Deep Dive: Designing a narrative for multiple middles and multiple heroes in Saltsea Chronicles

gamedeveloper.com:

Game Developer Deep Dives are an ongoing series with the goal of shedding light on specific design, art, or technical features within a video game in order to show how seemingly simple, fundamental design decisions aren’t really that simple at all.

Earlier installments cover topics such as how indie developer Mike Sennott cultivated random elements in the branching narrative of Astronaut: The Best, how the developers of Meet Your Maker avoided crunch by adopting smart production practices, and how the team behind Dead Cells turned the game into a franchise by embracing people-first values.

In this edition,  creative director of Saltsea Chronicles Hannah Nicklin discusses  how Die Gute Fabrik’s new story-driven adventure game structures the storytelling so that all ten of its characters can shine.

I have a strong memory of the last year or so of working on our last game Mutazione.

It was back when I was transitioning from narrative director to the studio lead and creative director on our next project. I remember sitting with Doug Wilson, one of the company co-founders, and agreeing that while we loved that Mutazione was a story about a community (and one we're extremely proud of), there was just one element that we wished we had more time to dig into.

We felt like there was an argument that the form it takes—the traditional adventure game form of ‘single character explores’—clashed slightly with the content. Mutazione is a story about a community, where all the characters are as important as one another. Doug and I wondered: what would a Mutazione look like if you could play each day of the game as a different member of the ensemble?

At the point we had this shared thought, we were at a stage of development that would