JUDAS, the latest game by famed Creative Lead Ken Levine, has put up a log of how they’re attempting to tie player freedom into immediate game reactivity.
Ghost Story Games has further detailed the systems of their upcoming release, Judas, in their 2nd dev log. The first question it brings up is, “How do we tell a fully realized story where the characters can respond in real time to even the smallest choices the player makes?”. For the reactivity part of the title Narrative Lead Drew Mitchell stated:
The project began with us wanting to tell stories that are less linear, that react to the player and unfold in ways that no one’s ever seen in one of Ken’s games. That told us a lot up front about what we’d need: namely, characters with strong, competing objectives, who each had a stake in everything the player did. Starting with that framework, we spent a lot of time thinking about those characters, their conflicts, the right setting to force them all together, and the systems underpinning it all. For a long time, there wasn’t even a set protagonist — just sort of a cipher, a blank slate.
The game’s Creative Director, Ken Levin of Bioshock fame, described Judas themselves this way:
I often come up with ideas when I’m out on runs, and one day I thought of this speech that would define this character that we were trying to figure out. This speech popped my in my head as I was struggling through the third mile:
“I only eat at vending machines, because I don’t like interacting with waiters. Restaurants are more complicated: there are greetings and ‘hellos’ and ‘Is this table okay?’ And I’m thinking, ‘Why should I care what you recommend? You’re not me!’ But I’m not supposed to say that, so I just have to count the seconds until the interaction can end, devise socially acceptable ways of saying ‘Go fuck yourself.’ Because for me, conversation is a prelude to failure. Vending machines never ask me a question that I don’t know the answer to. The exchange is reduced to the transaction: money in, product out. Why can’t people be more like that?”
This stream of consciousness became the touchstone we kept coming back to for the character and ultimately the entire game. “Judas,” as she came to be known, understands machines in a way she can never understand people. That became her greatest strength… and greatest weakness. We put her in a science fiction world, a colony ship filled with robots — a futuristic setting that makes someone like her extremely powerful. But it’s also a world where personal success hinges on how well you can conform to the rules, because dissent would lead to the failure of the mission. That makes her an outlaw, a pariah — a Judas. That tension at the heart of the character came to inform everything about the game, which we stopped thinking of as an FPS and started calling a “Judas Simulator.” Everything comes back to that core idea of you interacting with the world as Judas.
There are a ton of great insights in the blog, which you can find here.
How do you feel about the approach Ghost Story Games is taking with Judas? Let us know in the XboxEra Forums or make some noise in the lively XboxEra Community Discord Server. If you’re looking to be a bigger part of an amazing community, then either choice is a good one!
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