Hey, I’m Goldie, Art Director of Wayward Strand, coming to PlayStation 5 and PlayStation 4 on September 15th (it’s so early!!)
For the first time in six years since Ghost Pattern’s inception, the team and I are sharing a deep dive into the making of our real-time, simultaneously told story, Wayward Strand, with 14-year-old aspiring journalist Casey, as she follows her curiosity wherever she takes it.
The first illustrations of how the ship could be loaded with supplies, by me! Goldie Bartlett
From the start, the game was heavily inspired by immersive theater, slice-of-life comics, and graphic novels. Something I love about this format is that there’s plenty of space and room to insert moments among the larger plot points and storyline nodes.
Throw yourself! Create our characters
Our team created the Wayward Strand characters based on personal experiences and stories of people in our lives, especially older people. We wanted our characters to be active in the story, instead of waiting for the player to pass before doing anything. Georgia Symons, one of Wayward Strand’s writers, recalls that “the goal was to give each character the potential to ‘move the story forward,’ no matter what actions they take”.
In early demos, we were excited about how simultaneous scenarios gave the player the ability to perform on scenes or scenarios mid-stream. This helps the player understand and feel that there is a world of activity outside of their character.
The first mock-up of Ghost Pattern from the day 1 program in 2016/2017. Each row a different character and each column a time of day.
Wayward Strand’s other writer, Jason Bakker, is keen on telling multiple stories at once, which means we can really complement our characters. “It allows each character to have quiet moments, time for themselves. Each character can be the center of attention for a while, then the player can follow them as they return to their rooms and be with them while ‘they’re processing what just happened.
Screenshot of the current construction, at the front of the ship overlooking the coast.
We challenged ourselves to make every character as interesting as possible over three days of play, and that’s part of Wayward Strand’s making that I absolutely loved. A lot of times I would have a conversation with someone – my mom or an aunt or a friend – they would tell me a story about someone they once knew and I would think, “this is SO much for Esther to do. ‘ or ‘that’s exactly how Joe (one of the nurses) must feel about Dr. Bouchard’. Over the past six years, little nuances related to people we know have been added to the characters, piece by piece.
At the seaside
A first render of Casey visiting Ida using 3D modeling.
We have gone through many generations of visuals for our living world. Our early plans were to explore fully 3D spaces in an over-the-shoulder format, in a single-story hospital; when you entered a scene, the camera rotated as each character spoke. In this demo, we couldn’t see the larger backdrop of hospital bustle, or even the beautiful sea/sky outside, and decided to go in a fundamentally different direction.
A scrapping of the ship, where the parts were laid out widthwise.
Maize Wallin, our Audio Director, says the switch to a side view is one of the biggest experience differences. “This side view of the dollhouse makes it much clearer to the player that there are things constantly happening around them.” We built our next demo in a sideways style, where the camera was looking “down the barrel” of the ship, and the parts were laid out widthwise. It wasn’t until working with Su-Yiin Lai, an architectural consultant, that we discovered that length was the best way to achieve the comic book style we were hoping for – it was the final reconstruction and what you will see in the game.
An early design of the longitudinal hospital airship.
What does the ship look like today!
Hear, there, everywhere
One thing we have believed in from the very beginning is that the game should be fully expressed; in addition to wanting the game to benefit from the performances of the actors, like the theater, we needed the player to be able to hear all the conversations happening around you while you play. We did two rounds of “practice” voiceover recording sessions in 2016 and 2018, which taught us that producing voiceovers for the full game would be a colossal undertaking.
And it was – in six weeks, we spent 30 days with our actors, in four studios around the world. Maize, the technical audio director of the VO sessions, says we recorded over 18,000 lines of dialogue; the equivalent of about eighteen feature films. It took cohesive narrative direction, programming, technical audio specialists, audio engineering, and voiceover to make it all possible.
We hear Casey saying hellos a lot!
As we approached the release, we watched people play the game and realized that although a lot had changed on the journey, our fundamental goals never wavered. When you play Wayward Strand, you spend time in a living world surrounded by interesting and complex characters and their evolving stories, inspired by personal experience and real history.
We’re excited for you to experience it for yourself on September 15, on PlayStation 5 and PlayStation 4!
