This blog post contains mild spoilers for Outsider. Galantrix nonetheless believes that this content enhances the Outsider experience, even if not required for thoroughly enjoying the game. If you don’t like spoilers, don’t read this post. Also, please make sure to read the Outsider Disclaimer before moving forward.

This was the first week in my new life as a “game writer” after finishing the bulk of the game engine work as part of Playtest 2. Back in October/November, when I worked on the tutorial, Chapter 1 and the drafts for Chapters 2 to 4, I had my first taste of how difficult writing is. I was dreading coming back to it a little because, while I’ve done writing off and on throughout my entire life, writing in English is still a bit harder than writing in my native Portuguese. Also, writing a linear story is very different from writing a branching narrative. If there is one thing in this project that takes me out of my comfort zone, it’s writing 70K-100K words of branching narrative in a professionally-made game!

That’s right, professionally made. Outsider is an Indie game through and through, but it isn’t a hobby project. I know it’s a niche game - or, even worse, a game for a yet undiscovered niche - and the game market is difficult to break into. But I want to be clear that I’m going for the gold. The odds aren’t good, and the goods are kind of odd, but there is no shortage of winning spirit at Galantrix. 💪

In the game, the tutorial is presented before Chapter 1 (it’s a sort of “Chapter Zero”) and is a completely made-up mini-story. Chapter 1, also released in the most recent Playtest, is where “real Outsider begins”. If this was simply a linear story, writing it would be a matter of drinking coffee, sitting down and writing. However, this game is an adaptation of a source material, which is itself a branching narrative. Nando’s fragmented writings, if transcribed literally, wouldn’t work even as a “Choose your Own Adventure” book. At best, it would look like a version of Cain’s Jawbone, but with missing pages!

For instance, let’s get the opening salvo in Chapter 1 where Nando starts with Publius Terentius’ maxim, “I am human, and think nothing human alien to me”. Nando left behind 4 different openings for his first conversation, and only one had Publius Terentius words. This one and another of the 4 openings don’t flow well into the snippets he left for the subsequent parts of the conversation. So, what should I do?

1. Pick the segment that flows best into the subsequent ones and offer the player no options
2. Use multiple segments and offer the player options right off the bat, even though the player has no context whatsoever
3. Pick the Publius Terentius quote, which has limited relevance in the chapter, and create dialogue from thin air to stitch this segment with the subsequent ones

In this particular case, I picked option 3. So there you go; I’m admitting to creating some story glue from thin air… But this air needs to be like those souvenirs they sell, you know, “genuine canned air from Paris”. Have you seen them? It’s air, but not just any air; it’s from Paris, man! So whenever I create dialogue from thin air, it must be “air from Outsider”.

In the game, after the quote, he proceeds to talk about how he got a strange package in the mail, which wasn’t at all what he said in the real world after logging in. Originally, he complained about some connection problems (3 of the 4 openings) and asked for a minute to answer the door because someone accidentally knocked (2 out of the 4 openings). All boring stuff for the game.

The solution, then, was to extract things Nando said in later dialogues, which required me to mark these future passages as “already talked about X in Chapter 1” to avoid repetition. The package in the mail segment only comes later in Nando’s writings, but I thought it would be the perfect way to set the context for the user, so I used it to glue the quote to the rest of the chapter. I won’t spoil it any further, so I’ll just say that the quote wasn’t necessary in some versions for .

This is all very complicated to do and breaks the regular writing flow of coffee-fueled “in the zone” writing. Gosh, Stephen King says that he just writes down what the characters do, but I can’t do that here! My current journey of discovery, then, is how to efficiently build a narrative that only occasionally uses Nando’s different versions as branches without making too many continuity mistakes.

This week, I experimented with starting with an outline based on the longest and most complex series of segments and then filling in details linearly without stopping to include branches. I did it efficiently and produced over 10K words of high-fidelity dialogue in 3 days. After doing that, I started grabbing Nando’s snippets, which I had left out, and started adding them back as branches. This part is still very inefficient due to the aforementioned “glue” between segments, so I need to learn how to do this better. It took me a full day just to partially stitch them on Chapter 2, which is unacceptably slow. That said, I’m happy with the improvements I made in the writing process.

I’ll wrap today’s report by saying that you just got the type of spoiler you’ll see in blog posts in the future. If they read this post, the playtesters will likely agree that I left all interesting things (in my opinion) unspoiled. At the same time, players and players-to-be can glimpse how the sausage is made, hopefully enhancing the Outsider experience.