Character Development in Subnautica

Subnautica is one of the hardest things I've written, for all sorts of wonderful reasons. The world is huge and open, so pacing is out the window. There aren't other people wandering about, but human characters are the most interesting way to tell a story. We have huge creative freedom and independence, and a passionate fan-base with firm ideas about what the game is.

I was asked recently if I could share some of my process on character development for it.

That's a bit like watching a man fall down a hill chasing a rolling cheese, then asking him at the bottom how he did it - it's a lot of pain, hand-waving and muscle memory - but I'll try.

Spoilers for SN1 throughout.

Super Secret Subnautica Below Zero Feature - SPOILERS

This post describes a feature of Subnautica: Below Zero that you probably don't want spoiled in advance; however our open development structure (you can read everything we're working on at the new Favro boards when they go live) means this info is now public and, if you came here on purpose, I want to say a few words about our plans.

Announcement & Details: Subnautica: Below Zero

It hasn't been a secret that we've been working on an expansion for Subnautica since January this year, with a release date sometime next year. Today we opened up the Trello Board to the public (warning: spoilers), and in concert with that I publish here some background on the project and the story I'm developing for it.

I will avoid in this post plot spoilers of anything but the starting scenario (ie not really a spoiler), but if you do want to come at the story absolutely clean then please consider not reading this post and not playing the early access when it arrives. This post does feature Subnautica 1.0 spoilers.

Objective Project Overview

Below Zero will feature a smaller game world than the original, and offer a 10+ hour experience with the same Subnautica gameplay you know and love, with new story and content. That content includes a whole new map, new biomes, creatures, vehicles, characters and equipment, in addition to a revamped temperature system that we are still tinkering with. We are of course also trying to efficiently reuse assets from the base game where appropriate. You can probably expect an ice peeper.

So this is a standalone expansion set some months after the events of the original game. Ryley Robinson has escaped 4546B and made it back to Federation space, and Alterra has now sent the Vesper - an orbital research station - to the planet, where they maintain a small contractor presence on the surface. Ostensibly they are here to salvage the Aurora and prospect for resources. Alterra being Alterra, this may not be the whole truth.

Since January we have blocked out the world map, planned the story, and begun work on content. The LDs are churning out new biomes, vehicles are coming along, and the barebones of the story are implemented (ie we can play the game start to finish, but it's still very work in progress). I'm currently about halfway through the full first draft.

Story

We did consider adding content to the base scenario instead of creating an entirely new one, but I argued against it from a story perspective, and I am glad we are doing something standalone. The original story has been told. For me to be excited about working on the expansion, and for you to be excited to play it, I wanted a new character with a new set of conflicts which let us further explore the world we created, not just a bolt-on. It's the same approach we took to the expansion to The Talos Principle, and I'm happy with how that worked out.

You will play as one of Alterra's contractors, a zoologist of alien life stationed in a frozen area of the planet, tasked with investigating the alien ruins. Of course, a complication will arise that throws everything upside down and forces you to dive deeper in search of answers.

We hope this scenario gives us a neat twist on the original. You are still on the planet, fending for yourself and surviving against the elements; but now you're in touch with the Vesper in the skies above, which completely changes the context of your actions, and puts the story and character dialog more front and centre. We think of it like the shift from Alien to Aliens - EXCEPT it is in context only, not in gameplay. We are not turning our slow survival game into an action shooter!

Ambitions

For this expansion to be worth the price of entry it has to maintain what made SN1 wonderful, while delivering all new surprises. So we asked ourselves: What is Subnautica?

I think Subnautica is adventure. It's mystery, peril, excitement and wonder. It's life, basically. But can we keep amazing you by building bigger sea-creatures? Can we further scare you by adding bigger teeth? Perhaps... perhaps... But we need to go further. When you play Subnautica the first time, part of that experience is not knowing what the game is capable of. It's a basic survival game, then the Aurora explodes, then you find ancient alien ruins, then you have a telepathic conversation with a sea monster, and so on. How can we pull the same trick twice when this time you know what to expect?

The simple answer is that the more I tell you now, the more difficult it's going to be! But I'll outline one of our ideas, so you get the gist.

In Below Zero you're still going to be exploring an open world, finding abandoned bases, audio diaries, scanning creatures and following clues to the Next Big Surprise. You're still going to be piecing the story together as you go. That story is still going to turn around human interaction with the natural (and alien) world.

BUT. I am trying to tell the story in a way that is more character-driven. In the base game your character has no onscreen personality. They're an avatar. The character's motivations are always a sort of reduction of natural human motivations: you must survive, and everything you do in the game can be read as a means to that end (if you are so inclined as a player). No one can argue with that, but it's also a huge restriction to the kinds of stories your character can be involved in. In the base game there is a disconnect between what happens in the survivor stories, and what happens in the core alien mystery plot. The core story is in the past tense: you discover what happened before, but nothing much changes in the present (with some exceptions, eg the Sunbeam). In the expansion, I would like dialog and core plot to be more intertwined.

To achieve that end we are experimenting with using a speaking player character. This is a controversial decision, even within the team. To my mind it carries two risks: 1. It may create a disconnect between player motivation and character motivation; 2. Too much protagonist voice may take away from the feeling of isolated survival. I hope I can mitigate these with solid writing and lots of playtesting and revisions (that's where you guys come in!); but I accept that the decision in itself will be anathema for some (I hope) small minority. I bite that bullet, because playing it safe as a creative is just never a good option. If we fail, we may as well fail spectacularly.

What I hope this gives us is a much greater variety of stories that we can tell. Different ways we can surprise you. Character relationships which actually develop as you progress in the game, and which contextualise your actions and discoveries. An ending that is about more than survival.

A beating emotional heart instead of (or perhaps in addition to) cold scientific analyses.

These things may be very different. But they surely go together.

Two Painters

Two master painters are in a forest clearing setting up their canvasses and easels. The sun is slicing through the thick foliage, illuminating a  scene they are each determined to capture before it fades.

The first painter looks out and sees the trees: the moss on the trunks, the sun glancing off the dew-covered leaves, the great cracks and rivulets running through the bark. The painter takes up their oils and begins to paint.

The second painters looks out and sees the forest: a great dark mass, split by shards of white from the sky. The painter takes up their pencils and begins to draw.

Some hours later they each sit back and breathe a deep breath, before turning to examine the other's work.

The first painter has focused on a handful of trees, which are presented in great detail. It is possible to make out the individual leaves, in which there are reflections of all the others.

The second painter has drawn the entire forest in a more abstract style. Individual trees are hardly discernible, instead there is a black clump stretching in all directions, delimited only by flecks of white sunlight.

The first painter looks at the abstract drawing, and then at the second painter, and there is something that the first painter doesn't say to the second. What they don't say is, "Your trees are merely a black pencil smudge, whereas mine are a full reflection of the real trees before us, and I therefore insist that you make your trees more like mine in order to improve your picture."

And there is something that the second painter doesn't say to the first. They don't say, "Your forest only has three trees in it, whereas mine is a full reflection of the real forest before us, and I therefore insist that you make your forest more like mine in order to improve your picture."

No, they don't say those things, because it would strike them as ridiculous. They didn't come to the clearing together so they could go home with two copies of the same picture. One of them sees the trees, while the other sees the forest. They came to the clearing together so that for a short while they could see both.

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In other news Subnautica finally comes out 23rd January 2018 on Steam. It's actually going to happen this time. I can't wait. It's been over two years.

Quick Update

Here is what has been happening for the past couple months.

Yesterday I did an Ask Me Anything on Reddit. Last time I did one was three years ago, and I'm pleased to say the number of questions fielded this time was roughly triple, and ran the gamut from the usual 'How do I do your job?', through practical questions about the future of Subnautica, all the way to rather sillier ones. Here's a quick excerpt:

Tom, it turns out that I love every game that you and/or your pal Jonas Kyratzes have worked on. So, I have to ask...

Which would you rather fight: 100 small, brightly colored, six-legged, horse-like animals, or one horse-sized mantis with max ranks in combat?

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[–]tjubert[S] 3 points 16 hours ago 

I've waited my entire life to answer this question, and I'm afraid it's easy. I would rather fight 100 small, brightly coloured, six-legged, horse-like animals than one horse-sized mantis with max ranks in combat because a horse is a horse and a horse is not a threat, especially when it is small, even if it is six-legged and brightly-coloured and there are one hundred of them; however regardless the size or the species of the horse-sized mantis it still has max ranks in combat, and I always specialise in INT, CHAR, WIS.

In other news I am continuing to develop the general plotline for Subnautica (which will likely be true until a couple months before it ships), and next week I'm hoping to move back onto doing a proper redesign of the intro sequence and first 30 mins of story. Should be a big jump forward for the next update.

Finally, let's have a quick celebration of the fact the UK for the first time in decades has a prominent left-winger leading one of the two main parties, who believes in things like thinking before shooting, abolishing the monarchy and giving everyone an equal share of the things in life that really matter: health, education and political involvement.

Project Announcement: Subnautica

Rather than try to put into words how excited I am to sign onto another innovative new project, I will simply invite you to have a play of Subnautica if you haven't, and then ask you to enjoy with me a restrained mutual fist pump. Yes.

Subnautica, like FTL, is one of those games I loved so much as a player I just had to get in touch and see if there was something I could help out with. Much as I dislike the market pressures early access puts on consumers to purchase unfinished product, it certainly has its advantages.

Subnautica beguiles me so for two reasons. First, it is a non-violent, open-world exploration / survival game. While I've done a bunch of non-violent things in the past, it is great to be able to start 'specialising' in it, but it's the openness of the world that really holds the potential for me. My entire career I have wanted to explore ways of telling story that are not just audio logs, cut scenes and dialog trees - or at least be ambitious with how I apply those techniques. Subnautica offers a whole new palette.

Second, Subnautica's world is without parallel. Aesthetically speaking, where The Swapper lacked visual definition, and Talos had too much of it (for my personal liking), Subnautica's slightly exaggerated first-person world is hugely to my taste. It is colourful, immediate and intriguing, and its science fiction provides lots of opportunities to build on that world.

Thematically it is right down my alley as well. I always try to make my stories be about whatever the gameplay is about. If you are swapping your consciousness between different bodies to solve puzzles, the story had better be about that. If you are shooting many men in the face, your story had better be about that (hence why I don't work on so many shooters).

Subnautica's gameplay is about exploring and surviving on an alien world, and learning how to live harmoniously with your environment. That is literally what you do minute-to-minute. The story, then, is going to be about concepts quite alien to video game narratives in general: survival, environmentalism, life itself. I think these are topics which I can do justice to.

Now, what's the lay of the land, and what are we going to do?

To date there has been some initial story development at the studio, and early access players will already be familiar with the established backstory: you're on a space ship, it crash lands on an ocean planet, find out what happened and get home. Most of the gameplay systems are implemented, along with over half of the world map, but there is a way to go yet with original content creation before moving into polish stage.

Since this is early access, we are not taking the front-loaded approach I usually take, where we spend half the budget on pre-production planning before writing a single word. Instead we're firing multiple cylinders at once. Right now I am working directly with Charlie (Cleveland, Unknown Worlds' founder and creative director) to nail down some of the big outstanding questions about the story. Who is the player character? How do we deliver lore and story in-game? What crashed the ship?

At the same time I am developing plot pitches so that soon enough we will have a firm idea of what actually happens at the end - and of course what happens after that, since in a game like this there is no end.

Finally I am developing in parallel a practical in-game script for the first 40 minutes or so of gameplay, potentially to include in a future game update as a way to test the water for the direction we're taking, and share some of our work with the players.

If you want to follow development there will doubtless by story tasks added to the Subnautica Trello, once my workflow within the team is a bit more established. If you want to play the Early Access (it's in very playable state, save for a bit of stuttering) it's £14.99 from Steam.