How do you start a game? It’s such a difficult question. There are so many things a game has to do for a player at the start; introduce them to the world, teach them how to play and above all, hook them. We spent a lot of time and effort at the start of Paradise Killer trying to get it right. I haven’t done the math on this, but I do know that the start of the game is the most shared Paradise Killer music video on social media, so I guess something worked!
In Paradise Killer, you play as Lady Love Dies (LD), an investigator who has come out of exile to investigate crime in order to end all crimes on the strange paradise island. We knew the start of the game would depict LD arriving on the island and introducing the player to the world. As we were making an open world game, we wanted to start by showing the player the whole world initially. The island is quite large and you can explore everything, but you don’t usually see the scale of what you’re about to explore in the games. We were hoping that giving the player a bird’s eye view of a huge vista that was ready for them would blow them away and whet their appetite for exploration.
With that in mind, our first story draft began with LD arriving by plane, allowing the player to see the island as they flew over it. It wasn’t very exciting and it didn’t suit our game, so we put the idea aside and worked on other things while we thought about it. Finally Phil, our technical director, said to me: “I want an intro like the beginning of Bayonetta”. It’s quite a challenge! For those who haven’t played it, the beginning of Bayonetta sees the player battling a huge army of monster angels over a crumbling cathedral collapsing in the sky. It’s one of the best game debuts anyone has ever made, it really makes an impression. I thought to myself, “how can we do something like this in a first-person narrative game?”
After ditching the fly in intro, the story developed another way and we decided that the exiled Lady Love Dies was going to be in some kind of prison cell called Idle Lands, above Paradise Island. One of the issues we had to work out was figuring out how we would get the player down from there at the start of the game. Our first idea was for Lydia to pick you up in her car. Lydia drives a car that can travel through dimensions, so it would make sense that she could find a way to park high in the sky in the idle lands.
However, we just didn’t think it was very exciting. Luckily, we had decided early in development that there would be no fall damage in the game because the game is about free exploration and we didn’t want to punish that. Along with needing to come up with a good intro, we also needed a good way to communicate that, so we decided to jump the player off the idle lands at the start of the game. We tried it, and take a big leap running and throwing yourself into oblivion was awesome! Upon falling, the player could see the entire island spread out beneath them and begin picking out locations of interest for their investigation. It served several purposes.
A very early version of the open world jump and view
This fall on the island was great, but we knew we could make it more stylish. I love late title cards in games, so we decided to put the Paradise Killer title card when the player lands after falling. It’s a big impact moment, and tying the two together worked really well.
An early version of the moment of landing
We were pretty happy with the intro at this point, but we knew we could push it further.
At the time, we were working with a simple library of samples for our music, and we had the idea to take one of the short looped tracks and remove all the bass and percussive elements to make it an ambient track. more stripped down sound that you would hear while exploring Idle Lands Prison. We originally planned to remove the remaining layers as you unlock the prison doors on Paradise Island, but then came up with the idea to change it so that it starts transforming when you jump off the ledge , the music swelling as you dive. in the abyss of crime.
When we brought in our composer Barry “Epoch” Topping, he built on that by providing original music, as well as creating a beautiful bass slide that happens as you launch yourself out of exile. It ended up being an incredibly powerful moment that people talk to us about enthusiastically all the time.
Paradise Killer’s intro took a lot of iterations, but it was worth it. The beginning of Paradise Killer teaches the player the rules of exploration and gets them excited about the open world, but most of all, it surprises them. One of the key questions we ask ourselves about our games throughout development is, “what can we do here to surprise players?” ? Surprise is a wonderful emotion that sparks joy and helps engage players in the game.
Luckily, we seem to have achieved what we set out to do with the Paradise Killer intro and we nailed this moment. Players love the surprise of jumping onto Paradise Island, and we love seeing them get excited!
