Aryz Mural in Copenhagen

I think I better look that up next time I'm in Copenhagen.

More here: http://arrestedmotion.com/2012/08/streets-aryz-copenhagen/

The Girls of Sleeping Dogs

I've been asked whether there originally was more content planned for the girls in Sleeping Dogs.

The short answer is: yes.

I was at this recording session. Emma Stone is really sweet.

Of course when you start making a game, especially an open world game, you have all kinds of grand ideas. Many of them don't make it through the end through the various rounds of refining the vision (earlier in the process) and desperately cutting scope to stay on budget and schedule (later in the process).

The thing about romantic side-arcs to the story is that they're just that, side-arcs; so they're very vulnerable to getting scaled back when the shit hits the fan during production. As you may know, an extraordinarily large amount of faeces got airborne during the production of this particular game. It's a wonder so much of the girl content made it through; but not all of it did.

What I would have liked to have seen, and what was the plan for quite a while during development, was for the dating to be open ended. As you unlocked each of the girls through the story, you could keep seeing one of them, try to juggle several of them if you were that kind of player, or ignore them altogether.

There were some mini-games planned, and a semi-open system of reactions depending on how you were dealing with the girls. In particular, all the girls had reactions to finding out that you were two- (or more-) timing on them. There was a seduction mini-game planned at one point as well. We did record the audio for it, and it was pretty hilarious. Yes, you could've slept with Emma Stone's character (or any of the other dateable girls) as much as you wanted. There was a bunch of flirty back and forth dialogue recorded between Wei and each of the girls, as well as a bank of randomizable "fade to black" and "getting up in the morning" lines as well.

From a narrative design point of view, we were ready. But we never quite had the time to figure out how to make the gameplay part of it tight enough to justify including it, nor was there ever a firm spot in the schedule for implementing it; there was always something more crucial to get done.

There was another dateable girl as well, or a dateable woman to be more precise. She was part of a more sprawling late 2nd and 3rd act, but as time receded and scope was cut her missions ended up not making it; so there was no way her dating parts would make it either. Her name was Fifi, a cynical slightly over the hill movie star who really liked her drink. Basically she was Vivienne, 20 years later and with no illusions. I was sad to see her go.

Then there were the denouements... we had cutscenes written, and even recorded, in which Wei met up with each of the girls after the main story was completed. If it had just been up to narrative design (i.e. me) the way it would have worked with the girls is like this:

• You met them, one by one, through the story mission flow.
• They each had one, two, or three mini-missions before you got the opportunity to unlock them.
• After that, there'd be an open ended contact-and-improve-the-relationship-(or-not) mechanic leading to "private time" and tangible but temporary benefits to regular gameplay.
• If you tried to two-time anyone there'd be dynamic, open world complications.  (i.e. Tiffany might call while you were spending time with Sandra, and they'd react appropriately depending on what you did; or Amanda drop by while you're getting busy with Not Ping).
• By the time the main story wrapped up, you'd have the opportunity to trigger denouement scenes for each of the girl characters. These would showi how they each had an existence beyond being a notch in Wei's bedpost and bring a sense of closure to the relationship

... but it was not just up to me. The reality is that while it would have been very nice to treat the girls like that, those side-arcs are just that, side-arcs; they're not central to Wei's story. It would have been a significant task to support all of that with properly designed and tuned gameplay to a level acceptable for the game, even if the narrative design was squared away. And in the end, gameplay comes first.