Najmah Salam

Preproduction

Ideation

After completing our first project under the Small Loan Studio banner, Santa’s Secret, it was clear that our sophomore project needed to be a step up in difficulty and ambition.

As a team made up mostly of alumni from The Narrative Department’s Game Writing Masterclass, the project also needed to be a rich storytelling experience.

A romance visual novel seemed like a natural fit because it offers emotional depth, creates fully fleshed characters, and explores branching possibilities and multiple endings.

When I put together my pitching document, I used Miro to visually capture all of the game's most important elements and to best visually communicate my vision.

During the production process, we collaborated on the same document as a team, and it became a living, breathing source of truth for the game’s main elements, such as characters, story flow, and art direction. In other words, it became our version of a game design document (GDD).

There are as many versions of GDDs out there as there are opinions, but for a 31 day game jam, I believe this was the best version as it had visual shortcuts rather than explaining concepts in long paragraphs. Additionally, the ability for the rest of the team to collaborate in the document and be able to refer to it easily became immensely helpful for the process.

themes and Symbolism

As with many great ideas, The Ouroboros Express was the result of the ‘yes and’ spirit we have at Small Loan Studio.

From this conversation, I thought long and hard about trains being a liminal space, not destinations in themselves but transitions from one place to another, or in the case of The Ouroboros Express, one state of being to another.

The idea of a train’s journey going around and around brought to mind a status quo or the feeling of unresolved business. I compiled the mind map below to help me build the main themes.

Having gone through some major family bereavements recently, grief, kindness and regret were weighing heavily on my mind and came out organically in the game’s genesis.

Art Direction

I had a strong sense of the art direction even before I knew who the characters were. I based the art direction heavily on art Deco, evoking images of The Orient Express, luxury, and timelessness.

I also wanted to ensure that every element of the game would reflect this theme for a cohesive look, so I spent a lot of time frontloading the following work:

• Doing design research - I collected reference images of real examples of Art Deco interiors and furniture, and building moodboards in Pinterest and Miro.

• Mocking up the UI - I knew that our players needed some way to track their progress in the game and for the Vivienne, our player character, to write her innermost thoughts somewhere.

• Mapping out each location - I wanted the train to be a character in itself and knew that the scenes needed to be in locations that were easily identifiable and distinct.

For the timeframe we had, we didn’t have the luxury of spending lots of time in preproduction, so I knew that the vision had to be set very early on so our team could hit the ground running.

Characters

There was the question of what kind of character would the player inhabit? Is it a blank slate, or an existing personality?

I chose to go with building a character with an established history because I knew that it would be important for the game’s themes and storytelling. Having a blank slate would need the story to have holes for players to build out with their own imaginations, but would risk being too vague and lacking specificity. I also knew that the relatively short amount of game time meant that we needed to make every moment count.

Vivienne Sanssouci, our main character was born. The most important thing about Vivi, as we lovingly called her, was her ‘unfinished business’. Why was she on this train, and what was missing in her life that needed resolving?

Love Interests

To accompany Vivi on her journey aboard The Ouroboros Express was our cast of love interests. They needed to be equally full of depth, flaws and regrets and to have their own unfinished business. They couldn’t just be there to look pretty and say the right things!

I spent a lot of time thinking about how six different people could all end up with our player character - what were the ways they could contrast and complement each other?

I eventually whittled it down to the three strongest characters, with the other three now sadly relegated ‘Rejected NPC Jail’ in the corner of the Miro board.

Secondary Characters

Character Experts

One practice we implemented that worked very well was assigning character experts - writers who were devoted to only one character, building their histories out, creating their voices and then finalising their style guides.

These writers were then paired up with another writer and they would work with each other on writing the scenes where their assigned characters appeared.

In scenes where more than one character appeared, it was very helpful for our writers to collaborate with their specialist knowledge!