff throughout the course of the game. To include the degree of reactivity we want in Torment, we decided to break up these Global Dialogs across the game’s major story points. Even so, these tend to have more than 150 nodes each (though some of these nodes are duplicates, or at least similar, throughout the game). For Aligern, these include heart-to-hearts about his story, reactions to significant events in the Last Castoff's story, reactions to things that recently happened to the party, and reactions to things the Last Castoff asked Aligern to do for him, or did to him. This dialog is where some of the deepest, meatiest, most heartfelt - and sometimes painful - conversations in the game are found.
Consequently, it’s also the dialog I enjoy writing the most, really get to stretch my creativity and breathe life into the character. Of course, that also means it’s the most spoileriffic dialog, and the hardest to show you a sample of without ruining important moments of the game, but let's see what I can find.
Here is a sample of his global conversation, POSSIBLE SPOILERS:
So, there you have it. That's how we expand a character like Aligern from a two page idea to a 50 page character design document, and then to the actual dialog that you will read and hear in the game. It's a long and challenging process, but it's fun, and hopefully the results will allow you to get to know, love, or hate the people you're traveling with, and to immerse yourself even more deeply into the world and the story of Torment: Tides of Numenera.
Una lunghissima intervista a McComb