Stray: The Wayward Path is a 3rd-person action adventure game for the PC, where you play as Aapo, a small boy with a magical grappling hook. Your people were wiped out years ago after a volcanic eruption, leaving only you and your caretaker, Kunara, to fend for yourselves. Terrible creatures roam the wild, and a corrupting magic threatens to consume the world.
One night, Kunara vanishes; left alone, you must make your way through a tumultuous land and find your only ally. Learn the history of your people, uncover a sacred prophecy, and stamp out the corruption before it's too late.
Role: Narrative Designer
Team Size: 14
Platform: PC
Engine: Unreal Engine 4
Find the game here!
The Pitches When I was assigned as Stray's narrative designer, the game's premise was simple: A boy and his companion are lost in a broken world that festers with corruptive energies. The companion disappears, and the boy must go in search for them; this serves as the inciting incident. But the game's plot, the characters' relationship, and the world's historical context hadn't been decided. I knew the first thing I had to do was lay a foundation. I proposed to draft a series of pitches–each detailing those three elements in varying degrees–that I would present to the team. From there, I outlined 5 ideas, I narrowed them down to 3, and I then wrote a pitch for each idea. You can find these pitches on the right. Pitch #3 won by a landslide; a volcanic setting appealed to our artists and level designers, and the characters' relationship felt the most potent out of the three. |
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The Narrative Bible After committing to our premise, I began work on Stray's narrative bible. This document was integral to preserving the world's core details and upholding consistency among the team, serving as a reference point for the other teammates in how our world functions. The prioritized order exists largely as the document is written: before I delved into who the boy and his companion were, I wanted to define the world around them, beginning with the volcano, the Ampato's history, and their relationship in history. The initial narrative specified that a war had occurred in the land, so I developed an ideological conflict that lead to the volcano's eruption. Jenova Chen's Journey served as a vital inspiration, where wordless hints at the world's violent past litter the levels. Just as the robed figures also underwent a civil war, so did the Ampato in Stray, both communicated through environmental cues and level construction. Fleshing out the world made it much easier to conceive who Aapo and Kunara were: Kunara was a shamanic leader who miraculously survived the volcanic cataclysm, and Aapo was a newborn she'd found during the eruption. The two survived, and were now left alone in the world. Kunara's motivation began to take shape; she'd taken little action to stop her people's conflict, and feels immense guilt over their decimation. Aapo, meanwhile, undergoes a classic coming of age story so as to better immerse the player in the game's short time frame. |
The Golden Path The next step was outlining the game's golden path, the essential plot-points that the player encounters throughout the game's progression. I wanted to relay information about the game's past in a non-linear fashion, inspired by horror games like Silent Hill 2 and Until Dawn. Though Stray is not a horror game, I still wanted the player to feel intrigued by the world's past. Journey relays its past in a chronological order, but Stray has a more predominant narrative: that of Aapo searching for Kunara. So Stray's in-game past ought to be more of a puzzle for more narrative-invested players to piece together. It felt natural to break up the game's events into two chronological orders: that of the world's history, and that of the game's progression. That way, I could keep tabs on the player's linear progression, while also having greater control over what details the player was encountering. Of all the narrative documents, this was the most subject to change. Our narrative had to work with our short semester-long time frame, so I made sure to include details that were pertinent, but could also be cut without hindering the story. For example, we debated for about a month over whether we should include two choice-based endings at the end, where Aapo could volunteer to sacrifice himself. We were enamored with giving the player a choice at the game's conclusion, but as we grappled with how that world function narratively and ludically, we grew concerned we were providing the player a choice just for the choice's sake. So we cut it, and it made telling the story much simpler. |
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Ludo-Narrative Beats Once the golden path was complete, it was time to start designing levels. Our level designers required a beat-by-beat rundown of how each level would flow. From here, they could create visual diagrams of these beats, providing an easier representation for how the game's story would flow. |
The Script The penultimate thing to tackle was the script. We wanted to keep it barebones; the game focuses on enjoying the open spaces the game has to offer. Therefore, my job was to make the dialogue snappy, flavorful, and narratively informative. All of the dialogue frames the game: in the beginning, the dialogue informs the player of the narrative's contexts in ways visuals simply cannot accomplish, and the end serves as the necessary denouement. The game's middle still gets away with being communicated with no dialogue, though. Regardless, it was core to establish the relationship between Kunara and Aapo through these mundane interactions; that way, the player would establish a relationship with that status quo, and the player would feel Aapo's desire to find Kunara when she then disappears. |
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The Journal The last thing to tackle was the journal. A collaborative project between myself and our lead artist, the journal was conceived as a way of recording the narrative beats the player had already encountered, as well as bringing attention to narratively important details via a notification that the player might otherwise completely miss and therefore not consider. Journals are hardly a new concept in video games, but 2016's Night in the Woods revolutionizes the in-game journal. The protagonist, Mae Borowski, keeps a journal throughout the game. Instead of writing straight prose either through her voice or the narrator's, the journal is riddled with her nonsensical and juvenile doodles, akin to those in the margins of all our old High School composition books. Similarly, I wanted Aapo to do the same. He's a 10-year old boy in a grand, open world, tackling the unknown. He has no concept of his people's violent past, or the nature of the volcano's corruption, but by using his journal as a way for himself to digest it, we–the player–end up learning alongside him. And that makes for a more meaningful experience. |