Technical Post #5 - Evolution of HotW's Premise (Patreon)

Today’s post is about the original premise for the game that would eventually become “Heart of the Woods,” and how it morphed and evolved over time.  For the first 6-9 months of its life, it was an entirely different story.

The oldest outline document that I have is dated November 2016, though I think we’d been working on the idea for about 3 or 4 months by then. At the time, it was just me (Josh) and Rachel working on it. Studio Élan didn’t exist yet and wouldn’t until February 2017. I met Rachel after she read another game I had worked on and she gave some feedback on it. I liked her writing and her ideas so we started working on a game together.

The only starting point that I really had was that it would be kind of low-key steampunk, but set in modern times. We wanted a casual fantasy approach to it (we didn’t want to do sci-fi, because we didn’t want to have to worry about the specifics of “is this actually how things work?”) with a relatable modern protagonist.

You can read that first outline document that we wrote here, word for word.

Our big centerpiece - the desk that can send letters and stuff through time - was actually an idea borrowed from another project I worked on years ago (although we won’t get into that one).  As you can see, we had settled on the name Maddie pretty early on, although the love interest’s name was Viola at the time. At first, we were pretty enthusiastic about the idea. Our kind of handwavy approach of “fantasy, not sci-fi” let us get away with stuff like time travel and even the existence of the desk itself. Our characters were interesting, we had a unique angle and a cool aesthetic, and we thought we were doing great. We settled on the title “The Way Back,” which to this day I’m still pretty proud of, because it was a triple-entendre.

Buuuuuut, the main problem that we ran into was making the plot itself interesting. There was a lot of filler and fluff, because we wanted the timeline of Maddie and Viola’s relationship development to feel authentic, given that they couldn’t directly interact for half the game. We also ran into a constantly increasing number of plot holes, as well as the numerous issues that crop up when you’re trying to write time travel - basically, that every action you change in the past changes the future with it. There wasn’t a realistic way to avoid the consequences of some of the ideas we were trying to make happen, and in the end we decided to step back and try approaching the fundamental story from a different angle.

There were a few concepts from it that we decided we liked. For one thing, we wanted to keep the basic personalities of Maddie and Abby (somewhere in there we decided we didn’t like the name Viola) the same. We wanted the two to come from radically different eras but still fall in love with each other. And finally, we wanted the initial stages of their relationship to have some sort of disconnect, where they couldn’t fully interact with each other for some reason.

This was what we came up with.

We decided to introduce a new character, Tara, to give Maddie someone to interact with in the early stages, since it got old just reading one character sending letters to another and never interacting with anyone. Maddie’s job went from being a barista to something way more unique, too - a sort of “weird science” company that allowed her to use that engineering degree from the initial premise. The company she worked for was researching time travel, and as a kind of pet project she invents a Silph Scope-like device that lets her see the ghost haunting her house. Oh yeah, we also turned the love interest into a ghost haunting her house.

Things were definitely more engaging. We decided to lean more into the sci-fi side of things, although we still took an “it just works” approach rather than try to explain the actual science. The problem was, that approach started to backfire on us. Plot holes were stacking up faster and faster, and also there wasn’t any tension or sense of urgency. We tried making Maddie’s boss more of an antagonist, but at that point the story was getting kind of off the rails, and we started to lose sight of what exactly we were trying to make.

After all the time and effort we had spent coming up with a new premise, we really didn’t want to do it again. We spent a long time trying to make it work, but ultimately, we had to accept that it was just too far gone. We needed to step back and re-evaluate again.

Once again, we looked at what concepts and ideas we liked, and decided to figure out how to reapproach them. We liked the character of Tara and the dynamic she had with Maddie, as well as her interest in the paranormal. We liked Abby being a ghost. We still liked the “love across time,” concept as well as the physical restrictions on their relationship at first. Those were what we kept in mind when constructing the third, and more or less final iteration of the game. Everything else we scrapped, including the title.

Even in the demo, I think it’s pretty easy to see how those themes have manifested in “Heart of the Woods” so far. The wintery setting was chosen to give the game a clear and distinct aesthetic. Tara was clearly going to be the fan favorite character, so we gave her a lot more screen time and made her way more involved in the story. Friendship was ended with sci-fi, and fantasy was our best friend again. The whole outline came together a whole lot faster this time around. With “The Way Back” we’d only ever managed a summary, and never got all the way through a full, detailed outline. We completed one for HotW pretty quickly. We’ve since made some pretty major modifications to that itself, but nothing on the same scale as a total restart. For instance, originally, Morgan was just a minor character with a couple lines at most. Now, she’s my favorite character in the game. There are a few other elements from past ideas (and not just what’s in those outline documents) but to say much more would be spoilers. I promise there’s no time travel though.

Yet.