Now that “Champion of the Gods” has sprung a sequel, it’s high time for another backstage tour! Here are four behind-the-curtain facts about “Exile of the Gods,” with spoiler warnings duly affixed where appropriate.
The Blade Runner's Manifesto - Mild Spoilers
A good ChoiceScript game operates a little like a Voight-Kampff test: putting players on the spot, again and again, in order to scare an honest answer out of them.
But what happens when the player already has the answer memorized? That was one of the challenges to designing “Exile.” While its predecessor draws mainly on myths, this new game draws instead on military and political history—making numerous references to real-world events, about which the player may have already formed opinions. As I developed “Exile,” I began to worry those opinions might make it harder for me to get a hypothetical player to respond in the moment, diminishing the game’s ability to get a “clean read.”
To safeguard against this, I came up with the following ground rule, rather early on: use the historical details to fool the player into thinking they are getting something familiar, but always give them something else entirely. Which is to say: any time you think the game is going in one direction, or that it is reminding you of a specific historical event, be on guard—it will never let you off that easily!
Virtual Harryhausanity - Mild Spoilers
When I was developing "Champion of the Gods," most of my research consisted of reading historical and cultural accounts, and comparing different tellings of regional myths—but it also involved a deep dive into the monster-rich fantasy adventure films of Ray Harryhausen.
For those not in the loop on him, Ray Harryhausen was a film producer and special effects developer whose distinct style left its imprint on an entire genre of fantasy. He’s influenced filmmakers from George Lucas to Guillermo del Toro--and although his effects relied primarily on stop-motion animation, a technique that looks surrealistic to modern eyes, his mastery of the medium still impresses on its own terms. (The skeleton attack in “Jason and the Argonauts” may not seem realistic, but it’s a feat of craft—and almost more jaw-dropping when you know how its effects were achieved.)
I decided, when I started work on “Champion,” that I would do my best to sneakily reference every major monster that Harryhausen’s films featured, even if only obliquely. (And trust me…I got pretty oblique! I wanted the game to be like a hidden picture puzzle, just with hidden monsters.) By the time I finished “Champion,” I was able to hit five out of the seven categories I had hoped to include: skeletons, the Minotaur, the Kraken, a dragon, and giant scorpions. All of them are in there, albeit in somewhat remixed form.
But I ran out of space before I could include two remaining Harryhausen categories! So, while traversing “Exile,” be on the lookout for the Cyclops and some killer statues. (They were the holdovers.)
{Metro (retro) futurism} - Mild Spoilers
As noted previously, nothing in the game is purely copied from the real world; everything is remixed, because I needed the game environment to be unfamiliar enough to get relatively “clean” reactions from the players.
That said, I did make an effort to combine historical details with complimentary details from modern life, to make matters more relevant. (In “Jurassic Park” terms: my historical research was always the dinosaur DNA, while the modern details were the frog DNA, tying the whole velociraptor together.)
This is never more evident than when we’re talking about Vhyr, the City of Clay--a place you'll either visit halfway through the game, or start the game already living in, depending on your choices.
And while Vhyr draws a lot of physical detail from urban enclaves of the fertile crescent from 400 – 600 BC, all of its modern DNA comes rather noticeably from one place: midtown NYC, where I started work at an office precisely one month before I started writing/coding "Exile."
It's in this area of Manhattan that the ostentatious myth-inflected artwork of Rockefeller Center abounds, some of which has the nerve (or prescience) to depict the titans of industry as ever-watchful deities. It's also here that the most checked-out / decked-out locals parade around 5th Avenue with their checked-out / decked-out dogs. And with both Trump Tower and St. Patrick's Cathedral just a Rolex’s throw away, one can't help but get the feeling that these twelve-or-so square blocks have a perspective all their own--even a philosophy.
Real or imagined, its tenets have certainly informed the City of Clay.
100% Post-Consumer Plotlines - Major Spoilers
If you played "Champion," you'll recall that the realm of Agossa has a community of seers: people gifted with the ability to see the destined futures of anyone they meet. (It is a gift that comes with some serious drawbacks, since these seers are routinely shunned by their own kin for knowing too much about them.)
In the original version of "Champion," one of these seers—a young one, who was tired of living apart from their family—decided to join forces with Daggoras, hoping that the God of Chaos might take away their ability to see the future. I loved the idea of someone so intimately connected to the prophecy at the center of the game actively working against their own plot point! But the character wound up getting cut, mostly because they were soaking up all of the exposition that was meant for the player.
Now, fastforward years later, to when my research for "Exile" introduced me to the astrologers of Babylon, whose influence over the politics of their city was not unlike the influence that the seers had on the world of “Champion.” They immediately reminded me of the young character I had cut from the plot of that game, and soon enough, the idea of crooked soothsayers became the foundational concept for my sequel.
The lesson here could be misinterpreted as “never throw anything away,” but it’s actually “throw away whatever you like, because ideas will crawl back out of the wastepaper basket and track you down if they want writing bad enough.”