In this respect, HRO has some advantages over the Jane Austen project we produced a few years ago. Some of the inspirations for this project were pioneers in diverse casting and racially-aware storytelling as early as the 1960’s. The futuristic setting and the perception that sci-fi programs like the original “Star Trek” weren’t “serious television” gave visionaries like Gene Rodenberry some cover to push the boundaries. And they used that opportunity to bring ground-breaking social change into our living rooms hidden behind paper-maché rocks and rubber masks. But even they weren’t grappling with doing justice to the fullness of human society back then. It would be decades before the first LGBTQ character showed up in the Federation universe. 

So it was with a sense of joy and purpose that we set out to populate our science fiction universe with as broad a cross-section of humanity (humanoidity?) as we could muster. Of course—in a game like HRO — there was the question of aliens. We had conversations about how the aliens in the game fit into the calculus of balanced representation and whether they could be misinterpreted as stand-ins for minority groups we didn’t explicitly include (spoiler alert, they’re not). 

What we didn’t see coming was the effect this would have on our cast size… In the end, the final tally was forty-two characters, including recurring cast members and “guest stars.” Great for representation! Terrible for cost-efficient voice-over actor casting! Generally, a studio of our size would plan to hire six or seven actors to each voice multiple characters. Efficient. But tough to execute if you’re also looking to make opportunities available to a diverse range of cast members to voice your diverse cast of characters. In the end, we found a delightfully flexible pool of actors who — in addition to being amazingly talented — were willing to be hired for smaller chunks of time each so we could bring in more total voices. 

We hope you’re as excited as we are to play in a universe where everyone has a seat at the table. The ship’s conference room table that is. Where the senior staff is gathered to brainstorm last minute schemes to save the ship from being sucked into — say — a Dark Grey Hole whose trademark Crushing Gravity Well would surely kill them all! Yay diversity!

As a follow-up to the last post about the value of VO, we're offering this look behind the scenes at our recent HRO recording sessions. Over the course of four sessions, we covered 97 pages of script using 11 voice actors to voice a total of 26 characters. Cast featured in this video include (in order of appearance) Janelle Mills, Naeemah A. White-Peppers, Joseph Marella, Becca A. Lewis and Isaiah Plovnick. Enjoy!

As we’ve mentioned once or twice before, Marc and I are transplants from an adjacent storytelling art form. We worked for years in the professional theatre, and recognize the power of the spoken word. For months now Marc has been hammering out the script for HRO, and we’re finally (finally!) in the process of working with actors and recording the voice-over. For folks like us, it’s a real treat.

How the characters appear on screen is very important, but their voices provide essential in-roads for audiences to connect to characters. Giving characters a literal voice strengthens the experience and provides authenticity to the environment. Many of us have heard that old adage “it’s not what you say, it’s how you say it,” and that’s especially true for voice acting. A well-delivered line can provide insight into the character’s state of mind or emotional circumstancea. Voices can help communicate information quickly and efficiently and — as we discussed on our previous blog post about P.A.L. — voice is a great tool to efficiently move plot forward.

Unfortunately, it’s beyond the scope of HRO for every single line of text in the game to be recorded. There’s *so* much conversation in HRO that to voice every single line would have increased the budget and workload exponentially. Additionally, we love the flexible nature of INK and the tools it provides to change dialogue dynamically during the development process, but this also makes it impractical to voice *everything.* So we chose to limit the VO to the cinematic cut-scenes (which still left us with a 97 page script…)

Voice-over can be hard to do well, especially because of the non-linear nature of most games. Iterations are crucial. Voice actors might need to record the same line several different ways depending on context. For example, a single line of dialogue might need to be delivered differently if an element of plot plays out to more than one conclusion, or if the character is potentially engaged in a different action when that same line is heard.

Creating active dialogue is often an overlooked step in the process. It’s important to ensure that no line is simply information being delivered, but is also a communicator (subtle or otherwise) of motivation or emotional state between two characters. In each line, characters need to be actively doing something that’s expressed vocally. If you can’t identify what the actor is doing with their delivery, they’re probably not giving you an active performance.

Well-executed voice-over can bring a constructed universe to life, and the ability to recognize and nurture a strong voice-over performance should be something every game dev aspires to have in their toolbox.

I’ve always had a soft spot for a good B-story. Back when I was a working actor, I was often cast as the B-story guy — which is to say, not the romantic lead in the musical, but the funny guy who falls for the funny girl who is not the ingenue. Not the stars, but in a well-written script, a good B-story adds richness, depth and variety to a constructed world.

When we set out to outline the complex and branching storylines of HRO, we made a conscious decision to embrace the character-driven B-story. So within the larger, more traditional arc of classic space opera crises, there are also smaller, more human stories which explore relationships and allow us to talk about things the more expected plot lines won’t. Sure the Endeavor’s bridge has been seized by technologically-advanced aliens, but there’s also an Ensign whose fiancee is being held hostage there, and the player has the choice of exploring and participating in the resolution of either story dimension. The emotional toll of grieving abducted children, unrequited love, mental health and its relationship to informed consent — these and more are all B-story threads that players could choose to explore across the sweep of the HRO season.

Because we love the B-story and want to incentivize the exploration of the more “character-driven” stories within the game, we built the six unlockable mini-episodes (“episode-ettes”) around resolving the B-story plots. So if a player chooses to help a character with a smaller, more personal story, they might find that story playing itself out in a later unlockable chapter that the traditional “min-max” style players probably won’t ever encounter. It’s an investment in the inner life of the game world and we hope to make it one which pays off for those players who choose to connect and empathize with the people they meet there.

The early concept work for “HRO” envisioned it as sort of Cubicle-Themed Thunder Dome — a sci-fi open-world bureaucracy sim (wow, that sounds — insane now). Players were intended to be on their own, hunting down workable solutions and implementing them perfectly from among a myriad of persistent and persnickety options. It was a cold and lonely world where only the spreadsheet-savvy survived. As development progressed, the concept was refined to become a more focused story-driven experience. But something was missing — as early play testers noted. We got a lot of questions like “Why would I want to talk to the ship’s Botanist?” and “Wait, who is that character?.” Not to mention the dreaded, “What do I do now?.” The player was alone in this world. And they were adrift.

To address this, we gave the player a digital assistant, a PAL (Personal Administrative Liaison) who pops in at the beginning and the end of each act to update the player and move the story along. An ally, of sorts, or at least a witness. Someone else in the world. PAL carries a lot of design water for us. Here are some of the ways he helps:

PAL’s primary function is to orient the player at the top of each act. He summarizes what just happened, what the next goal is, and what the avenues from getting from A to B might be. In this sense, he’s very functional and the major challenge is getting all the content in a 500 character screen limit. In the early stages of the game, he also replaces the traditional tutorial. By choosing to present PAL as VO and giving his dialogue a little edge, we also avoid some reading fatigue and warm the relationship between the player and their helper.

The role of PAL at the end of each act is very different. Here they serve a feedback role, often commenting on the success or the failure of the player’s choices. There are  multiple “succeed” and “fail” endings to each act, but even within the successful options, there are some outcomes that are more desirable than others. PAL’s summary lets us signal those shades to the player and provides weight and consequence to their choices.

And finally, and most importantly, PAL’s interactions with the player connects critical story-telling dots. It’s an opportunity for us to resolve loose story ends, point the player to the next story arc, and bring together branching storylines. From a branching/converging narrative structure point of view, PAL is the bridge that allows three different story paths to share a common video summary cut-scene.  His dialogue gives the player the story elements they need to connect where they were to where they’re going. This allowed us a lot more flexibility in the kinds of stories we could tell and  efficiency in the video resources we could share.

The only downside to building PAL in is that now I kinda want one in my real life, too. But that’s a topic for another post…

We were really excited to have HRO included in Steam’s June “NextFest” promotion and we’re still sifting through the feedback and the observations. Eric and I wanted to thank everyone who downloaded the first demo episode of the game and especially the streamers who played online. Streamers were particularly helpful because it gave us a chance to watch real people play in real time, without our presence being a distraction or skewing the responses. It was a whole “Gorillas in the Mist” thing, except this was more like “Streamers in the Net.”

So what did we learn? Well, we learned a lot about how intuitive and effective the UI and game structure was from watching streamers navigate through the game. Generally, we watch for where players fumble and where they flounder, but we didn’t see a lot of that. It looks like the early play testing let us address most of those potential issues already. Which was a big relief. It’s nerve wracking sitting and watching players wander off the story path and get frustrated because we neglected to connect some dots. 

We saw good player engagement with the story and the characters and a wide range of play styles that all seemed to work. Some players tackled the game as more of a mystery to be solved, some as a story to be enjoyed and explored and some as a series of obstacles to be overcome, and everyone seemed to find things to enjoy along the way. All the online streamers also “succeeded” in completing the first demo episode and would have moved on to episode 02 if that had been available. Yay! 

This week we're moving on with content development, music composition, and voice-over casting  — which is one of the most fun parts for us. We were both theatre people earlier in our lives so being on this side of the audition table is very exciting for us. Next blog post we’ll be talking about PAL (the "Personal Administrative Liaison") and how he helps orient players and move the story along within the branching and converging structure. Til then, we’ll see you in space!

Ink also facilitates integration of the JSONs you create into your Unity framework by allowing the author to set flags that trigger actions in the Unity game. So the animation of a character you’re having a conversation with will change facial expressions in coordination with the dialogue, or buttons on the player’s console can be made to light up at the appropriate time, that sort of thing. Plus there’s a robust and clear system of flagging errors within Ink, so it’s easy to troubleshoot and tougher to construct files which don’t work at run-time — though I have managed that several times thanks to my own coding terribleness.

Yes, we’re officially fanbois. If you’re a creator of interactive fiction, we highly recommend checking out Ink. 

And now — as the resumption of this blog is meant to signal — it’s time to bring our players, colleagues and friends back into the process as we work to shape the experience and improve the storytelling. As part of that effort, we’ve been setting up the game’s store page on Steam — which has proven to be a surprisingly inspiring set of tasks. In the process of clearly laying out the game’s theme and its mechanics — so long after the initial concept work on the game was originally done — we found a golden chance to evaluate how far we may have hewed or strayed — for good or ill — from the original vision. 

The new marketing language for the game now describes it as: "HRO: Adventures of a Humanoid Resources Officer is a puzzle-driven visual novel set in a retro-futuristic sci-fi universe. You play the underappreciated Humanoid Resources Officer aboard the Endeavor — a military spaceship with more than its fair share of crew rivalries, office politics, and erratic decision-makers. When the Endeavor stumbles into universe-shaking trouble, can you harness the power of the bureaucracy to rein in your crew’s worst impulses and survive to the next episode?”