Alpha Protocol Blog Update

Alpha Protocol lead designer Chris Avellone has once again treated us to a new blog entry, which he describes as a “braindump” on the game’s narrative process.

Also about a year and a half ago, we decided it’d be in best interests of the title if we started a design hierarchy with the two most important aspects of the game – the first and most important tier was the actual moment-to-moment systems, combat/stealth/tech, and character building (in the capable hands of Matt MacLean with assistance from Chris Parker). The second tier was level design, which answered to systems to provide context for the game mechanics (level design was in the hands of Lead Level Designer Tyson Christensen). The narrative designers were on the third tier (Travis, Matt, and I), giving the existing levels purpose with the characters and script with assistance from the level designers, and the level designers would often assist with banter and dialogue requests for their levels – a number of the LDs were good writers in their own right, so we used some of their dialogue exactly as they had written it. We didn’t have a sub-lead for Narrative Design, we simply divided up the chunks of the narrative where it made sense among the three of us then set about implementing it.

The three tiers did see some bleeding into each other. In the final draft of the game, for example, more of the narrative elements moved up into the game systems category, so it became part of gameplay and not just branching narrative, which was a plus.

After we had iterated on the narrative until we were satisfied with it, we devoted a cinematics designer (Joseph Bulock) solely to coordinating and setting the visual narrative themes and perspective with the cinematics department (led by Shon Stewart). So if you see cool dramatic moments, shower those guys with praise, not the design department.

For the narrative part of the process, Travis, Matt, and I did take on the existing characters and levels, wrote a new story using a portion of the already-made locations and relationship chains (where it made sense), and then rewrote the script and in-game emails to account for the story changes. We also added a lot more “what if the player did this” moments, took some of the plot elements and characters that were formerly untouchable and exposed them to kryptonite, and also accounted for the new reactivity mechanics and giving the player more choice and interactions in the missions. We also changed a lot of the motivations and focus of the storyline as well, as well as allowing the protagonist to have more choices with his background in character creation, which was a plus (Mike formerly had one role in the Agency, and one outlook on the greater good, so we decided to let the player choose their beginning and ending over the course of the game instead).