KOTCL Dev Diaries - Inspiration, pt 3

Knock, knock, travellers!

I hope you liked our holiday story about the Mistress. By the way, how do you see her appearance? Surely not as an old crone with a scythe? No, she’s actually quite charming.

If it seemed to you that, in describing Death, I was playing with the BDSM theme, you weren’t mistaken. The Mistress’ servants, ready to fulfil her any desire—I think that’s a hilarious image. Midian is overall rather grim, but there’s still space for jokes.

But enough about Midian. We’ll return to the main topic at some point, but for now let’s liven it up with some sketches from everyday life.

Making the next diary entry is always harder than the previous one, and once again it brought me onto the topic of inspiration. But this time, we’re not talking about sources of inspiration, but about the phenomenon itself.

I hope it will be interesting, let's go!

Oh, right! I almost forgot (just kidding, of course)

The rebalance is on the final stretch

The director’s cut of the game balance — the one we’ve been working on for several months — is already standing right at the threshold. Knock-knock!

Next week we’re launching a test build and we’ll see what kind of creature it really is. We’re going to poke it with a stick thoroughly.

Let me remind you: these are not cosmetic tweaks and not simple balance adjustments.. This is an entirely new balance. And your feedback will be VERY important. To be or not to be — that’s for you to decide.

I’ll definitely make a separate post with all the details, but for now I’ll just tease a bit.

And now — let’s go!

Inspiration as a Thing-in-Itself

We all see inspiration in more or less the same way, but it works differently for everyone. For example, some people become full of inspiration, carry it for a long time, and then—boom!—they start giving birth to ideas and projects, creating tirelessly around the clock, taking only short breaks for food and sleep. My inspiration, however, is more like a small vessel that empties quickly and fills quickly. I charge up and burn out several times a day; I’m not able to write even this small text in one sitting. Now can you imagine how much writing was involved in Knock on the Coffin Lid? It’s unbelievable!

I don’t like comparisons in the vein of “two Witchers-long" or “three War and Peaces in length.” They might impress some, but they don’t actually say anything. You have to count how many technical descriptions and how many narrative descriptions are there; some texts repeat, some are unique—in short, it’s a subject of academic research, and I am too lazy to deal with all of that. But there is A LOT of text in our game. With my small inspiration vessel, I could never have written that much. We need a narrative game designer.

Inspiration Can Be Shared

Do you know the difference between the work of a scriptwriter and a narrative game designer? Their functions are very similar, but there’s a fundamental distinction: the scriptwriter writes the story, while the narrative designer tells it. The scriptwriter only operates with text, while the narrative designer has the full set of expressive tools that the Game provides.

In practice, this difference leads to the following: the whole team directs the scriptwriter (because I write the story to fit the game and to serve the game), the narrative designer directs the team (because he decides how the story is told), and the scriptwriter directs the narrative designer (because I decide what story is being told). So we get this triangle of mutual responsibility—isn’t that funny?

Anyway, when my modest reserves of inspiration run out, our narrative designer can generate 10 ideas in 10 minutes. Nine of them are complete nonsense, but the tenth one is brilliant. At the right moment he somehow knows to turn off his inner censor and hand that function over to me. He gushes with ideas, and I catch the good ones.

You Can Play Ping-Pong with Inspiration

Imagine you have a seed of an idea that you can’t grow on your own for some reason. You pass it to a teammate along with a bit of your inspiration, and a minute later they return it to you, improved. You like that, and suddenly you find yourselves playing ping-pong. You give them a piece, they send back a bigger piece.

Do you know what can come out of that? The best events in Knock on the Coffin Lid —with pop-culture references, with jokes only the two of you (well, and maybe a few thousand players) understand. In short, it can turn out really awesome.

You Can Gift Inspiration

Do you want to peek beyond what you see? Midian has several biomes that are pretty well fleshed out but didn’t make it into the game. Maybe one day you’ll see them, but I can tell you about them right now in detail. No, actually, that’s enough for today. Maybe I’ll do that in the next diary entry in a week. Are you interested?

Or maybe you want to invent your own biome? Midian is huge, and it leaves plenty of room for thought and imagination beyond the limits of the game. That’s our approach to building a game world—leave as much space as possible for the unknown.

Imagine a large painting sketch made with broad strokes—neatly, but without details or color. And in that painting, in that sketch, there’s a small fragment painted in full color with obsessive attention to detail. That little fragment is nothing but our own Knock on the Coffin Lid.