Note: click here to read Tony’s lore.
Player choices should create real, in-game, global change in the narrative. I was always trying to give players a voice in Vainglory stories. I haven’t managed that to my satisfaction yet, but the closest I came was writing a branching narrative.
I’d proposed this many times over the years, but I finally got my chance right before Vainglory released its 5V5 map: Sovereign’s Rise. I’d been tasked to give the map its own narrative, to introduce players to its backstory and introduce them to its new features. At the same time, we had a charming new hero coming up: a dwarf named Tony.
The lore leading up to Tony had been heavy. The Storm Queen felt betrayed, Varya came down from the heavens to fight certain doom, Lorelai discovered that she’d been releasing civilization-ending dragons upon the world, that sort of thing. It was great to explore this dark drama from a new, lighthearted perspective. After all, the dwarves of Vainglory don’t go too heavy. They’ve been around a long time. They’re gonna outlive your dumb war.
Only one tiny problem: I didn’t know how to write a branching narrative. I didn’t even know that it was called a branching narrative until I began my own in the super pro way I often do: by googling it.
There are programs galore to help out. One of those programs, Twine, comes highly recommended. I considered using it, but it would’ve been too difficult to localize. I decided to publish it on our website, with each little bit of the story appearing on its own page with links to follow. Some of the endings would be canon and most would be non-canon, some even off-the-wall.
Now that I had a plan, all I had to do was write it. How difficult could it be? I was totally prepared.
...I was not prepared.
Each branch of the story provided compounding issues. One inconsistency or snag needed to be fixed in multiple branches. I found odd repetitions everywhere. Every story must be edited and edited and edited again, but a branching narrative, I found, needs QA.
After many ridiculous stops and starts, I came up with the following system:
(Those who have read Tony’s lore will notice edits I made from this list. In all, I had to cut over 2000 words from my first edited draft for the localization budget.)
Linking within the google document was paramount to keeping my act together. The links in the image above lead to the story’s staging document:
I put the editorial team to work on this document. I knew I had something good when I heard them laughing. Their feedback was essential. One guy, who plays mid, chose to go mid in the story, a big success. He was the hero. Another remarked, "I killed the dragon on my first read-through so I feel like I've won. Do I need to keep reading?"
Endings for a branching narrative must be crafted with care. Readers will feel cheated if there are too many deaths, for instance. All that work, just for the character to die? You're asking more from your reader in a branching narrative than a regular story, and I needed my readers to want to buy Tony and play him. If it feels like Tony dies easy, they may translate that to dying in-game. Game lore is advertisement. It needs to feel aspirational and epic. There are good reasons for Tony's less-than-brave moments.
There’s always a lot to consider for a piece of lore. I never get to just go nuts. I have to consider the age group I’m targeting, making the hero aspirational, how the story ties into the greater world, whether it’ll make sense in other languages and cultures, if it will pass the game’s rating in all markets, and if risky content will eliminate its chance to be promotional material. For Tony, I had even more to consider. I had to introduce the 5V5 map to players, and that meant a few other key characters needed to show up in the story. Like Sovereign’s Rise’s two dragons, Ghostwing and Blackclaw, and their sugar momma, the Storm Queen herself. The other dwarf in the Vainglory universe, Frankie, deserved his own chapter, and Frankie tends to keep Grumpjaw around. I also needed to establish Churn poisoning on the Rise. I needed to reveal the Well of Power in the hollow base of Mont Lille and give story context to new items: Teleport Boots and Scout Cams. And so, the wonder of Sovereign’s Rise was revealed through Tony’s eyes.
The writing itself came easy. Tony is a big talker, and the story is simple: a guy who isn’t in charge of much gets shoved into a grand adventure. The first chapter set this up in a way that opened up dozens of possibilities.
Branching narratives are traditionally told in second person, which is my favorite way to write. Nothing invites a reader into the mind of a character quicker. It has to be handled with skill and authority, though, so the reader is never tempted out of the hypnosis you’ve weaved to think, “Wait - I’m not a dwarf.” It must be commanding. If you’re interesting enough, the reader will follow.
Art was another consideration. There were at least thirty pages of branches that would have looked like plain black pages on the website without some art, but I couldn’t ask my lore artist, Alex Chen, to create thirty different illustrations in the time allotted. Instead, I asked him for line drawings. Every day, Alex brought a little pad to editorial meetings and sketched out these amazing little drawings that were so inspiring as to be distracting. I gave him a list of the “canon” endings of Tony’s narrative to sketch out, then asked for small repeatable bits of art I could add to the other pages.
In an exclusive reveal, I read a few of the branches on Discord; those listening voted on which path I should take while I answered lore-related questions. This event almost didn’t happen, because we immediately crashed the server! Thousands tuned in just to hear a story. As soon as I published the story, people posted the threads to particular endings and speculation for Tony’s future skins went wild. Here’s Halcyon Masters’ take on it.
Tony’s branching narrative was the most engaging of Vainglory’s stories by far, and it's no wonder - people play video games so they can experience the story from the inside. Here are a couple of my favorite branching narrative story apps:
And of course, don't forget to download and enjoy Vainglory today.