Hi everyone! I'm Jorden, I'm the content writer for Rank: Warmaster. I've been on the team officially since the beginning of August and Arthur mentioned the Dev Blog at our last meeting. I'll be posting every other Monday and talking a bit about what I've been doing for the game and even a bit about writing for a game in general (although I'm quite new to it). A little about me first: I am primarily a fiction writer in the Fantasy and Sci-Fi genres. I've known Arthur for a few years now and when he first asked me to help out with the flight tutorial I'm not certain any of us realized how long term this partnership was gonna end up being.

On to the meat of this post.

The tutorials of Rank: Warmaster were initially a two-man project with Chris writing the dialogue and scenarios of the tutorial (describing what actually happens) while Matt coded all of that into the game so it would, you know, happen. I was brought on to review the dialogue of the tutorial because they both felt that it was generic and lacking something. Matt sent me a document that seemed like it was just copied out of the game code and it looked like this:

#

#FTUT_INTRO_01 - Display the tutorial's opening message.

#

STARTEVENT FTUT_INTRO_01 INACTIVE TRIGIMMEDIATE

#Fade in from the black screen established in FSIMTUTORIALSTART.

FADE2DOBJECT FTUT_FULLSCREEN 0 0 0 0 10.0

#Throw the WM(Normal) on the screen prior to the message that follows.

FADE2DOBJECT WMPARADEREST 255 255 255 255 0.0

#Prep and fade in the opening message.

#TEXT2DOBJECT FTUT01_MESSAGE 15.0 50 7.0 1 3 Welcome to the cause. I'm one of the Fleet Commanders around here, and I'm here to show you the ropes. Let's have you steer that bad boy.

TEXT2DOBJECT FTUT01_MESSAGE 15.0 50 7.0 1 3 Welcome to the cause. I'm one of the Fleet Commanders around here, and I'm here to show you the ropes.

FADE2DOBJECT FTUT01_MESSAGE 255 100 255 255 4.0

#Activate the next stage of the flight sim tutorial.

If your eyes glazed over as you read all that, that's ok it's definitely a lot. After working my way through the document I reported back with my assessment: the tutorial dialogue was serviceable as it was but definitely a little dry. I told them I could help but I needed to know what kind of tone they were going for. This prompted a quick meeting with Arthur and by the end I had an idea of what I wanted to do. My personal rule when you're trying to bring something to life goes a little like this: if something is dry and lifeless then create a character to embody it. I considered where the dialogue the player was seeing might be coming from and I came up with an AI character who I would eventually name Ares. We'll talk in detail about Ares's origins in the world of Rank: Warmaster in a future post.

So now I had the character of Ares, an instructional AI whose task was to train the player to remotely pilot space ships. I ended up spending a weekend developing the full tutorial dialogue. The tone I had been given was "dark corporate humor" so I tried to think from that perspective as much as possible. The player is a corporate settler who escaped to Mars after being cut off form Earth so Ares will treat the player as a company asset. Ares itself is, of course, the product of that famous concept "lowest bidder engineering" so I tried to use the dialogue to display all the cut corners in Ares's development. AI development is a topic I personally enjoy so I envisioned what might happen if somebody tried to take short cuts in developing a sapient AI assistant. As a result Ares doesn't really give situations the level of gravity they deserve; its constantly going on small tangents related to nothing and gives the impression that perhaps it really doesn't place any true value on human life except where that life benefits the company.

When I was finished the team reviewed my work and they loved it and brought me on to do more. The flight tutorial is currently implemented in the demo available on Game Jolt and right now I'm working on the "Main Game Tuturial" alongside Chris and Matt. Chris creates scenarios, I write the dialogue the player sees, Matt codes it all in. That's all for this, quite long winded, blog post. I'll see you all again in two weeks where I'll discuss some more of what goes in to writing content for this unique game.