The Ouroboros Express (2024), small Loan Studio

In February 2024, the members of Small Loan Studio began the pitching process and voted for what would become ‘The Ouroboros Express’ - a romance visual novel with an emphasis on rich characters and storytelling set aboard a luxury train.

I created the story and characters as well as the art direction and went on to direct the game. We began with about 20 people in the team, which scaled up by the end of production to 41 people which included playtesters.

Keep on reading for a detailed overview of the full production process, or skip ahead to the specific sections you’re interested in below!

Preproduction | Production | Postproduction and beyond

Beware - there are spoilers ahead!

If you wish to avoid these, play the game first and come back later. It’s totally worth it.

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!

Production

As we were planning to submit this project to the NaNoRenO game jam, one of the stipulations is that we couldn’t go into production until the start of the official game jam period, which was throughout March 2024.

So with the precious little preproduction time now done, we barrelled straight into building The Ouroboros Express from scratch…

The Tech Stack

Having come from a marketing background with extensive experience in automations and operations, having the right tech stack is always at the top of my mind.

The good news is that we always knew what our budget was. The bad news is that our budget was always zero.

Luckily, there are several solutions now to facilitate collaboration that are free or incredibly cost-effective!

Team Collaboration

Love them, hate them - meetings are still at the heart of every team project.

I’ve been through my fair share of badly run meetings so I feel passionately about ensuring a high standard for running a good meeting which are:

• Clear agendas that members can see ahead of time

• Clear objectives to meet by the end of the meeting

• Moving the momentum along and ensuring that all members are sticking to the agenda

• Balancing communicating information versus a town hall setup to hear from members

We held weekly team-wide meetings called ‘State of Affairs’ where I would call upon each team lead to give updates and let us know if they had any blockers and how we could help.

My personal tip would be to ensure that there is always someone facilitating the meeting and keeping all attendees on task so no time is wasted. This is especially important to us at Small Loan Studio as we operate as a volunteer cooperative studio and try to be mindful of our members’ time.

Fleshing out the narrative

The Ouroboros Express clearly had a larger scope from our first project, so I tried as much as possible to illustrate the concepts through visuals and mental models.

One thing that became more apparent as we completed preproduction was the idea of the story not being a loop but rather, a spiral. I created a quick visual for the team and they quickly understood. This spiral motif would be further reinforced not just in the narrative but also in the art direction.

I worked on this flowchart and together with our narrative lead, Salvador Bas-Folch, we presented the overarching plot to our team of writers.

I’d created the bones - but now it was down to our narrative team to begin fleshing out the narrative.

To assist them, I did some prior research on the stages of grief, which became our story chapters, and what they normally look like for people.

By creating prompts and asking questions, our writers were then able to ideate upon the nitty-gritty of the story and gain ownership.

This was especially important for our character experts - they would be the guardians of truth for their assigned characters and would know best how they would react in any given situation.

Next came the assignments - divvying up who would be writing each of our scenes?

I created a Notion database, which included descriptions of what happened in each scene, setting a logical naming convention, locations, and characters.

It was then down to our lead producer and narrative producer to assign the scenes and start writing!

In terms of the order we approached writing, I asked the team to follow this order:

• Act 2

• Act 1

• Act 3

It did throw a lot of our writers off which they expressed in postmortem, but I knew that we needed to get the meatiest part of the writing out of the way first.

Additionally, we had 4 variations of the same game loop in Act 2, so I needed to see a prototype of one of the chapters to see whether it actually worked in practice!

By the time we got to Acts 1 and 3, they were a breeze because we knew where our characters started and where the story finished.

📌 One tip I cannot stress enough for other game devs is to ensure that each of your teams has its own producer.

Having a narrative producer freed up our narrative lead to worry about story problem-solving, vision, and editing without thinking about the team's logistics, such as scheduling, tech, and onboarding.

As you can see from the image of our narrative tasks in the notion board, producers are key to keeping the documentation up to date and checking that all of the tasks are being recorded correctly.

And just in the nick of time, about a day before the game jam deadline, we submitted the game and celebrated!

But there was still one thing left to do - our team postmortem…

Postproduction and beyond

After spreading the word about The Ouroboros Express, our team took a well-deserved break. We then reconvened to have a collective team discussion about what worked, and what didn’t.

Postmortem

As the game director, I’m incredibly proud of what we achieved as a team, and found it extremely fulfilling to see my character concepts taking on a life of their own.

While I know there’s still a lot to learn about game development, this experience has given me a whole new appreciation for the effort and creativity that go into the creation of the games I love.

If you’d like to collaborate with me or speak to me in more detail about The Ouroboros Express’ production, just shout! I would be absolutely delighted to share the lessons I’ve learned.

PLAY THE OUROBOROS EXPRESS

A massive thank you to the intrepid Small Loan Studio team - you couldn’t find a more professional and passionate group of game developers working voluntarily to create high-quality games! Follow our escapades here >