The concepts of life and death in most games are represented by the ability to keep playing, or the need to stop and start over. In Supermassive Games’ most recent lost-in-the-woods monster adventure The Quarry, death is an intrinsic part of the fun, like in a horror movie. « It’s less of a game that you can win and more of a movie that you can play. The people that get it, get it. And they love it, » game director Will Byles told Mashable.
To be sure, Supermassive is playing in the same sandbox — branching, player-authored adventures — as others, particularly Telltale Games. In Telltale’s hit The Walking Dead series, you’re making choices that, over time, steer character relationships and shape the narrative around different outcomes. It’s a story that is ultimately shaped by your personal sensibilities, and the final result feels like something close to fan fiction.
By contrast, most of Supermassive’s games, like Until Dawn, the Dark Pictures Anthology series, and The Quarry are all horror stories through and through. Your fingerprint is there, but the individualized experience lives in a state of perpetual tension with the trope-y thrills of a monster movie, and familiar horror movie thought exercises become gameplay. Do you take a path that you know will keep a particular person safe? Or do you have them hide under that nearby bed, where you’re certain they’ll be discovered and dispatched in gruesome fashion? The Quarry and its ilk let you play out the answers to those kinds of questions.
In short, stories from Supermassive Games just hit different, and here’s an in-depth look at why.
Finding the game in a movie script
It all starts with a script. Byles put The Quarry together originally as a 90-page feature script, written in the widely used screenwriting application Final Draft. No branches, no choices, just the story of what happens when a bunch of camp counselors get stranded in the remote woods as a monstrous threat lurks in the shadows.
« It’s got a kind of canonical journey that goes through [the story beats], and all the scenes that are in the game are in there, » Byles said. « Very condensed, but that allows me to pull character relationships together. »
Particularly at this early stage, it’s important to have a coherent and broadly relatable foundation to the story, so there’s a stable root structure before the story starts to branch. Byles will « freely, happily » lean on established story structures like Joseph Campbell’s « hero’s journey » as his starting point in the canonical script.
« All that sort of stuff is a good guide to make sure that the story is engaging and that it has a good core, » Byles said. « In terms of every single one of those beats [in the script], what would we do to branch that? » That’s the question Byles grapples with again and again during story development, alongside narrative designers, storyboard artists, the production designer, and the art director.
To keep everything organized, the Supermassive team uses what Byles describes as a « storyboarding tool, » which was built in-house. The Supermassive-authored software acts as a centralized interface for tools that handle scriptwriting, video and sound editing, art, and more, tying the big picture together in a color-coded « GameFlow » chart that maps out the course of the story and the rippling impacts of each choice that players make.
The anatomy of Supermassive’s GameFlow
This is what the full story of The Quarry looks like with every possible player choice and story branch accounted for in Supermassive’s GameFlow chart. It’s almost incomprehensible in this zoomed out view, but each of those boxes correlates to a specific moment or action in-game.
Supermassive’s storyboarding tool keeps the GameFlow chart accessible in its own window. The development team then zooms in closer on specific chapters, scenes, and even choices to make tweaks and test results.
It’s easier to understand the different pieces and how they come together in a more zoomed in look at the chart. Here’s The Quarry‘s full prologue in GameFlow form.
The green squares are scripted cutscenes. Players can’t alter the outcome once they reach one of these. « As a rule, we never want them to be more than a page long, which is roughly a minute [of playing time]. We want people to be constantly feeling that they’re engaged. »
Each box in the GameFlow chart is color-coded according to its purpose. Orange boxes are choices, so they’ll often branch out in multiple directions. When there’s a timed element to any given choice, a branch with a clock icon points to the result that plays out when players don’t make a choice before time is up.
Blue boxes branch out as well, but the boxes themselves correlate to « Quick Time Events » (QTEs). These gameplay moments challenge players to follow on screen control prompts on a timer, often in the context of an escape sequence or some other action, and the branches lead to story results of success versus failure in each QTE.
Red boxes are used for combat moments, which are more prevalent in The Quarry than they’ve been in most of the past Supermassive titles. Purple boxes represent exploration moments where players get to wander in the shoes of one character or another. And those big yellow boxes that wrap around certain sets of smaller ones have no gameplay purpose; they’re simply developer notes, often serving to fill in any missing context.
The storyboarding tool Supermassive employs is essential for keeping the scope and focus of a project like The Quarry in view as it evolves from a feature-length script into a sprawling, choice-driven video game. Using the GameFlow chart, developers can zoom all the way into any particular box and tweak various in-game elements right there on the spot.
Burying canon in the woods
« It’s like a writing room, really, » Byles said of Supermassive’s tool. « We can sit there live and type into it and sketch into it, and we can flesh out the story as we go along. Music, we can think about. All that stuff. »
Byles added, « It’s lovely, it’s collaborative, but it’s also directed, because we know what the story is. »
A still-in-development game is even playable at this stage, albeit in rough and unfinished form. But the ability to string together storyboard art, music, voice lines delivered by robots or bad actors, and fully animated, near-final/final footage into something the team can interact with and « play » is instructive for the process.
« You can get an idea of how long the scene’s gonna last, » Byles said, adding that the rough presentation can actually be instructive in this context. « If it’s exciting at this stage, it’ll definitely get more exciting once you make it real. And if it’s dull at this stage, no matter how much you polish it up, it’s gonna stay dull. Making it 3D […] won’t help a weak story. » Byles’ original, un-branching, story provides the narrative energy for unchanging plot points.
And there is a path through the story that takes the player on the story the director first envisioned. « It’s not a happy ending, » Byles said of his original script. « It’s not everyone living by any means, [and] it’s full of all sorts of twists and turns. » But while seeing that canonical version of The Quarry is technically doable, players would need a detailed roadmap.
« We did at one point think about releasing a thing that [would take you through the canon plot] if you actually hit every single [choice], » Byles said. The idea was to include some sort of audiovisual indicator that would point players to each of those correct-for-the-plot choices.
« It would be nigh-on impossible to catch every one. So it seemed a little unfair, » Byles said, adding, « There’s always a chance that we might DLC something. » This « official » version, wouldn’t just be some statement of authorial ownership, however, and could actually offer important clarity to fans. After all, said Byles, « If you don’t have a canonical story, then how can you make a sequel to it? »
What’s next for playable horror movies?
It’s easy to forget that Supermassive is essentially writing the rulebook and the rules of play as it goes. For as much as Until Dawn, The Quarry, and The Dark Pictures Anthology all share DNA with choice-driven adventures from the likes of Telltale, your choices serve a different purpose here. The Quarry and its ilk turn the rules of horror into a video game.
« That really is it, » Byles said of Supermassive’s guiding philosophy. « We’re making a horror movie that you can play. » The Quarry is the latest example of how the studio delivers on that promise, but it’s also the best one to date.
« We’re going to really lean into that now, » he added. « This genre [of game] is maturing. It was a real punt with Until Dawn, and then with this one it felt like it solidified. »
Byles may have offered a hint about next steps when he emphasized his interest in the way the player’s personality brings different kinds of narrative texture to the plot. « Whether or not you want to be a douche, or if you want to be a hero. I think that’s a really interesting thing, » Byles said. « The sort of person you are allows for a whole bunch of different styles of playing. »
Take the example of the prologue moment when Laura and Max, the two stars for that stretch of story, interact with a local cop after a mysterious circumstance led to a car crash. Your choices during that sequence don’t materially influence the plot in an unchangeable way; they exist more to add color. Byles loves to see where players end up going in moments like this.
« Watching what people do when the cop, Travis, is talking to them — whether they are super honest and polite or whether they’re irreverent and a little bit rude — is interesting because there’s no context for it either way. It’s just about your personality, » Byles said.
« How that changes the relationship and affects things as [the game] goes on is not massive — it’s certainly there, but it’s a contextual thing. I love that, » Byles said. « So it’s not just the horror side of it; it’s the horror and the relationships, and the consequences of both. »
The Quarry is now available for PC, PlayStation, and Xbox.
