Ryan Rusian​

Pre-Development

 

From early on, In Harmony was envisioned as a narrative-heavy game. As the narrative lead for Trust the Process, it was my responsibility bring to life whatever story we conceived.

 

The rest of the team were eager to develop a deep, thematic narrative that included a varied cast of NPCs and relatively deep world building.

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Development - Part I

 

One of the earliest themes the team kept coming back to was the five stages of grief. This was something a lot of people were eager to move forward with, but before this was taken very far, we were faced with the growing awareness that this had been done to death as a theme. And that began to leave people a little uncertain. 

 

So, I began to lead a pivot away from grief and into something I found was conceptually similar but not overwrought: empathy.

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I think a lot of the appeal grief has as a go-to theme is that it can be divided very easily into stages, and almost everyone seems to know off-hand what those stages are. The development of empathy in people can also be divided into stages. And while those stages didn’t become the main fixture of our game, it was helpful in convincing people it was a worthy replacement.

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Our game would be about the relationships between people, and growing to understand the situations of others.

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As the art team began its process for developing the assets needed to make the game’s world come to life, they requested more information about the world, its inhabitants, its history, and so on. I was the one in charge of answering those questions.

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It started with a notepad file that tracked the questions I’d already answered, on the off-chance anyone asked them again. As we got more questions from different people, it slowly developed into a massive world and story bible, which was edited and proofread in conjunction with several other designers. 

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The end result of this document was a comprehensive world and story bible that anyone could access. If there was ever a narrative-related question, chances were good that the answer was somewhere in there.
 

Development - Part II

 

What we ended up struggling with was conveyance of the core theme. Conversations with NPCs seemed to be the way to go, but the main problem that arose was length. Because we had so much riding on these conversations, they tended to be more verbose than was optimal.

 

I was able to get around some of this by pitching a sort of cyclical nature to the game. That is, all the routes the player would travel would ultimately end back inside the central hub. Here, the main NPCs could still be spoken to, and they would have different dialogue depending on the player’s progression in the overall game.

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This let me break things up over the course of three conversations that would be spaced out over the course of the game, and for a steadier, more gradual arc.

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Of course, by most accounts the conversations still err on the longer side, but given how compact the rest of the game needed to be, it’s only a natural consequence.
 

Release Details

 

If you’re interested in viewing some of the materials I made while working on this project, you can view them here.

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In Harmony is available on the Xbox Store.