Rob LeFebvre from Cult of Mac wrote up a very kind article about Lifeline 2, including a few interview questions with Dave Justus and myself. We enjoyed responding to his questions, and we hope our answers shed some more light on the thinking behind Lifeline 2. He didn’t have space for all of our (long-winded!) replies, so here’s the complete Q&A:
Who wrote this story?
Mars Jokela (Lead Game Designer at 3 Minute Games):
Dave stuck with us to write Lifeline 2, with a little pinch hitting from his longtime writing partner Matt Sturges. They’ll be co-writing the next game (working title: Lifeline 3), and many more to come. We’re also excited to further expand the Lifeline universe by bringing in more writers to lend their unique voices to the series.
What are the challenges and joys of creating a compelling multi-branching story?
Dave Justus (author of both Lifeline games):
When I stepped in to write the first Lifeline, my initial thought was, “This’ll be just like writing a short story!” And what I found, very quickly, was that it wasn’t like that at all; instead, it was like writing hundreds of short-short stories. Every few sentences, you need to provide a choice, and every binary split leads to another binary split, and it can very quickly become unmanageable. What I discovered was that if we knew a few key nodes — an important bit of information that the player had to read, or an object they needed to encounter, or a sight they had to see — then it became much easier to branch with confidence, going in numerous directions but knowing there was always a safe place to land.
I believe that there are two very different kinds of “lost” that a player can become in a story. The bad one is when the narrative has become too convoluted to make any sense… and that’s a real risk, in a multi-branching tale. But the good kind — the kind we’re always aiming for — is when the story is so compelling, so intriguing, so dazzling that, for a little while, you as a reader/watcher/player are swept up in it to the exclusion of the real world around you. And that’s the sort of “lost” that everyone involved in these games is looking to evoke. We want the challenges to be invisible, and the joys to be inescapable.
How do you follow up Lifeline 1?
Mars:
It’s kind of funny, and a little terrifying. Lifeline 1 was an experiment for us, just like all of our games. We weren’t expecting it to be a hit like this, so suddenly there is this huge audience with expectations based on the first game. So we’ve built Lifeline 2 to be a bigger and richer experience, that is different in important ways—we want to show how broad this new medium of real-time storytelling can be—while keeping the things that we think resonated the strongest with players. The story is still focused on a likable, relatable character who desperately needs your help. I know Dave felt a lot of pressure to deliver another story as compelling as Taylor’s, but I think he nailed it.
Dave:
Mars is being very kind. But he’s also underselling just how much pressure I was putting on myself. (And to their credit, the 3 Minute guys weren’t pressuring me at all; they were content to let me do that dirty work for them.) Although the final storyline of Lifeline 2 is very, very close what I first pitched, it took me ages to really feel like I’d found the right voice for Arika. Whereas Taylor starts the game desperate for your aid, Arika is initially much more cautious — she and the player have a bit more “getting to know you” time, and I wrote and trashed thousands of words before it felt right. From the protagonist, to the setting, down to the pacing of the gameplay itself, we wanted to make certain that this was a different and unique game from Lifeline 1.
It felt like a self-contained story. Is Lifeline 2 a sequel, or just a second story that’s related in some way to the first?
Dave:
The only thing I knew for certain when 3 Minute approached me about a sequel was that I was going to push as hard as I had to not to make it a direct sequel. Because I had just spent weeks out on that moon with Taylor, and I’d be damned if I was going back. So no matter how much they pleaded, I was determined to fight back.
And then, of course, they immediately said, “Let’s not make it a direct sequel,” and suddenly I had nobody to fight. All those Gymkata lessons, for nothing.
Mars:
Right—we felt that Taylor’s story was complete, and there was no need to put the poor kid through the wringer again. So Lifeline 2 is not a direct sequel to Lifeline 1, but they have much in common. Arika is in mortal danger and she needs your help. She’s a witty, snarky girl who’s funny to hang out with, much like Taylor, but she has her own voice and character. We do realize that a lot of players got very attached to Taylor though, so I wouldn’t be surprised if your Tau Ceti friend shows up again in another Lifeline. And not to spoil anything, but you’ll see some clear connecting threads between the stories as you play—some that might allude to those future games.
Dave:
The more the writers talk to one another, the more ideas we exchange, the bigger the Lifeline sandbox gets and the more excited we become about playing in it. And while we absolutely intend to make each game a self-contained experience that never requires prior knowledge of any other entry in the series… we think that players who are looking for a larger story are going to be very satisfied by what’s taking shape.
What’s new in Lifeline 2?
Mars:
Lifeline 2 is bigger, longer story, with almost twice the written content of Lifeline 1. It’s a much fuller and more polished experience overall, with more branches and choices to make. It has a more polished look, runs even better on Apple Watch, and includes an original 28-minute soundtrack to set the mood at important story moments. The order of Arika’s quests is randomized for each play-through so everyone’s experience is a little different, and it includes a subtle morality-tracking system that will influence the story as you make decisions. But all of that is in service of the story itself, and I think you’ll enjoy getting to know Arika, and helping her through this critical moment in her life. I sure have, playing the game as Dave wrote it!
Are there plans for any extra features or gameplay mechanics other than choices and text?
Dave:
One thing that comes up, over and over, in talking to people about the first Lifeline is that they enjoy it, and keep coming back to it, because in a lot of ways it doesn’t behave like a game. It’s more like getting a series of texts from a friend who happens to be vacationing (very poorly) on a desert moon. It appeals to non-you little shits because it uses their device (phone, watch, etc.) in the ways that they’re accustomed to interacting with friends or social media. And while we have all sorts of notions of features that would be cool to include — and certainly we’ve done, I think, some very cool, tricky stuff with the real-time element in one of Lifeline 2’s sections — any potential additions have to pass the “sniff test” of whether they start to press against the boundaries of that player/device relationship.
Mars:
We do feel that there’s a lot of room to grow in terms of features that would add to these games, but we don’t want to make these games too “gamey” and break the underlying experience. If you’re suddenly managing inventory slots or trying to level up before you can proceed, these types of mechanics can very quickly break the immersion of talking to a person on the other end of the line. The features that we’ve added in Lifeline 2 don’t feel like overt game-like mechanics, but they draw from that well and they help flesh out and enrich the experience. We’re looking forward to pushing it further with the next games in the series.
