Kickstarter Special – Summer Daze At Hero-U & Interview with Corey Cole

You mentioned Summer Daze in our interview back in July last year. Is the game in its current state much as you envisioned it back then, or has it evolved into something different?

Summer Daze at Hero-U is fundamentally the same game as we talked about it last year. Lori has been writing dialogue and working with the team for the last year to get art assets and a prototype for the game. Anyone may download the prototype for free from https://transolar-games.itch.io/summer-daze or by clicking the “Download Demo” button on Steam – https://store.steampowered.com/app/1139490/Summer_Daze_at_HeroU/. The prototype covers day one (of twelve) for one of the two playable characters. 

Of course, games never stay static. As she works on the game, sees the art, and so on, Lori constantly comes up with new ideas, puzzles, and other ideas. The Kickstarter will also have some influence. If we reach stretch goals, we’ll be able to add more mini-games, animation, and so on. And if we somehow fail to reach the base goal, we’ll zero in on half of the game – Tilly’s story – and make that available on early access to fund Ifeyo’s half.

There is quite a contrast between them. Tilly is a mischievous, (and let’s face it, cute) rogue who never takes life too seriously. Ifeyo is the opposite, a dedicated student who is trying to prove to his family that he can be successful as a Wizard. Some of the events in Ifeyo’s story are also darker and more serious. If we’re able to fund adding some combat to the game, it will mostly be in Ifeyo’s game.

How do you block out your story beats and how has that changed from the early games to Hero-U and beyond?

Our stories start from the characters – not just the hero, but everyone he or she meets in the games. We think about each character’s needs and desires, and where they might be getting blocked from them. Then we go back to the player character and ask, “Why might players want to help this character? What can they do to help?” Those become many of the “puzzles” – or “problems” as I like to think of them – and also the main story beats. “My husband is missing. I haven’t seen him since he left to visit the store last night. Please see if you can find him.” – That could lead to any number of story situations, depending on what happened to the husband and who (or what) else is involved.

Players have their own problems as well – “I need to get out of my room at night without being spotted, because that’s the only time I have to get into the dungeons.” But we think that solving problems for others often gives players more motivation.

The major difference in how we plot our stories now vs. thirty years ago is that we have much more memory, and better ways to illustrate events in art and animation. We’ve also developed techniques over the years to make our games more responsive. For example, when Shawn talks to Ifetaya in Hero-U: Rogue to Redemption, the game has information about whether Shawn has previously had a run-in with a ghost. If so, we add lines about talking to ghosts to Ifetaya’s script. If Shawn has no reason to ask about something, that choice does not appear.

We may have taken this to an extreme level. Hero’s Quest had a 50,000 word script. Quest for Glory IV ballooned to 180,000 words, mostly because of dialogue changing due to previous events. The game might take the same amount of time to play, or at most double, but there is much more replayability and variation between plays. With Hero-U: Rogue to Redemption, we really went crazy with a 450,000 word script – 2-1/2 times the size of Quest for Glory IV – full of branches that you could only see in some playthroughs, invisible in the rest.

In general, the concept of a “story beat” is very different in a game from a film. Screenwriters have full control over what viewers see at each point in time. Their responsibility is to make each scene compelling, and to maintain the flow of the story. In games, it’s much more complicated. The software development cliché is that managing programmers is like herding kittens. That’s even more true in a game – Imaginative players will go anywhere at any time. They might not intend to break anything, but they’ll contort and twist the story by missing an important clue or dialogue setup, or by stumbling on a scene they weren’t supposed to reach until later.

Adventure game writing consists of creating thousands of “snippets” of text and dialogue, then trying to nudge players in the direction of encountering those tidbits in a reasonable order. One of the ways we do that now is by making much of the dialogue conditional – When the Warrior Drats invade Hero-U, that’s what most of the characters talk about. When a student is missing, that’s the main topic. This even applies to minor story events – If a character likes the hero, they’ll have different dialogue than if they don’t like him. If you’ve been studying Mozart in music class, your fellow students might talk about that. The idea is to try to make the game dialogue feel natural.

Hero U: Rogue to Redemption has had a positive reaction both in the press and among players. Was this surprising or were you reasonably confident that your style of adventure game would still resonate with people?

We never actually know how people will react to our games. We just make them as good as we can, and try to make games we would like to play, then we release them and see how people react. That’s an exaggeration, of course. We did ten months of outside Alpha and Beta testing on Hero-U: Rogue to Redemption, so we had a great deal of player feedback before the live release. And, of course, many complaints and suggestions that we handled as best we could.

We expected a positive reaction to the game because we knew we had been true to the spirit of our previous games. Plus the art and music were beautiful. So in that sense, we were pleased, but not surprised.

We did get some criticism as well. One common complaint was that it took too long to get places. What happened there? As we did at Sierra, we locked the player animation speed to make the walking animation look good. But it had some problems in this game. Part of that is expectations after playing modern games. Nobody ever walks in World of Warcraft except for role-playing. You run everywhere and fly where you can. Players are more impatient than in the early 90’s. Also, the sheer size of Hero-U is an issue. We’re proud that we were able to use 3D scenes effectively to make the castle feel huge. But the side effect of that is that it takes a long time to get places.

We added a “fix” for Shawn’s movement in a later game patch. That’s a nice thing about releasing our games online – We can go back and fix issues that players find. The less-nice thing is that we feel obligated to do that, which can get in the way of making the next game. Anyway, we now have a slider that lets players speed Shawn up – or slow him down. The animation doesn’t look as good at hyper-speed, but it’s a more comfortable play experience for many players, and that matters more. (As with story beats, player experience and interactivity are king in computer games.)

The other common criticism was that some players didn’t like the pressure of our “time as a currency” mechanic. That “feature” was a central element of our design throughout the project, and not something we could change without breaking many other game features. The idea is that Shawn is a student and has a schedule – breakfast, class in the morning, a little time to practice skills or visit the library, elective class in the afternoon, supper, free time in the evening, then bedtime. With that somewhat-enforced schedule, it can be a challenge to find time for exploration, monster slaying, relationships, and earning pocket money.

In addition, dialogue changes constantly throughout the fifty days of a Rogue to Redemption game. That was a huge challenge for Lori as a writer, and it means that players can’t just skip days or complete the story in 5 or 10 days. To make this work, we chose to gate Shawn’s time with all those mandatory activities. Otherwise players might exhaust most of the exploration and practice content in a few days, and be stuck waiting for story events the rest of the game. That can actually happen in the last ten game days. We scheduled fewer story events there, and some players have told us they didn’t have enough to do in the late game. That could be because most of our players are elite, experienced adventure gamers who burn through the secondary content quickly. Or it might just mean we should have tightened the script to 40 days.

Is there anything else you think our readers would like to know about Summer Daze or Transolar in general?

We have been trying to manage expectations on Summer Daze at Hero-U, at times emphasizing that it’s less ambitious than Rogue to Redemption, or that it was inspired by visual novels and dating sims. But adventure game fans should know that Summer Daze is actually a full adventure game. The script might weigh in at a “tiny” 200,000 words… but that’s still longer than the script of Quest for Glory IV: Shadows of Darkness. If you think that game is quite large enough, you’ll find just as much in Summer Daze.

At the same time, we’re trying to keep a laser focus on what we think makes our games great – the story, characters, and player choices. We’ve solved the problem of taking too long to walk through endless hallways by taking out the hallways. Instead, we’ve gone to still background screens and menu interactions. That’s what I did with Castle of Dr. Brain, and is similar to how Shannara played, as well as to the vignette scenes in Hero-U: Rogue to Redemption. (That’s so cumbersome – In the future we’ll just call it Hero-U 1 or maybe Hero-U: Rogue.) You move around by “fast travel” clicking on the interior and exterior maps, not by walking through hallways for five minutes.

One of Summer Daze’s Travel screens – I think it was Professor Plum with the Rope in the Library

There is also no “hunt the pixel” – Interactions are by menu, and designed to work as well on a tablet or phone as on a PC. The puzzles and problems are Quest for Glory style – helping other characters and yourself – rather than by figuring out arbitrary combinations of things to make a fishing pole or a disguise.

Coincidentally, taking out those dubious features is also making Summer Daze a more affordable game development project. We lost a lot of money making Rogue to Redemption. But we don’t think we’ve taken anything out that hurts the game. Instead, we have a tighter, more focused game that concentrates on the story and characters. If you like our other games, *or* visual novels, *or* games like Dream Daddy and Magical Diary, we think you’ll love Summer Daze at Hero-U.

And as someone who loves adventure games and wants to keep them alive, please pledge to our Kickstarter campaign so we can finish this game without going farther into debt. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/transolargames/summer-daze-at-hero-u is the place!
Also check out our content on https://www.twitch.tv/transolargames and our personal Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/coreyloricole. The adventure game community is small, and that means each of you is important to keeping adventure games alive, and not just an artifact of the 1990’s.