Merchants of Rosewall Developer Interview: The Intricacies of Building a Meaningful Story about Commerce

While most games tend to deal with moments of conflict with violence and war, developer Big Blue Sky Games aimed to pose an interesting alternative with their newly released fantasy shopkeeping sim Merchants of Rosewall. How would a diverse world handle these conflicts if violence and war simply weren't an option?

It's an interesting concept, but more interestingly, it can create some rather unique problems that need to be answered from a narrative point of view. I recently had the opportunity to sit down with one of Big Blue Sky Games developers and the Narrative Lead on Merchants of Rosewall Suriel Vasquez to talk more about the intricacies of crafting a meaningful and entertaining story. We talk about the unique challenge of telling a worthwhile narrative while staying bound to the constraints of commerce and mercantilism in a world where the gameplay is all about buying low and selling high.

DESTRUCTOID: Hello Suriel, thank you for chatting with me today! Full disclosure, I've only played a few hours of Merchants of Rosewall, but I feel like I've got a good understanding to ask some good questions in regards to the story and design process from a narrative stance. What was the initial inspiration both for the world and the overall narrative of Merchants of Rosewall?

SURIEL: The inspiration was us at Big Blue Sky Games wanting to do something different in the fantasy genre. We wanted to focus on what happens between large conflicts that other fantasy games cover like things involving wars, clashes, or humans fighting orcs and such. We wanted to explore what those worlds are like without war. It started us on the path of "What kind of fantasy game could be interesting in that sort of context?" and one of the earliest ideas we agreed on was the idea of running a shop in that kind of world. From there we started incorporating ideas of how to make running a shop in that world more interesting and we landed on the idea of there not being a real conflict around it. In our world there aren't any wars going on as there is a worldwide armistice where people aren't allowed to make or produce weapons, and going from there it raises a lot of interesting questions about what other kinds of conflicts would exist in that world and how do we address them and talk about things like different cultures clashing and what methods of negotiation do they use when they don't have weapon to use.

DESTRUCTOID: It feels like a uniquely timely piece, and I felt early on in my experience that it felt like Merchants of Rosewall was released at a perfect time based on the current status of the world. Rosewall is certainly a fantastical world, but it takes a lot of real-world issues and interweaves them into this fantasy world. What's the process like taking heaving real-world issues and placing them into a more fantasy world but still making them feel meaningful?

SURIEL: When you start the game, you can select which sort of fantasy character you want to be. We wanted to have a game where you immediately feel like you are someone else rather than "This is my transposing myself into this world" which most games do for good reason, such as in Mass Effect or similar games. But we wanted to create the experience of you being a stranger in a stranger's land, so there aren't any Human characters, so you have to choose to be a race that isn't like yours. There are some that look close like Corkgnomes or Dwarves which look like Humans, but you have to choose to be someone else. This is an idea of planting the idea that this is a game that is interested in diversity and having a number of perspectives that are all equal. From here we thought about what are some interesting questions we want to answer. So without there being any kind of war, what are the most interesting things we want to talk about? Business and how they operate and how they related to governments was a big one we wanted to tackle, and so figuring out how to ask those questions without making it feel very preachy or boring, and finding ways to reference those kinds of things while keeping it interesting which allows us to sort of 'have our cake and eat it too.' We want to have a fun story where you don't feel like you're constantly being confronted by difficult questions, but also making it interesting by having you consider some of these questions in the back of your head while you're playing through the gameplay loop of building up your business. We felt this was an interesting way to seed some narratives early on then as players progress have them dealing with things more directly.

DESTRUCTOID: The characters in Merchants of Rosewall feel like such an important part of the game. Were there any characters or narratives that evolved significantly from the original vision as the team fleshed out the gameplay for the game?

SURIEL: A lot of the characters ended up undergoing some major changes. For some backstory, I started on Merchants of Rosewall after it was more or less halfway ideated, so a lot of the characters were already on paper. The high-level story was already mapped up. As I started working with the team and adding more characters and having them interact, a lot of them started undergoing some changes. Mehdi was originally supposed to be more friendly, and had a more jovial tone. Once I started getting into the writing it felt more appropriate for Mehdi to be more representative of bureaucracy, and a character reminding you that this world is different and that you are playing by different kinds of rules here. In a way, he's your introduction to the world. We had established some quirks about the way Brolly talked but as we explored how he sounded, he became more representative of someone who is a working-class person as opposed to Mehdi who is more representative of the higher-ups and government. Most characters changed and very few are the way I originally wrote them.

DESTRUCTOID: Were there any unique challenges with telling this narrative with the game being primarily about trading and running a shop?

SURIEL: One of the hardest things was figuring out sources of conflict without falling into this same trap of commerce sim that is interested in what commerce means as opposed to just having you do a bunch of commerce. Figuring out the right way to get players to think critically about these concepts without undermining them was a pretty big challenge to make sure players don't feel bad about what they are doing but also finding some interesting questions that this unique setup raises. Also finding new answers to them, so the player feels like they are learning something rather than just being made to do something they don't want to do. It also took a while to nail making the player feel welcome without constantly praising them just for being around. This was partially motivated by having played some JRPGs around the time this was being ideated, where the characters were getting all this undue praise for having all the right answers to everything and everyone lavishing praise on you. I wanted to avoid this for a few reasons, one of which is, that if characters are trying to embody someone other than themselves, we want them to see the world al little bit differently. Being in a world that is fairly fantastically but characters aren't always quick to say "Hey you're doing great, you're the most important character in the world!" I thought it was important for characters to maybe look at you skeptically but not be outright mean; you don't want an introduction that's outright hostile to the player. But we wanted the feeling of nervousness around arriving in a new city and the trepidation of entering a new world but having that slowly be peeled away as people get to know you better and warm up to you.

DESTRUCTOID: Being a game about commerce and trade, were there any narrative elements that had to be sacrificed for more gameplay elements?

SURIEL: There were some. A lot of it wasn't necessarily for narrative reasons, but more for scope. There were a lot of cut characters in some areas we couldn't really use, but that was more because we didn't have time to create all the locations or really flesh out the characters. One of the things I really enjoyed was being given the leeway to explore some of these questions and figuring out how to make sure the line was being threaded between having the player ask certain questions about what they are doing without completely undermining them. I think the team is overall very happy about where we threaded that line.

DESTRUCTOID: Are there any plans for DLC or future content where you plan to flesh out more of the story or characters, or are most threads tied up at the end of Merchants of Rosewall?

SURIEL: We don't have any plans for follow-up DLC or anything like that. We have a patch that just dropped and from here we'll see where the audience takes us. If they really respond to the narrative and want to see more we can always reconsider, but for now no plans to expand the story out that way.

DESTRUCTOID: What sort of techniques did you take from other forms of media like books and movies that you adapted for a more interactive storytelling approach in a fantasy setting like Merchants of Rosewall?

SURIEL: In terms of techniques I took from other mediums, outlining was the big one which I had done as press before, things like writing a big story with an outline before you start writing it. With creative writing, you get to make up all the quotes in a weird way, and pick which moments you want to hit. Writing is similar to animation where you have things you want to focus on that may be the more central beats, and then you fill in the rest with, compared to animation, frames that lead up to it. That's more or less a frame of writing that adapted greatly to creative. I used a loose adaptation of the traditional screenwriting format to write out all the scenes first and adapted that so that there are cues for certain gameplay functions like transitions and music queues.

DESTRUCTOID: Time for some fun questions! What aspect of Merchants of Rosewall are you most proud of? Anything in particular that you specifically are proud of about how it turned out narratively?

SURIEL: The thing I'm happiest with is the characters. This is a game about building a business and buying low and selling high. I'm really happy we were able to make that trend work so that doesn't feel like you are looking at spreadsheets all the time, and the characters do a great job of assisting in that by being fun to be around. When I started this project it was intimidating to write for so many voices as I didn't have a ton of creative writing experience professionally, but having to find all the different voices and making them different than each other, I feel like I was able to explore and challenge myself to make sure every character had a purpose and wasn't just there to feed you information. You didn't have to like every character, but hopefully, it feels like the character has a certain amount of effort behind them whether you like or dislike them. That took some time to nail and I was interested in and I feel like we pulled off well.

DESTRUCTOID: Of all the characters in Merchants of Rosewall, which is your favorite?

SURIEL: Chrys is probably the character I put the most work into because her quirk is less about the words she uses and how she inflects certain sentences and what she is or isn't aware of. I had a lot of fun writing her once I figured out her whole tone and purpose. That's the character that felt the most indicative of my kind of imprint on the game. She's one of the few characters I created myself as opposed to adapting from when I joined the team, so she's one I got to build from scratch.

DESTRUCTOID: Very cool, thank you for the opportunity to peel back the curtain on this unique process and learn more about Merchants of Rosewall. Your answers have me even more excited to delve more into the game and getting my productive shop up and running!

SURIEL: I hope you enjoy it! Thanks for talking to us today!

Merchants of Rosewall is currently available on PC via Steam for $24.99.

The post Merchants of Rosewall Developer Interview: The Intricacies of Building a Meaningful Story about Commerce appeared first on Destructoid.