The Quarry: How to Write a Story with 186 Different Endings First

ign.com:

The Quarry has, to be precise, 186 different ending variations. The ending you get depends on the choices you make with nine different playable characters; some of your camp counselors will be forever changed by their experiences at Hackett’s Quarry, while others may not even make it to see the new dawn. A story that shifts and changes depending on your choices is nothing new for developer Supermassive Games, but creating The Quarry was a “mathematical nightmare” that resulted in a script longer than a thousand pages.

As part of IGN First, we spoke to The Quarry’s director, Will Byles, about the challenges involved in creating a choice-driven horror game.

“Writing a branching narrative is a really interesting exercise,” Byles tells us. “We write a full, hundred page screenplay as if it were a movie. We develop our character styles, and once we've got that, then we can start looking at how we break that out into a full 10 hour experience.”

That first script is expanded to include all sorts of alternate pathways, covering different relationships, story twists, and — the classic — adapting to the potential death of all nine main characters. This colossal, final tome is then passed to the acting talent.

“Actors are used to, on a feature film, a hundred page script,” explains Byles. “So when we send the actors the scripts they get very alarmed because they're huge. The script for this is over a thousand pages. We have to shoot about 50 pages a day, which is unheard of. It's just a mad amount of footage. But obviously a lot of what they're learning is the same thing again and again and again, but a different branch.”

Anyone who has loaded a previous save to retry a decision in a choice-driven game knows exactly what this means.