Hey everyone,
This blog post is the fourth in a series focusing on the creation process of our upcoming Umbral Choir. We covered the game design aspect, the art, and now the lore to start with our new roll of G2G votes! Ever wondered how the secret sauce was made? Here's your chance to find out!
Today, we’re taking a look at the lore, with some votes! This means watching StoryEngine work, and asking him a few questions...
Can you please introduce yourself and tell us what your role is within the team?
I'm Stephen Gaskell aka StoryEngine, Senior Writer at Amplitude. With Narrative Director, Jeff Spock (Slowhands), I'm responsible for creating in-game texts across all our titles, and generally ensuring all written assets are of sufficient quality. Specifically, on Endless Space 2, I've primarily been working on the world bible, faction quests, dialogue, and UI texts--and helping to storyboard the trailers. In the team, my role is often to be a champion for the lore and story, and make sure the designers' awesome game systems have (semi-plausible) narrative rationales.
What were the inspirations and challenges behind creating the Umbral Choir lore?
Of course, the broad strokes of the Umbral Choir were originally created by our amazing community, so you'd need to ask them where specific inspirations came from! When we formulated the various stages of the faction creation votes, one of our driving goals was to allow the community's inherent creativity to shine, so we kept the choices as wide as possible given the context of the prior votes. The challenge of this approach for the background lore is then taking this community design and ensuring it dovetails with the existing Endless universe. One of the big questions we needed to answer was: if the Umbral Choir is an ancient entity, why is it only emerging onto the galactic stage now? That, and how does a wraith-like faction interact in a material world?!
Could you please walk us through the process of creating the Umbral Choir faction quest?
Before we even considered the Umbral Choir questline, we first spent a lot of time exploring the factions origin, identity, and motivations. The community provided us with hundreds of different ideas, and this formed the creative mulch from which we came up with answers to these questions. We didn't actively take any one single idea, but I would be surprised if our own answers didn't have echoes in many of the community's suggestions. Once we had these answers, the next stage was to storyboard the faction trailer, since it not only requires a long lead time to produce, but is also one of the most important elements for marketing the expansion. Like several other ES2 trailers, the Umbral Choir one focuses on a specific event, and so when it came to the quest it felt natural to continue this story. Without giving away too much, I can say that the questline explores how vastly different lifeforms regard one another, and involved lots of back-and-forth between writers, designers, programmers, and the creative leads. And with four different endings it has a ton of replayability!
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We hope you enjoyed this look behind the scenes at our lore creation! Don't forget that votes are now on for you to decide what the name of the Umbral Choir's home system is!
Now tell us: based on what StoryEngine said, what do you think the faction quest will be about?
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