It’s Goldie, Art Director of Wayward Strand, coming to PlayStation 5 and PlayStation 4 on September 15th (coming soon!!)
For the first time in six years since Ghost Pattern was formed, my team and I are delving into the creation of Wayward Strand, a real-time, simultaneous storytelling starring Casey, an aspiring 14-year-old journalist. , she follows her curiosity wherever she goes.
Early artwork of how to load a ship, made by me! Goldie Bartlett
From the beginning, the game was heavily influenced by immersive theater, slice-of-life comics, and graphic novels. What I love about this format is that there’s a lot of space and realm to squeeze moments into larger plot points and storyline verses.
cast away!character creation
Our team created the characters for Wayward Strand based on the personal experiences and stories of people in our lives, especially older people. I wanted the characters to be active in the story rather than waiting for the player to come before they did something. One of her Wayward Strand writers, Georgia Symons, said, “The goal was to give each character the possibility to ‘move the story forward’ no matter what they do.”
In early demos, we were excited about how concurrent stories would give players the chance to encounter scenes and stories mid-stream. It helps players understand and feel the world of action going on outside of their character.
An early mockup of Ghost Pattern’s 2016/2017 Day 1 schedule. Each row, different letter, each column is a time.
Wayward Strand’s other writer, Jason Bakker, feels that telling many stories at once means you can complete your characters. “We allow each character to have a quiet moment, a time of their own. We can be together while we process things.”
A screenshot of the current build on the front of the ship overlooking the shore.
We spent three in-game days trying to make every character as attractive as possible. I often had conversations with someone, such as my mother, my aunt, or a friend. They told me stories of people they once knew. How Joe (one of the nurses) must feel about Dr. Bouchard.
at the seaside
An early rendering of Casey visiting Ida using 3D modeling.
We have experienced the visuals of the living world for generations. Our initial plan was to explore a full 3D space over-the-shoulder inside a single-story hospital. Once in the scene, the camera was moving around as each character was speaking. In that demo, we didn’t see the larger backdrop of busy hospitals, or even the beautiful ocean and sky outside, so we decided to go in a radically different direction.
Abandoned ship layout with rooms arranged side by side.
Audio Director Mays Wallin says the change to side view is one of the key differences in experience. “This side view of the doll’s house makes it more clear that something is always going on around the player.” created and laid out the room horizontally. It wasn’t until he worked with Su-Yiin Lai, an architectural consultant, that portrait was the best way to achieve the comic book style we wanted.
An early design for a vertical hospital airship.
How the ship looks today!
listen, there, everywhere
One of the things we were confident about early on was that the game should be fully voiced. Not only did we want to bring the performance of the actors into the game like in theater, but we also wanted the player to be able to hear all the conversations going on around them while they were playing. In 2016 and 2018 he did two “practice” voice-over recording sessions.
Over the course of six weeks, we spent 30 days in four studios around the world with our actors. Maize, technical her audio director for VO sessions, says she recorded more than 18,000 lines of dialogue. Equivalent to about 18 feature films. To make it all possible, we needed a cohesive narrative direction, programming, technical audio, audio engineering and narration audio specialist.
I hear Casey saying a lot of hellos!
We’ve seen people play the game as we’ve gotten closer to release, and even though a lot has changed along the journey, our core goal has never wavered. Playing Wayward Strand means spending time in a living world surrounded by intriguing and complex characters and their evolving stories inspired by personal experiences and real-life history.
We are so excited to experience it on PlayStation 5 and PlayStation 4 on September 15th.
