How the Ghost Pattern builds the world in the direction of Wayward Strand’s story – PlayStation.Blog

Hey, I’m Goldie, Wayward Strand’s art director, coming to PlayStation 5 and PlayStation 4 on September 15th (soon!!)

For the first time in six years since Ghost Pattern was founded, the team and I are sharing more deeply about creating our simultaneous, real-time narrative, Wayward Strand, with the participation of Casey, a 14-year-old journalist. , as she followed her curiosity to wherever it took her.

Original artwork on how ships can be loaded, by me! Goldie Bartlett

From the very beginning, the game drew inspiration from the stage role-playing drama, casual comics, and graphic novels. What I like about this format is that there is a lot of space and area to nestle moments between plot points and larger plot twists.

Leave! Create our character

Our team created the characters of Wayward Strand based on personal experiences and stories from people in our lives, especially older ones. We wanted our characters to be active in the story, rather than waiting for players to arrive before they did anything. Georgia Symons, one of the Wayward Strand writers, remembers that “the goal was to give each character the potential to ‘move the story forward,’ through whatever action they took.”

During the early demos, we were excited by how concurrent storylines gave players the chance to happen in mid-flow scenes or storylines. It helps players both understand and feel that there is an active world going on outside of their character.

The earliest mock-up of the Ghost Pattern in the schedule January 1, 2016/2017. Each row, a different character, and each column a time of day.

Another Wayward Strand writer, Jason Bakker, felt like telling multiple storylines at once meant we could really perfect our characters. “It allows each character to have quiet moments, time to themselves. Each character can be the center of attention for a bit, then the player can follow them as they return to their room and be with them as they process what just happened. “

Screenshot of the current construction, in front of the ship overlooking the coast.

We challenged ourselves to make every character as interesting as possible over the course of three in-game days, and it’s part of the Wayward Strand that I love so much. Usually I would talk to someone – my mother or aunt or friend – who would tell me some stories about people they used to know and I thought, “that’s what Esther has to do. ‘ or ‘that’s exactly how Joe (one of the nurses) must feel about Dr. Bouchard’. Over the past six years, small nuances related to the people we know have been added to each character.

By the sea-nery

Early drawings of Casey visiting Ida using 3D modeling.

We have passed generations of images for our living world. Our first plan was to explore 3D entirely in over-the-shoulder format, in a single-story hospital; As you enter a scene, the camera cuts around as each character speaks. In that demo, we didn’t see the broader context of how busy the hospital was, or even the beautiful sea/sky view outside, and decided to go in a fundamentally different direction.

Layout of the ship, where the rooms are arranged horizontally.

Maize Wallin, our sound director, says the change to side-by-side view is one of the key differentiators of the experience. “This side doll house view makes it much more clear to the player that there is something constantly happening around them.” We built our next demo in a side-by-side style, where the camera looked “down into the barrel” of the ship and the rooms were spread out across the width. It was only after working with Su-Yiin Lai, an architectural consultant, that we discovered that length is the best way to achieve the comic style we had come to expect – here’s a copy. Final reconstruction and what you will see in the game.

An original design of a hospital airship in length.

What does the ship look like today!

Listen, there, everywhere

One thing we’ve believed in since day one is that games should be fully voiced; Just as we wanted the game to benefit from the actors’ performances, such as the theater, we needed the player to be able to hear all the conversations going on around you as you play. We did two ‘hands-on’ dubbing sessions in 2016 and 2018, which tells us that producing the full game’s dub will be a big undertaking.

And that’s it – over the course of six weeks, we spent 30 days with our actors, on four sets around the world. Maize, technical audio director of VO sessions, says we’ve recorded over 18,000 lines of dialogue; equivalent to about eighteen full-length movies. It took cohesive narration, programming, engineering and sound engineering, and voice-over experts to make it all possible.

Casey is said to have created a lot of monsters!

As we got closer to release, we watched everyone play the game and realized that while a lot had changed along the way, our core goal never wavered. When you play Wayward Strand, you’re spending time in a living world surrounded by interesting, complex characters and their evolving stories, inspired by personal experiences and real-life history. .

We’re excited for you to experience it for yourself on September 15, on PlayStation 5 and PlayStation 4!