Behind the scenes: SLARPG's scrapped intro! (Patreon)

(Quick side note: If you missed it, the OST is out now! Go get it!!!)

Hi everyone! With the game finished, I'm going to be putting together special peeks into the development of SLARPG for my patrons! I'll release these to the public eventually, I'm sure, but for now these can be backer-exclusive since I haven't given y'all nearly enough exclusive content over the years.

Anyway, what better place to start than the beginning of the game?

In early 2020, I returned to the start of the game to complete the intro sequence and everything prior to reaching Greenridge. For the most part, this resulted in a rough version of what's seen in the game today. However, between the introductory lore slideshow and the nighttime scene featured in both trailers, I experimented with including another scene. Just about the only deleted scene to make it past the script stage! Let's go over the scene itself, why it existed in the first place, and why it was ultimately cut.

The scene

[Setting: somewhere in the woods near Greenridge. A monster runs on-screen from the left, pursued by Allison, Jodie, and Claire.]

Allison: Why can't this thing just cooperate?
Claire: It's almost as if it doesn't want to be caught.
Jodie: Maybe we should call this one a wash. We've been tailing this monster for hours, and I think it's just messing with us at this point.
[Allison turns towards Jodie.]
Allison: No way! This thing's been terrorizing Greenridge ever since it showed up on the island. We have to catch it.
Allison: And also, we really need that 1000 gold bounty.
Claire: There it is. Noble as always, Allison.
Allison: Hey, I've got bills to pay, Claire.
[Allison steps towards the monster.]
Allison: Now come on! Enough messing around. We've got it this time!

[The battle with the Behemoth Boar proceeds with Allison, Claire, and Jodie facing off against the beast. The monster gets the upper hand and hurts Allison before fleeing.]

Allison: Ow...
[Jodie walks over to Allison to check on her.]
Jodie: Allison, are you okay? It looks like it really got you.
Allison: Yeah, damn. I think it's time to call it a day.
Allison: Hey wait, where's Mel? I thought she was with us.

[The camera pans back over to the left, where the party had come from previously. Melody walks on-screen, finally catching up with her friends.]

Melody: Allison! Are you okay?

[Cue music: "Melody's Plan to Get Super Ripped," along with part of the introductory slideshow recycled from the demo.]

Your name is Melody Amaranth. You're a timid fox who lives near the small town of Greenridge on the scenic Sapphire Islands. You'd lived a quiet life with few ambitions since high school, mostly content to let yourself coast along on autopilot. But you always felt that something was missing.

A few months ago, something finally clicked, and you came to two important realizations about yourself. One: you're deeply in love with your best friend, Allison Goleta. And you probably have been for a long time. As it turns out, the feeling was mutual. And two: if Allison has her heart set on becoming an adventurer, then maybe you could join her. As a healer.

So you and Allison took up your friends Claire Higsby and Jodie Caldwell on their offer to join their new adventurers' guild. it seemed like a perfect opportunity. But that, admittedly, hasn't gone very well so far...

[The music fades out, and we return to the scene.]

Claire: Melody, you missed that whole fight! Well, not that it was much of a fight.
Melody: I wanted to help, but I don't know how much help I would've been against that thing. It would've eaten me alive!
Allison: No, yeah, I think you made the right call there. We're totally out of our league.
Claire: Do you still have that bottomless potion bag I gave you? Allison could really use the healing.
Melody: Oh, right, of course!

[At this point, the player gains control of Melody and can try to hand potions to her teammates.]

Claire: Oh, thanks, but I'm good. Worry about Allison.

Jodie: Oh, thank you, Melody! I guess I got a little banged up, too.
Melody hands Jodie a potion.

[The scene continues when interacting with Allison.]

Melody hands Allison a potion.
Allison: Thanks, Mel. You're a lifesaver.
Melody: I think the potion did most of the work.
Melody takes a look in the bottomless potion bag.
Melody: Wait... is that the last of them? Is something wrong with the bag?
[Claire turns towards Melody.]
Melody: Oh no, look at this tear! When did this happen?
Claire: What? Melody! That was an incredibly rare enchanted bag!
Melody: Oh no. God, I'm really, really sorry, Claire. I should've been more careful.
Jodie: Hey, give Melody a break. We're all doing our best out here, right?
Melody: I don't know if my best is all that good.
Claire: No, come on, Melody. It's not that big a deal.
Melody: I'm serious! I've been trying to study healing magic, but at this rate it'll take me years to learn anything remotely useful.
Melody: Right now I'm basically the team's water girl, and I can't even do that right.
Allison: No, don't be so hard on yourself, Mel. I just got my butt handed to me, too.
Allison: We both knew being adventurers would be difficult. Maybe we just need to take this slower.
[Claire puts her hand on her chin, apparently pondering something.]
Claire: ...
Allison: Claire, I don't like it when you make that face. That's your scheming face.
Claire: I was hoping it wouldn't come to this, but... I do have a backup plan.
Jodie: You don't mean...
Claire: I think it's time, Jodie.
Melody: What are you two talking about?
Claire: Don't worry about it. Let's head back to town for now. I've got some preparations to make.

[Fade to black.]

Later that night...

[And so begins the familiar opening scene, albeit without the presence of the Behemoth Boar.]

Reasons why the scene was written in the first place

1. To introduce the characters and their personalities quickly.

(Duh.)

2. To depict up-front what the Novas actually do.

Things get weird for them real fast in SLARPG's story, so I wanted to establish a baseline of what they expect regular adventurer work to look like.

3. To create kind of a tonal fakeout moving from the opening lore to this scene.

It doesn't really come off this way in the above dialogue, but establishing a Serious Fantasy tone with the Fortuna lore and then cutting to a scene where three 20-somethings bumble their way into failing a very simple monster hunting mission was supposed to establish a light, comedic tone... in theory. (More on that later.)

4. To create ANOTHER brief fakeout where Allison is initially framed as the protagonist.

Melody is an unconventional video game protagonist (and not just because she's a fat bisexual trans woman who is also a fox). It's somewhat rare to see a timid healer like Melody take the starring role in a game, as opposed to being a supporting character. Meanwhile, Allison is much more of a traditional hero in many ways - the character who, by the typical logic of fantasy adventure video games, probably should be the protagonist. I didn't lean very hard on this commentary in the game, but it's a thought I had many times. To try and drive this subversive angle home, this intro initially focuses on Allison, before revealing Melody as the character you actually play as.

Beyond metatextual subversiveness, Melody generally does feel like the odd one out of the group, so this scene aimed to illustrate that.

5. To frame Melody as a down-on-her-luck underdog.

So this was probably me at my most Screenwriting 101. Some real Save the Cat type shit. I thought it would help to sell Melody's arc if I conveyed that things aren't going particularly well in her adventuring career, to establish the stakes for her. It's every video essay on film storytelling you've ever seen that's like "At the start of Back to the Future they show how Marty is down on his luck and the whole world seems to be against him so that you root for him to overcome it all."

Within the context of this specific story, it was also supposed to more directly convey why Melody and Allison were willing to accept Claire's dangerous offer to power them up with ancient magic.

Reasons why it was cut

1. The tone was off.

Sure, I had lots of reasoning for trying to depict Melody as a down-on-her-luck underdog here, but the execution made for kind of a downer opening.

If anything, it may have been TOO effective at depicting Melody as helpless and bad at what she does with little else to balance it out. Instead of the intended reaction, it may have just resulted in players who went in blind going "Ugh, I have to play as this other character that sucks at everything? Lame." Cutting this scene allowed for her to make a better first impression in her one-on-one with Allison, and also allowed the tone of the opening to stay relatively upbeat, even with the scripted loss against the Behemoth Boar still painting Melody and Allison as underpowered.

Melody aside, the quippy (but not particularly funny) opening banter with Allison, Claire, and Jodie probably comes off as more "Whedonesque" than actually comedic, which really misses the mark of what I was going for. Claire in particular comes off more as Allison's sardonic sidekick here, which probably exacerbates it and doesn't really sell her character well. A rewrite could've addressed these tonal issues, but it wouldn't have fixed the problem of...

2. It frontloaded the game with even more text.

Pretty self-explanatory. This is a huge problem with a lot of RPG intros. (I'm looking at you, Persona.) Generally speaking, for this type of game, it's better to let the player run around and fight stuff at least a little as soon as possible. The opening bombing mission in FF7 is generally held up as the perfect example of this, or perhaps Chrono Trigger's Millennial Fair for something less action-focused, but you can see it all over the genre. In this same vein, both versions of the intro sequence of SLARPG were designed to have a bit of interactivity - some dialogue choices, a bit of walking around, a (scripted) battle to introduce the battle system - but it was still for the best to cut it down so as to truly let you loose sooner rather than later.

While the traditional writing advice is always "show, don't tell," in this case there was a whole lot being shown that could really just be condensed to a few lines of dialogue for the sake of better pacing. Sometimes that's the actual answer.

3. The first impression it provides isn't particularly unique.

By opening with a quippy little scene of the Novas efficiently introducing their surface level personality archetypes for the audience while hunting a monster out in the woods for a bounty, it came dangerously close to just looking like yet another generic fantasy story riffing on old-school JRPGs and/or MMOs - except this time, there's furries, and the healer is the main character! Wow, what a twist! Sure, the story goes in many different directions later, but the immediate first impression does little to set it apart from approximately 500 different anime airing in any given season these days.

It was for the best to instead jump straight to the scene with Melody and Allison, allowing the cute but grounded relationship writing to be the introduction for the characters, setting the precedent for that to be the real heart of the game. (I also like the way it more clearly establishes the nighttime one-on-one chats with Melody and Allison as a recurring motif throughout the story.) Why bother trying to set up a tropey baseline to contrast the actual content of the game with as some kind of metatextual fakeout when I can just skip straight to the good stuff?

It's also just... not that interesting! Maybe a higher budget game or a movie or whatever would be able to intertwine those tropey character introductions with some fun action for an exciting opening (the introductory car chase from The Bad Guys comes to mind as a recent example), but I'm not making a movie and I ain't got resources like that, so the same storytelling tricks won't always work for me. That is, perhaps, the big overarching lesson here. SLARPG has its own strengths as a story, and I think the final intro plays to them much better, while also having much tighter pacing.

And so, after talking it over with Bee, this scene was removed entirely from the intro, with the battle against the Behemoth Boar being moved to the ritual scene.

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That does it for this first behind-the-scenes post! This was longer than I expected it to be, but it is a detailed breakdown of a whole scene, I suppose.

If there are topics you'd like me to discuss in future posts like this, let me know! I'm probably less likely to do a deep dive into heavy spoilers just yet, but otherwise I'm all ears.