My Role in the Development of Narcosis, the First Deep Sea Survival Horror Game for VR

^source

I've had the pleasure over the last ten years or so of taking part in some really remarkable projects. But the one thing I've always wanted to do is work on VR games, pretty much since 1992 when VR first entered my awareness.

It always seemed to me that VR was a place where regular people could be like wizards, with unlimited power in their hands to create, destroy and change everything around them in whatever way they desired.

Much in the way that those who became proficient with early computers ruled the world of hacking, finance and so on, those who became proficient creators of VR worlds would become the gods of this new age.

Perhaps a bit dramatic for what, at the end of the day, amounts to hunching over a keyboard or flailing about with tech strapped to your face and hands. But the experience of playing a formative role in the development of a VR game was nevertheless the realization of a longstanding dream.

I approached Honor Code originally with some pointers about habitat and suit design, citing some information resources I'd collected over the years relating to deep sea technology. This intrigued them. Moreso when I sent them samples of my writing.

They just happened to need someone with my specific combination of skills. Narcosis is, after all, a horror game which is very story centric, and which depends on technical realism to further immerse the player in its unique world.

I was quickly brought onboard and put to work advising on the engineering details of the deep sea hardware depicted in the game. Some time later I was asked to write the novelization of the game, mostly as a world building exercise and a pool of dialogue from which the statements that the main character would make ingame could be selected.

The lump sum payments I received were the most money I'd ever seen all at once. I wanted a cut of sales but naturally as a first time developer whose funding came from Kickstarter, they felt success was very much uncertain. I didn't agree. I am picky about games, horror especially, and I recognized immediately that Narcosis was a diamond in the rough.

That's why I was so eager to get involved. How many games with a deep sea scifi setting have there been? How many horror games set in the ocean have there been? Not many when Narcosis began development, a curious fact given how obviously compelling that setting is for a horror game.

I could tell they were really doing the setting justice too, with some seriously talented artists creating some of the most eye-wateringly beautiful and scrupulously realistic depictions of the deep sea ever seen in a videogame.

I wanted in on it, big time. Lucky for me, I was 'the right man for the job', one of probably a very small group of people in the world with the intersection of horror writing experience and exhaustive knowledge of marine engineering necessary to contribute meaningfully to a project of this nature.

It was an interesting experience working with such a widely distributed team. Narcosis began as a final project for students at a prestigious French game design school. As such, much of the team is French. Most of the rest are in California, with a scant few contributors in other locations around the world (like myself).

It was my first experience with the sort of tools commonly used in the game design industry for collaborative creative work. This sort of asynchronous collaboration using cloud based tools was really something. Overwhelming at first, but the importance of doing it that way soon became obvious to me.

I wrote the novel over the span of a month or two IIRC, then came a long string of edits. I wrote what I imagined the most suitable story would be, but at the time very little was set in stone. As the rest of the team decided on major story elements, huge parts of what I'd written had to be thrown out and redone.

This was supremely uncomfortable to me as an autistic person, but unavoidably comes with working as part of a team. I assume it's very similar to the experience of an author whose book is adapted to film, and subjected to major plot changes in the process.

David Chen, the team member who I was most frequently in contact with, is an absolute professional and was a joy to work with. It was awe inspiring to see how stretched thin he was, wearing all these different hats, demonstrating the game at shows one day and talking to the press, then organizing the plot materials and depth spreadsheet and giving me pointers for what changes to make in the novel the day after that.

It's a harrowing, hectic profession but the more I saw of it, the more I wanted to do this for a living. I actually went to school for this, but it played no part in getting my foot in the door on this project, that had to do entirely with my niche maritime expertise and experience writing horror. I might've saved myself all the student loan debt had I known I didn't need to actually know how to make game content in order to work on games.

But really, is there a shortage of people in the world who know how to 3D model? Who know how to texture map, create shaders, rig and animate characters? No, this isn't what's holding games back. Usually what holds games back is the quality of the writing. The story is either designed by committee or a long standing idea of the project lead, who has no prior experience writing creatively.

Whoever is in the position to decide what the story and dialogue will be typically isn't a writer but feels convinced their own ideas from junior high or whatever are Shakespeare and feel as if they worked their way up in the industry in large part to bring those ideas to life, so there's little chance of convincing them to use an experienced writer's ideas in place of their own.

As a consequence, videogames have something of a bad reputation where story telling is concerned. The exceptions to this rule are the games based on novels (like the Witcher series) or the included an experienced writer on the development team.

Narcosis had the benefit of both a dedicated writer with horror experience (cough), and an extraordinarily talented voice actor to deliver those lines. The overwhelming praise this game has received focuses mostly on the writing, and on the narration. The voice actor, Jeff Mattas, brought some real emotional weight to the lines I wrote for him and has been compared to Tom Hanks and Robert Downey jr.

I felt absolutely surrounded by astonishing talent while working with Honor Code and found it both humbling and invigorating. I sometimes felt like am impostor included by mistake, but I assume that's a common feeling for people working on their first big game project, when they are used to being the big fish in a small pond.

The finished novel was released as a tie-in with the game, a neat final easter egg for curious players to go out and find after they finish. It's mentioned ingame both in the dialogue and the plot materials accessible from the menu. Anybody who thinks "What if it's real?" and goes looking for it is in for a treat.

It wound up being somewhat of a chimera. Only about 75% of my writing remains, the rest consists of the changes and additions made by other team members. Having read it, I have no qualms about having it published under my name as it turned out just as breathtakingly excellent as the game itself.

The novel, "Hell or High Water: Surviving Oceanova" can be purchased here.