Narrative design in pursuit of authenticity in musical biopic We Are OFK

gamedeveloper.com:

We Are OFK is a strange and wonderful thing. The latest brainchild of Hyper Light Drifter co-designer Teddy Dief, the project is billed as a music biopic game slash interactive e.p. that blurs the lines between fiction and reality by turning a virtual band into one that will release music, post on social media, and perhaps one day even play gigs.

Sitting down with Dief ahead of the game's launch, the We Are OFK  director, writer, and lead singer explains how the original intent was to release something akin to a sitcom based in Los Angeles, largely because Dief wanted to lean into the old adage that tells people to "write what you know" in a bid to create something authentic.

Dief spent the first six months of the project narrative prototyping, building out each of the band members as individuals with their own unique personality traits and perspectives before attempting to mesh a them together as part of a broader, cohesive storyline.

"[At that early stage] there was a bunch of character development that went on for arguably too long," Dief says, explaining what it was like feeling their way into the project during those formative months. "The nice thing about working on a game is you can simmer on your story and then pivot and work on mechanical stuff and it never feels like you're fucking around. You know, I was being productive even though I was afraid of doing a second draft of my character sheets."

Dief says they wanted to emulate sitcoms by giving the actors playing each character the freedom to inform how each one would take shape. Although it was impossible to emulate that process on a 1:1 basis -- because in television they'd be producing episodes and releasing them on a cycle -- the OFK team decided to cast