This is the end of my first year on the Baklava team for Games for Love. Our scrappy band of volunteer indie developers is slowly making headway toward a playable demo. In the meantime, I've been able to tie down all the idea fairies flying around and herd them into a coherent set of narrative objectives and story points for the game. Herein is what I've been able to establish for 2021...
To start with, our Director's vision is to bring you a four-person couch co-op beat-em-up-slash-team-assembly game. Think of it as a hybrid of a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles arcade game and Overcooked.
We began with a simple concept - Four juvenile T-Rexes must battle across the islands of their homeland to defeat a horde of lava monsters and the volcano god launching them. They must use their wits and teamwork to bash the lava monsters into dust while assembling items to help them achieve their objectives.
I won't give away too much more about why exactly we're fighting those lava monsters or what exactly we're building. It was an interesting enough journey over the last five months just getting the story's foundation settled. Here are the key elements I worked out.
#1: Building a Smart Island for Intelligent Dinosaurs
This seemed pretty simple. A fantasy world of limitless possibilities. A veritable Dinotopia, if you will. Potential can be paralyzing, though. Not every world is the MCU (nor should they be, because that'd be exhausting). Starting out with world building is like standing in an infinite hallway full of doors. Each door leads to a new hallway with a finite number of doors. Each time you open a new door, you find a new hallway with a decreasing number of doorways. Once you pick a door, you can't walk back through it. Unless, that is, you're willing to abandon your choice and the possibilities it led to. I think this is the primary reason people go all the way in their world building efforts, only to ball the whole thing up and throw it in the trash so they can start from scratch. If you're not rigorous in your notes, you don't have a map to help yourself walk back through the doors you took, and you get so lost it's easier to go back to square one.
I fell in on a draft concept with some really neat ideas. The dinosaurs' home would be the Greek island of Santorini. That led to a drive to give the game a Greek cultural theme. The dinos were going to assemble baklava to feed to the lava monsters. What is baklava, you ask? So did I. And because I didn't know, I assumed my 11-year-old son wouldn't know, and since nobody wants to go to a Wikipedia page mid-game, I realized we'd have to explain that. And in writing that explanation I realized that we'd have to explain why we're fighting and feeding these lava monsters at the same time. Also, our T-Rex heroes were going to be Muay Thai kickboxers (short arms, remember?) who had learned martial arts from a dinosaur that had come to Greece from Thailand. I didn't know why he was there. I didn't know why a bunch of T-Rexes on an island of technologically advanced peaceful dinosaurs would learn martial arts. The ideas were great, but the narrative arc was turning into a rat maze.
The world had become a place where everything that could happen was happening. It had been built by breaking the rules of worldbuilding in hallways - opening more than one door in the same hallway and not closing doors behind yourself when you exit a hallway. I couldn't see a way to make the player feel immersed in the world without giving them a lot of exposition/explanation or just leaving them in the dark. Neither option seemed like something they would enjoy.
We had several discussions about this in which I tried to shift us from "Santorini" to "an island with Greek-ish characteristics." It was a struggle to find a balance between authenticity in the cultural element, consistency to support our story, and a way of presenting it without creating a text box as big as the island itself.
And that's when it hit me. An idea so crazy I couldn't help but throw it out there. This is the crude PowerPoint illustration that changed it all for us.
And just like that, we left Greece behind. In a world where intelligent T-Rexes fight lava monsters, why can't there be self-aware text boxes that serve as geographic features? Why shouldn't there be self-aware text boxes? Baklava happens in the past, but it doesn't necessarily have to be OUR past. It could be an alternate dimension. Have Rick and Morty visited this dimension? Perhaps. Am I thnking about putting a five-horned dinosaur in a lab coat, calling it Sty-Rick-osaurus, and making him give our heroes weapons to fight lava monsters before disappearing through a portal because he has to go to a "council meeting?"
Absolutely. Because for this to be the type of island where stuff like that can happen, then stuff like that must happen.
The best part is that we can pick and choose what happens. If it does happen, then it happened because it could. If it doesn't happen, well, that's just because it didn't happen on this occasion. Maybe it'll happen in Baklava 2. Are there Greek dinosaurs? Sure! Should Leonidosaurus tell a lava monster "This. Is. PANGEA!" and kick it down a bottomless pit?
I mean, dude YES. And if it works for our story, I will do that.
That has been extremely liberating for everyone. With a single text box, we have simultaneously put ourselves back into a place where anything can happen and excused ourselves from justifying a lot of it. We have a foundation of "no time to explain, bash a lava monster." And that works so well because it's exactly what the player wants to hear.
#2: Four Heroes Ought to Mean Four Stories
One thing that always irked me about most simple brawlers is that your character selection has absolutely no impact on the game's outcome. All this work goes into creating visually unique characters and so much is taken away from the art because those characters are treated as interchangeable shells for punch-bots. I wanted something more for our game.
While I knew it would be unrealistic to create four entirely unique game experiences or create all the branches and reconnection points for the four individual heroes throughout the game, I did make a goal for myself to give the player some sense of investment in their choices. The solution I came up with is to give each T-Rex a personal motivation/ambition that's tied to the larger quest. If each player can achieve some sort of scoring threshold by the time the game is completed, then that T-Rex succeeds in their personal ambition.
#3: The Mega Meta
This is more of an objective than an actual accomplishment (thus far), but I've set up a pretty big goalpost for myself. Because Games for Love is a charity and profits from the game will go directly to funding programs like 1UP Lifebridge and GFLExperience, I want the game to at least in part evangelize those missions. So we want themes of teamwork, volunteerism, hope, and healing. Most of those are endemic to the game, but the healing aspect is more of a challenge. Killing the lava god feels bad. Finding out that the lava god is somehow a victim and needs saving from itself feels a little too Moana. But in a game of dinosaurs assembling things across islands where anything can happen, I don't think we should pass up the opportunity to build a literal life bridge.
We're not to a highly detailed plan of levels spread across a three-act story structure yet, but these first items were a pretty heavy lift, and accomplished on volunteer-hours over Discord. I'm proud of the work so far. I'm excited to start refining things and get a story that hurls these intrepid little T-Rexes to their destiny. Here's to everything we'll do in 2022!
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