Snowfall Village
Snowfall Village is an interactive social sim developed by Studio Scrapbot. Play as a beleaguered village leader, forced to use a time-rewinding magical item to relive the same day, over and over, to prevent her neighbors from getting themselves killed.
Contributions
Writing
Documentation
Character Dialogue
Event & Situational Dialogue
Pre-Development
Studio Scrapbot wanted the titular village of Snowfall Village to feel like a living, breathing environment, and they would achieve that by having NPCs carry out a multitude of tasks and interactions even while the player was doing other things.
In addition to the important non-player characters, there would be a modest host of random, unnamed NPCS wandering around, going about their daily lives.
I was brought on by Studio Scrapbot to come up with dialogue for their main and secondary characters, as well as to come up with interactions and scenarios for those characters to participate in.
Development - Part I
Other designers had produced a number of characters sheets for the named characters in Snowfall Village, including the player. My only job was to write dialogue between these characters based on this. Thanks to the details in these sheets, it was easy for me to see how they would get along with each other and what they would talk about.
What proved to be more of a challenge was the inconsequential characters. They had to be distinct, but in a way that was relatively uniform – they had to say things that most people would say, complain about things most people would complain about, do things most people do when they’re bored out of their minds. And yet they also needed some bite to them, otherwise any exchange with them wouldn’t be interesting.
And it also had to be in a way that wouldn’t overshadow the main NPCs. The last thing anyone on the project would want is to have their favorite character, that they personally designed, be upstaged by some procedurally generated guy with no name.
Development - Part II
To solve this problem, the solution I developed was to make these inconsequential NPCs a stand-in for the “straight man” in a comedy routine. They’re there to serve as a soundboard, a way for the main cast to express their eccentricities.
The dialogue tones for the random NPCs became a consistent sort of bewilderment, coupled with an ample amount of physical and social exhaustion. It seemed an appropriate disposition for people trying to eke out a living in a hostile, frozen environment while also dealing with the continuing antics of a few crazy neighbors.
Release Details
If you’re interested in viewing some of the materials I made while working on this project, you can view them here.
Snowfall Village is not commercially available at this time.