Introduction to Scrimshaw
Long overdue and well underexplained, I felt it time to properly introduce the subject of my Final Major Project; Scrimshaw. I began development on the game in December 2020, after hearing the term on the hit television show Suits (2011), through a casual comment from a character on the show impersonating a pirate. I immediately looked it up, and found that it refered to art carved into whalebone, commonly made by sailors in the whaling industry for the past 200 years during the New England whaling days.
At the start, the game contained nothing but a ship, some simple movement, a wide open ocean… and that’s about it. Since then it has evolved to include crew functions such as a cannon and a harpoon, and a more complex system of gameplay, starting as a roguelike, and moving on to my favourit system of gameplay to design; Hub/Exploration cycles of gameplay, such as seen in games like Darkest Dungeon, where the player ventures out to gain resources, which they then use in their hub to grow and develop it, with a larger goal in mind (Usually defeat the Big Monster).
The concept for the final game is far too complex to properly explain in a single blog post, and likely I myself don’t know how it will end up, and therefore I’d like to go over the Core Design Pillars, and Inspirations for the game.
Elevator Pitch
Scrimshaw is a narrative focused RPG, centered around the realm of Davy Jones locker, where drowned sailors go to rest. You are recruited as the newest in a line of Scrappers, tasked with venturing out from the realms many settlements, and collecting scrap to deliver to Davy Jones, and sometimes siphon some off to the denizens in need in each of the hubs.
Throughout your adventure, you’ll meet long dead sailors in dingy taverns, who spin yarns of hidden treasure, sunken wonders, and spooky ocean spirits; you’ll encounter puzzles and obstacles on your journey, that you must solve with your seafaring wits, and have to contend with a complex and restrictive political regime, that attempts to thwart your fun at every turn.
You must navigate this world, doing your job to get paid and smuggling contraband and items of value to the characters in the games many settlements, in order to grow the world, your relationships with characters, and ultimately and hopefully yourself and your vessel.
Core Design Pillars
Reactive Narrative: The core of the game is narrative, characters wants and goals will drive the player’s decisions with regards to where they will voyage on each journey, and what resources they will prioritize. In order for characters to feel more grounded and have their personalities be expressed more effectively, they should also “look out for” player actions that affect them, or relate to their given interests. This will make characters not only feel like a sequence of voice lines, but as if they “see” the player in real time as they progress throughout the game.
Audio-Visual: While the core of the experience will hopefully be a satisfying CGL (Core gameplay loop) the game will primarily attempt to constantly provide the player with unique and thematic visual and auditory stimulation. This is not to say that it will be a sanitized form of stimulation to keep people interested, moreso that myself and my close friends have access to a range of interesting and unique artists and musicians, and given that the core of the game is a collection of characters and aesthetics that the player will encounter and interact with, the use of these resources will be key to keeping the player “delighted” at the world they are experiencing.
As they pass by Taverns, they will hear the sounds of local bands playing folk songs, and characters singing shantys on the docks, as well as some just greeting you as you go by. The idea is to offer a world filled with unique audio and visual experience.
This handcrafted approach will make the final game take more time to develop, but ultimately I believe lead to a better and more personalized experience.
Character Driven: While the previous two pillars also provide support towards character driven design, this is more related to the core of the overarching narrative, and progression design. I want character “wills” to drive any meaningful progress in the world, while staying cognizant of how that can send less realistic messages (Social Structures tend to be the core of social change, rather than individuals).
The core of this will be in the “realm development” as character requests completion should lead to material changes in the world. Delivery of a juke box to a character will lead to that character’s residence or place of work playing music the next time you visit, providing wood and metal to a character will lead to them building new facilities in their place of work that you can dock at and use. The hope is that this provides both a practical reason for players to complete character requests, and an aesthetic change to the world that players should hopefully appreciate and strive for.
Inspirations
The core inspiration that I have attempted to stray away from, but it’s impact on my design philosophy has been substantial and incalculable, is Hades by Supergiant Games. The way that this game approaches narrative design, through it’s core systems, opened my eyes to how many classic and genre defining systems have been underused in the games that replicate them.
The aspect of the game that most stuck with me, is the incredibly simple, but labour intensive Reactive Narrative system. Characters in hades have a priority queue system of voice lines, where player actions will enqueu certain voice lines in certain characters, relating to their personalities and interests, as well as gameplay uses. Characters will react to how you complete runs, what weapons you use, and even what settings you enable in the pause menu. This creates a world where the player feels “seen” and any action can bring forth the though: What would X say about this, I wonder?
Many players have comented, that while they have completed the game, they have not yet exhausted the number of unique and dynamic voice lines from characters, and continue playing beyond the endgame to experience more from these characters they have come to love.
Another core inspiration is Sid Meiers: Pirates. This is a game I played as a child, where the player could navigate an open and expansive world for the time, and take down ships, conquer forts, have romances with local duke’s daughters (less PC) and do Piratey things in general. This was a very formative game for my early years of gaming, and provided me with a core design philosophy for game design: Cater to a potential player fantasy, while outlining and providing new facets to that fantasy, and teaching them about it’s tropes and historical factors.
Progress So Far
In it’s state as I started the FMP, the game had the following features:
- Player Controls: Players could move the ship and turn it, on the 2D Y plane, and rotate the camera around the ship, as well as change vessel states to use harpoon and cannon functionality.
- Harpooning: A harpooning system where objects could be harpooned by firing at them, and once “connected” reeling them in to the vessel and collecting them.
- Cannoning: Players could fire a cannon at certain objects, destroying them to remove barriers and access certain collectables.
- Item Management: The player could open their inventory and manage items by moving them around and dropping them from the vessel back into the water. This was also designed to accomodate the future system of item slot effects, where slots could be marked as “Hidden” or “Fragile” due to external and player controlled effects. This is to allow for future systems of Customs Checks when entering ports, and Inventory Damage destroying items in fragile slots when the player takes damage.
- Docking: A simple dock system is implemented, that by now has been updated, where the player can enter a trigger area, and dock at a location, enabling them to interact with objects on screen to purchase resources, talk to characters, and see posters and other readable objects for world flavour.
Prototype Scope
The prototype will encompass a series of events that will happen prior to the game, in a previous state of development of the realm. It will involve a single journey by the player, starting in the original settlement of Mevar, and moving to the new (at the time) settlement of Shurrick. The goal of the player is to bring a specified resource to Shurrick, as well as a number of side objectives that the player can acquire from other characters in Mevar.
The voyage itself will have the player pass through a number of regions, each with it’s own procedural generation techniques (Not super complex), and their own objectives and aesthetics. I want to direct the player vaguely through the realm by providing paths for them, as well as ways and reasons to deviate from those paths.
The regions will contain pletiful scrap and containers for the player to collect, as well as characters and event locations for them to visit. The goal is to provide a complex and dynamic experience that changes meaningfully with each playthrough, the outcomes of which will be show in the final destination.
Shurrick will have a number of characters who will have dynamic voice lines, that use the priority queue system to decide which voice line to use. This will change how the player first interacts with characters when they arrive at their first new settlement, hoping to show players that their actions have meaningful thematic and story consequences. These reactive elements will also have surprising interactions, where the consequence of an action will make itself known in a way that a player may not expect, like appearing at the Customs Check sequence, or stopping the player in their tracks to force them to grapple with them. It may also appear before opening shop UI’s as the shop owner themselves has an issue to bring up with you, or a voice line to deliver.
These are some of the systems I plan to add to the Demo:
- Conversation and Dialogue System: Priority queue system of dialogue that players can be surprised by and makes characters feel unique, both per playthrough and within a playthrough.
- Region Generation: Unique region gen systems that create regions that have their own unique feel and style as well as objectives and ways to draw the players eye to explore and collect.
- Docking System: Overhaul the docking system to make it more fluid for the player, and provide unique shop, conversation, and interactable UI’s and experiences.
- Lead System: Characters will provide Leads which will be yarns spun in bars or on docks, about sunken treasure and wrecks, that the player can then visit on their voyage and find.
- Progression: The ship that you captain will be powered by the souls of some long dead sailors, and the progression of that vessel will be done through the personalities and leanings of those sailors. The initial conversations and unlocks for these characters will be available in the demo, for the player to learn more about their vessel, and gaining useful abilities for their short time in the game.
Other systems are planned, to augment the feel of the Demo, but will be added or replaced based on time constraints and what use they provide to the play experience.
This is about it for my introduction to Scrimshaw, I will update soon with my first additions to the Demo, and what I plan to add sequentially, and how I am working with my one man art team to provide the full experience of the game.
Till next time, stay seafaring.