Why lore matters

When we thought about the games production, it was clear, that we wouldn’t integrate a classical story players could follow, so we didn’t pay much attention to world building in the first place.

One could argue that we shouldn’t spend any time in developing background information since the player would never really get to see it, but as the graphical development went further we quickly realized, that we had to answer at least some basic questions like:

• Who are our characters and what are their goals?
• What is the world like?
• What time are we in?
• What is the motivation behind the hacking?
• Which mood do we want to create?
• Is it more fantasy or sci-fi?

What was the point of that?

The answers to those questions had direct impact on our decisions in terms of Art Style, lighting, music, character creation, level design, etc. This gave us the opportunity to follow a common goal and helped us creating a consistent game. Even if there wouldn’t be a story, we wanted to present as much hints as possible so that the player has the chance to guess what’s going on and understand what our thoughts were.

Practical example:

We liked the idea that Net.Attack()s world faces a cyber war in which the player tries to steal data from different countries. This led to the level selection being a world map and we wanted to give each of those regions a unique character that influences the visuals of the abstract circuit board levels.

In fact, each of them has its own little profile with researched reference pictures and descriptions for motivation, believe, living circumstances, geography and form of society.

A valuable investment

From being in production phase it’s clear that spending enough time in world building was definitely an important part in our pre-production and made conception so much easier. For our game it’s the best way to give players some context and a meaning for the gameplay.