Writing with Portraits

I’ve been working on the final dungeon this week, getting puzzles designed and placed in after some time of hesitation on my part. It’s really awesome to finally be getting stuff done! That’s not what I’m posting about today though.

As I planned out puzzles, I found it really helpful, if not necessary, to keep with me a sketchbook and sharpie to put down rough designs and compositions on paper before implementing them into the game. What I didn’t expect, but should have, is that my habit of compulsively doodling would end up making this task a lot more time consuming than it needed to be. But some interesting thoughts came to mind as a result.

See if you can spot which part was supposed to be a puzzle rough draft. I dare you.

Look at this drawing:

It’s of “Sophie,” the second character the player gets to control in Phanta (I use quotations here as I generally encourage people to name these characters themselves). I’m not accustomed to hand drawing anymore, and typically these days I only do it as a compulsion when I happen to have a pen and paper in front of me. Which is less often than you’d think. What surprised me about my revisited doodles of these characters, like the one pictured above, was how evocative the images were in expressing the essence of these people as I originally intended them.

What I mean is, I’ve labored quite a bit over the game text to try and really characterize the protagonists of my game. But I wonder if I ever truly capture their souls in the way these simple drawings often do. I think a factor here is the use of portraits in the game.

This image is from one of my previous games, Dubloon. The text all appeared in this way; big blue boxes, with the only supporting art being a copy of the character already visible on the screen. The purpose was more to quickly identify who was talking rather than to add anything to the script. In going from Dubloon to Phanta, I chose to elevate the production quality and push the story with more detailed, expressive portraits for each line. On paper, this sounds like an unequivocally good idea–reading what the character says is good, but seeing their expression as they say it is always going to be better. Right? Truthfully, the answer is “not always!”

In a world of just text, it was quite easy to express pretty much anything with the character’s voice. Attaching a face to each line has certain implications. Consider the line above again. (“Hey! We’re using this inn and we aren’t paying squat for it! Got it?”) If we could see “Elizabeth”‘s face, what would her expression be? Is she shouting angrily? Is she wearing a confident smile? Maybe she’s kind of laughing? All of them seem a bit too harsh, though. My feeling is that after trying each of these faces from a finite list of canned expressions, I’d probably just land on a muted expression, like she’s just having a regular conversation. None of these options really capture all the granularity of emotion present in the line, and note that as far as lines of text go, that one on first read seems pretty simple and straightforward to parse emotionally. No matter what face I put on that, as soon as it’s grounded into one expression, I think it loses something as much as it gains something. That’s something I didn’t foresee when I entered into this project.

Is... Is that a ghost?

Now, don’t mistake this for regret or disappointment with the decision, or Rocky’s portrait work. Rocky’s portraits are really beautiful, and at the end of the day, they’re still one of my favorite things about the game. Using them just provided a challenge I hadn’t expected. I definitely ended up needing a lot more expressions drawn than I thought to give the game a sufficient emotional landscape–I went from around 15 different portraits initially to around 50 for the main human characters in use in the game data, with plenty more drawn but unused for various reasons. And each of those portraits required fine tuning at the same level as the writing did, if not more, to get just that right face that fit that character in that emotional state. Creating the characters through the game’s expression became a two-fold mission. The text and the supporting art both have to be very strong, as a given line is only as good as its weakest element in that regard.

A tendency that had to be culled was my habit to “normalize” things. In a full-bodied storytelling work, like a book, it makes sense for character traits and emotions to be more subtle and then gradually revealed through extended visitation and exploration of their dialog and thoughts. Writing for games is a bit different, since characters spend much of the time under the player’s control and have only occasional moments to actually speak their mind in character. On top of that, people’s patience for extended textual exchanges is fairly low, and always getting lower. It becomes that much more urgent to exaggerate their thoughts and feelings to give a rough sketch of who that person is with the time allotted. The art, then, has to match that. Expressions need to be exaggerated, or emphatically un-exaggerated if that’s what the character is.

This has a lot to do with the growing notion these days that role-playing games deal in an antiquated form of storytelling in games, and that they don’t represent the best that modern game design has to offer. I’m raising that point here to say that while I think it comes from a totally valid realm of thought, there’s always going to be a place for this mish-mashing of mediums, where the participator gets all of the core experience of playing a game and reading a story.

Some of the many faces of Clair. I bet you know a good bit about her already.

I’m going to close out this ambling thought with what I think these portraits bring to the table, and why they’re worth having. I think it’s self-evident; they really give the characters life and personality that wouldn’t otherwise be visible. It’s true that a line of text with no face on it carries the advantage of interpretation and granularity, but when the face IS there it serves an equal opportunity to spice text with an unexpected interpretation or to clarify a character’s feeling. A limited cache of faces limits me from highly specific emotional colors, but those same limitations also do a lot to give each character a unique personality. One character may have 5 different portraits devoted to different angry glares, while another has as many devoted to different expressions of shock and confusion; that alone tells a story about the character even when they aren’t saying anything. And like a comic, the portraits lend weight not just in snapshot but as one moves from line to line, face to face. Emotional “movements” are formed, and sometimes just that can lend a lot to somebody’s characterization even when they’re barely doing more than giving exposition. The important thing, I’ve found, is to make sure you have just enough portraits to express everything the character needs to express. Once detailed character art enters the mix, you’ve got to go all the way; characters can only be as deep as the berth of emotions present in their accompanying art.

And with that, I’ve got a couple more portraits I want Rocky to do…