People in an Empty Vale

The story of Dawnshadow has gone through a lot of revisions over the time I've lived with it. The broad strokes of the plot have remained more or less constant. Sai is trapped alone in Syn's domain and has to get out, with the major objectives mirroring the original Dragon Warrior nearly identically. The "alone" bit has changed dramatically, though.

I was nervous about trying to tell the story of Dawnshadow right from the beginning. Most of my training is as a writer, and not a lot of story is going to happen when the main character is all alone nearly all of the time. It may have worked for Dragon Warrior, which is obviously the model on which Dawnshadow is built. But, regardless of what my artwork may suggest, it's not 1986 anymore, and people rightly expect more out of a game than what was available 30 years ago. There were no cities full of faceless characters in the Shadowed Vale, so every character Sai encountered had to be both memorable and multipurpose. That ended up applying to characters inside the playable party as well.

I always knew that Sai would have pets, both from a story and a system perspective. Acquiring those psychic shackles is a huge part of Sai's backstory, and adding just one extra character to a party makes an immense difference in the complexity available in combat. But in the initial design notes, Sai's pets were just that; generic, interchangeable wyrmkin that were more equipment slot than character.

Things started to change when I decided to find a way to ensure the first wyrmkin Sai encounters would always be available, even after reaching a point where killing the raptor in a single hit became trivial. This led directly to the decision to make her a permanent ally, and from her, others followed. Cuatete never got quite as much story as some of the permanent allies that followed her. Still, for a non-verbal character, I think she turned out all right.

So Sai got some colorful and interesting allies, but the Shadowed Vale was still populated by monsters. I knew what quests had to be completed and I knew which craftspeople Sai would encounter, but they were just that. Notes in a journal. Sai's longtime nemesis, Coatl-ome, had a personality, but the others were just ciphers for things that needed to happen for Sai to escape from the Vale. They didn't even have names.

That changed as soon as I had to actually write Sai's meetings with these non-entities. When the grimling smith opened his mouth and Boston came out, I knew I was in trouble. He went from "grimling smith, find hammer for gear" to "Zababil, the Savage Smith" within an hour, I think. His counterpart, the bogling artisan, followed not long behind. Bikkulum in particular was striking, since she ended up with a mild character arc all of her own.

But the biggest evolution by far was in Gugalan. He started as little more than a locked door that Sai needed to find an item to pass. But little by little, as more and more of Dawnshadow's story was developed and finalized, there came times when bits of lore and knowledge were best delivered by the bored minotaur hanging out just outside Syn's citadel. And with more and more words in his mouth, he became more and more of a coherent character. In the end, his story arc spans the entirety of the game, and is almost more interesting than Sai's own.

I think that might be one of the things I enjoy most about the creative process: watching characters become themselves. As I mentioned, my background is in writing, and every author I've spoken to about the craft of writing has stories of arguing with their own characters. Because good characters argue with their creator. They will say things we don't want them to say, but we have to let them say it, because what we wanted them to say sounds wrong in their mouths. Then the entire story bends, and the writer is left trying to catch up to where his characters know they need to go.

Sai and Syn and Coatl-ome and Gugalan dictated large portions of Dawnshadow all on their own. I let them speak with the hope that the story of the Dawnshadow and the setting of the Shadowed Vale would feel more solid and more real with their input. We'll see if that was the right choice or not in just over three weeks.