Episode 2 Creator Q&A

Note: Sorry for the low quality, I changed part of my setup and was sitting too close to the microphone and my voice pops quite a bit. I would lower the volume before listening!

TRANSCRIPT

AM = Anna / Idrelle Games
CG = Josiah / Chilled Glasses

CG: Hi friends, welcome to another question and answer session with the writer of Wayfarer, Anna. We’ve got a bunch of questions here that have been submitted by you, the fans, and we’re going to be covering a few different topics today—everything from Writing & Process, to Worldbuilding, and Story & Characters.

The first few questions are going to be a bit more general. So, even if you haven’t played the new content that’s out for Episode 2, still feel free to give this a listen. We will give you a warning when we start delving into spoiler territory.

AM: Yeah, it’s been a while since we’ve done one of these. The last one we did was in September, and that was for Episode 1. So, this is going to be a lot more Episode 2 focused. (laughs)

CG: Exactly. And as is always the case when you start diving into bits of the main story of any piece of fiction, there are a lot of questions about specific plans for the future that we’re not going to be able to give a ton of detail about.

AM: Yeah.

CG: So, we will try to drop some nuggets where we can

AM: Yeah, I’ve been dodging spoilers for two years, I’m not about to stop doing that now.

CG: Exactly. So, this will be more so answers that are based on the text as it exists currently, instead of “here is the plan for the next couple of years, and who is going to die, who is going to fall in love… etc.”

But without further ado, we’re going to start with a few questions on Writing & Process.

AM: Yeah.

WRITING & PROCESS

CG: First question: The game is planned to be pretty long and complex. What’s your strategy for keeping track of early game choices and how they impact the ending?

AM: So, it’s lists and an excel sheet. (laughs) Basically, it comes down to my outlining process, which I’ve gone over in a couple different places. I’ll try to link some of the articles when I do the transcript. (Outlining process posts here and here)

I have my beat chart, which is the full structure of the entire game. And then my beat chart is broken down into individual outlines for each act. And then when I get around to doing the chapter outlines, I break it down further.

So, it’s just kind of like… you do your outline, and then you do another outline, and another outline. And you’re slowly going from the really broad scope and narrowing it down into the specifics.

And then as I’m writing, I’m cross-referencing it with my Excel sheet that has all of the variables that I need to track in it—what needs to pop up where, what needs to reference something else or a different choice that happened… Also, implementing a catch-all flavour text thing for circumstances where if the player did Choice A, and then there’s Choice B and Choice C, and then everything else falls under the additional “else” statement for when any of those conditions are not met.

It’s a lot of making lists and checking things off and cross-referencing with what needs to continue to be tracked. A lot of the choices that might feel super important, they all have a deadline where they will stop being important. I actually unset those in the game’s code, so they stopped being tracked and that’s what prevents the game from getting super bloated. Like, after a certain point, it doesn’t matter how you addressed Luthais in Episode 1. It affects certain things in Episode 1, but by the time you reach Episode 2, that’s so long ago it doesn’t matter anymore.

CG: So, basically, from my understanding, in terms of keeping track of these early game choices, the main thing for you is that with all of your outlining, you know as you’re writing what choices are going to be important and which ones you need to keep track of for later.

AM: Yeah.

CG: And I know there’s been occasions where something has come up in writing, with a discovery that you wanted to have accounted for later. But it’s a lot less of a time consuming process to factor in one or two extra choices that may come up, instead of writing the chapter and then you have to go back in and figure out everything that needs to be accounted for. You’re writing the chapter knowing what is already important and how that’s going to impact things two, three, or four episodes down the line.

AM: Yeah, because in terms of how choices impact the game… For small and medium choices, it’s more about how those choices work towards a bottleneck. The choice you make inthe bottleneck is what’s important for impacting things later on. But the path you took to get to the bottleneck won’t matter later on, but it may affect what choice you make.

CG: And a follow up to that question is: do you know how many endings you want?

AM: Yes.

CG: Read and find out.

AM: Yes.

(Laughter)

AM: Well, to expand on that a little bit… I don’t want to say too much about this, but there’s kind of two main branches for how the story can end. It’s not “good” ending and “bad” ending, it’s… you choose to do a thing or you choose not to do a thing. And they’re both equally good or bad, depending on what you do within those branches. There will be little variations within those two major branches, right, to account for all of the romances, character relationships, and faction relationships and how those went… So, it’s like there are two endings, but there’s multiple versions, if you really want to get into the nitty gritty.

CG: Speaking of the nitty gritty, dealing with all the side characters that you have: How do you come up with all your side characters? They’re all so memorable! Were they all planned from the beginning of the story or do you add some as you go?

AM: It’s half and half. Some are planned in the beginning, some are not. What I tend to do most of the time is that I know the narrative function that a character needs to fulfill, but I won’t decide what that character looks like, what their name is, or what their personality is like until I’m actually in the scene and all the pieces fall into place. So, I know what this Void needs to do eventually, but I allow myself a lot of flexibility depending on what’s going on.

A lot of things change when you’re in the act of writing. No matter how much you plan and outline, you always end up going… Things never end up going exactly according to plan. The outline is a guideline, not something you follow super strictly.

CG: Next question is: What degree of mental imagery do you have and how does it affect your writing? For example, on a scale of 1-10, where 1 is aphantasia and 10 is hyperphantasia? Do you need to find lots of reference images before you describe a location or character?

Aphantasia: being unable to visualize imagery
Hyperphantasia: having extremely vivid mental imagery

AM: I have an extremely vivid mental imagery. I’m probably like a 9 or a 9.5? Because I can picture what we have in our fridge very, very clearly. If you ask me to picture an apple, I can picture an apple, and manoeuvre it around in a mental space.

In terms of looking for reference images, I don’t tend to do that very often. If I’m drawing on specific inspiration, then I might go do a little bit of research, but I don’t often need to go back through that research once it’s done because the image is already in my head.

When it comes to people, I never look up references. I can imagine what they look like and then go from there. So, when it comes to finding references—say, for sending to an artist for a commission—I always really struggle with that because I don’t work with people references. I always struggle to find something. You can never get it to live up to what you see in your head when you have a vivid imagination. When I’m describing certain characters, the way I’m picturing them in my head… there isno reference for that. It doesn’t not exist because they’re an imaginary person in my head.

CG: It’s also the beauty of text descriptions as well. Everyone’s going to interpret something differently. If I say someone has an “angular” face, everyone’s going to come up with a different image in their head.

AM: Yeah, like… what does that mean? (laughing again because I use this description all the time :) )

WORLDBUILDING

CG: Moving onto the next section now, we’re going to have a few questions about worldbuilding. To begin with: What was your favorite part of designing the Wayfarer world?

AM: That’s a good question. I don’t know… Kind of like… all of it? It’s just really satisfying to start from a small seed of an idea and build on it. So, you don’t do everything at once—or, at least, I can’t do everything at once. Because then you just fall down a worldbuilding hole, and you never get any writing done if you try to flesh everything out.

I really like the small discoveries I make along the way. Because if I don’t know something… If I reach a point when I’m writing and I need to know this thing I didn’t plan for, then it’s fun to see the direction everything is going in and then flesh that out. I don’t know if that makes any sense…

CG: It sounds like the favourite part is really the evolution of the worldbuilding.

AM: Mhm.

CG: So, not necessarily… It wasn’t creating the map or the magic system, it wasn’t creating the all the different political factions, it was having the seed and building from there.

AM: Yeah.

CG: The next question in terms of worldbuilding is: How outnumbered are Wayfarers in terms of numbers?

AM: Pretty outnumbered. Very, very outnumbered. I can’t get into percentages or anything like that, but the best comparison would be both the witchers from The Witcher and also Star Wars after Order 66 when there are supposed to be no more Jedi, but they keep cropping up. We started with like… there was only supposed to be like two left and now there’s like… twenty of them.

CG: Which is fitting for the Wayfarer world because there’s no more Wayfarers, but there’s Kellis and the protagonist, and there’s also maybe a few other people…

AM: Yeah—did you just call Aeran by his last name?

CG: Yeah.

AM: Yeah?

CG: Yeah.

AM: Okay.

(Laughter)

CG: Too many people call him by his last name in the text.

AM: Hmm, okay.

CG: It just sort of has that nice way of rolling off the tongue, just saying Kellis.

AM: (unimpressed) Yep. Hm.

STORY & CHARACTERS

CG: But this is where we’re going to start running into some spoilers for Episode 2. So, we’re going to be having a few questions on story and character, and discussing some events that did happen in Episode 2. If you either haven’t played it or you haven’t played all the routes that you want to play and you don’t want to be spoiled for some things that may happen, then I would say: proceed with caution.

AM: Yes. Listen with care.

CG: To begin with, though: What scene or scenes have been the most fun to write so far?

AM: Ohhhh… I think… Oh, it’s a funny thing to ask because I know very clearly which scenes were not fun to write.

CG: I was going to say, I could probably tell you which scenes were the least fun to write.

AM: Yeah. I know which scenes were the least fun to write, but in terms of the ones that were the most fun to write… It’s kind of like everything else? (laughs) Because the Lethalis meeting scene was atrocious. That was so difficult. And it took me two months… Didn’t help that I had writer’s block during it, so that was just absolutely not fun. I kept getting confused about what part of the conversation I was at because there were so many different branches in it depending on how you approached it. I felt like I was stuck the entire time because I was writing all the branches, I was having the same conversation again and again and again, and I felt like I was making no progress.

But I think if I had to pick something, though… I think the end of Episode 2. So, I’m calling Scene 5, which only happens if you’re not drunk (you can’t get hammered at the party, otherwise you can’t access any of this). But all the gallery scenes with Phaedra and Melchior and Veyer… Those were a lot of fun. The dynamics and all of the romance scenes and the intimacy scenes, and the friendship stuff with Aeran if you go back to the apartment and you try to figure out where your relationship is at regardless of whether you’re romancing him or not… If you’re at high approval, that whole mess.

I think that dynamic was a lot of fun to write because I was finally free of the Lethalis stuff. So, I was just excited to write anything that was not a meeting scene.

(Laughter)

CG: And it’s also fun to have those really vastly different scenes you can have.

AM: Yeah. There were a lot of things that surprised me that were unplanned to a certain extent. It was like “this is an idea and I’m going to run with it.” Like meeting—

CG: Like everything with Veyer?

AM: (laughing) “Everything with Veyer”, yeah… That wasn’t supposed to happen.

CG: Literally everything with Veyer.

AM: Everything with Veyer—that was not on the menu originally. It just kind of happened because I wrote this one-off comment that they can have on one of your dialogue branches in the Lethalis scene. They make some kind of comment about how they wouldn’t have an affair with the main character because it would draw too much attention… I can’t remember what the actual line is, but they’re being super sarcastic. And as soon as I wrote that, I was like, “Oh, you are a problem. You are going to be a problem, I know what kind of character you are now.”

CG: And thus everyone became compromised.

AM: Yes. The other thing that was surprising that was unplanned was introducing Mel’s theatre company this early. It was unplanned, but I ended up pushing the scene in that direction because originally he wasn’t supposed to invite you to a party, he was supposed to invite you back to his quarters. And I found that the dynamic was a little off… Because he’s so mysterious and so otherworldly that the power dynamic was a little bit off, and it didn’t feel right for him to invite the main character back to a place where they would be alone. That wasn’t the right vibe.

So, I was thinking: who else is here? Oh, well, the theatre company is here, let’s take the chance to introduce them. So, you have an early introduction if you end up going down that path, and then it branches into a couple different spots based on player choice. Because once you introduce the theatre company, it becomes “Okay, this is about more than Mel now…” (tired laughter)

CG: There were just so many scenes within that section.

AM: Mhm.

CG: As we’re talking a lot about characters, though, the next question is somewhat related: Now that you’ve written so much and have gotten a chance to introduce more characters, do you have a favourite character to write?

AM: Veyer.

(Laughter.)

CG: I had a feeling.

AM: In terms of Episode 2 characters, the ones who are pretty much always fun to write are Veyer, Mel, Phaedra to a certain extent, but her vibe is different. Her dialogue’s a lot of fun because she has that… She’s just really in control. She’s in a power position.

CG: Her words are calculated.

AM: Yeah, yeah, calculated is the right word.

CG: But they’re not calculated in terms of she is directly trying to manipulate you or sway you in some great direction, it’s more that they’re calculated because that’s who she is.

AM: Yeah, she’s really, really in control of the situation, She has fingers in many pots, and is super aware and super observant, and I think some of my most favourite dialogue from the entire episode comes from a scene where you punch Sabien (are aren’t drunk) and then talk to Phaedra during your gallery scene, she’s not happy about it. And that has some of my favourite dialogue.

(Laughter)

CG: Oh, my goodness. That’s going to be a branch some people will have to chase down.

CG: So, next question. We’ve already answered part of it (what was your favourite part of writing Episode 2), but the second part continues that: What are you most looking forward to in upcoming episodes?

AM: I think right now… The end of Episode 3, definitely, because that answers some questions that have been burning for a very, very long time. And everything is kind of working towards a specific point that will occur at the end of that episode.

And then I’m really excited to get to the beginning of Episode 4 because that’s when you actually finallystart to meet the rest of the main cast.

CG: A lot of this entire process has been building up to the end of Episode 3 and immediately diving into Episode 4.

AM: Yeah, I think the combination of Episodes 1, 2 and 3 are kind of like… It’s all part of Act 1, but it could really be considered its own act. Because the end of Episode 3 will be a very distinct moment.

CG: Now we get into some questions where there may not be incredibly detailed answers.

AM: Yeah, we’re going to be dodging spoilers for future stuff quite a bit.

CG: For instance, to start with: Is there a way to reconcile with Aeran after the big fight?

AM: There is. If you haven’t found it yet, it does depend on a few different factors. So, you need to have either high approval or high romance, with some extra conditions. And by high approval or high romance, I mean you need to have 60 romance or 60 approval.

The only way you can get 60 romance with Aeran is if you flagged his romance from the beginning and then are knocked unconscious in Episode 1. So, if you’re at 10+ romance, this isn’t going to work.

For the friendship version, you have to have 0 romance. So, none at all, it has to be strictly platonic. And you need 60 friendship in order to access the scene, plus you can’t kill Rhodarth in Episode 1… which I don’t think a lot of people have done. (laughs)That’s a pretty rare thing. And also if you find the letters, you can’t tell him about the letters because otherwise he will be very upset.

If you don’t know about the letters, I will leave you… to go find that…

(Laughter)

CG: Realistically, after the fight is a very, very tense moment with Aeran. He has a lot of stuff going on in his brain. You have a lot of stuff going on in your brain. If you are going to reconcile immediately after that, you guys have to be very close.

AM: Yeah. You have to be very close and you also have to go back to the apartment. So, you can’t go to Mel’s party and you can’t sleep with Veyer. You can talk to Phaedra, though.

CG: Speaking of that: Does sleeping with Veyer end your friendship with Aeran?

AM: Not necessarily.

CG: What about if the MC and Aeran have feelings for each other?

AM: Not necessarily.

(Laughter)

This is going into Episode 3 territory, so I don’t want to say too much—

CG: Future choices have matter.

AM: Future choices matter. But unless you take a choice that specifically says “End Friendship” or “End Romance” (with the romance there’s a little broken heart icon)… If you don’t specifically do that, then you haven’t ended anything. But there might be complications down the line. Also: he might not find out about it. It depends on what you do. So…

CG: To be determined.

AM: To be determined!

CG: So, next question. Moving off of Veyer, but not off of Aeran: Why was Zenaida searching for Aeran? He has a clear distaste of Velantis and the Guild of Mages. What about his past and reputation justified her searching for him, as opposed to the MC?

AM: Yes, so this is in the subtext of the game. Zenaida was looking for Aeran… She talks about this a little bit in one of the conversations you have with her in Episode 1. She knew where he was and she knew about him because she has a source who told her. She wasn’t looking for the main character because she didn’t know about them.

CG: The main character was a surprise.

AM: The main character was a surprise. The main character has been… not intentionally on their part (though I guess it depends on how you imagine it and how you roleplay it), but they’re completely off the radar. No one knows about them. No one really knows that they made it through the civil war in Vestra and that they survived the Spire because they weren’t present, they are just kind of like… off the record.

CG: Not for long.

AM: Not for long. Aeran, on the other hand, has a huge reputation in the Empire. And, also, someone pointed Zenaida in his direction.

CG: Somebody…

AM: Somebody did.

(Suspicious laughter.)

CG: By the end of Episode 2, the dynamic between Aeran and the MC feels really messy and nuanced, and the MC has to walk on eggshells around him. Is this intentional and will there be some kind of satisfying payoff or resolution? Will the MC have the option to grow past their feelings?

AM: Yes and yes and yes. So, yes, it is intentional—

CG: Very much intentional.

AM: Very much intentional. I’m not having him get angry and blow up at the main character for no reason. His behaviour will make sense when you know what’s going on. Because he’s acting in this way for some very, very specific reasons. And yes, it is working towards a very specific conclusion. You will get part of that at the end of Episode 3. You will have some answers by then. Not at all of them, but most of them.

I can’t really say much more than that other than yes, it is very intentional.

CG: And also just to add onto this whole Aeran thing… It has been brought up a bunch of times that the main character has to walk on eggshells around him, that Aeran’s very easy to upset in Episode 2. It really is one of the moments in the game where the signs are there that Aeran is feeling extremely anxious, he has a lot on his mind, he is clearly bothered by something. And just like in real life, if someone is incredibly bothered by something and you are being short with them, pushy towards them, or just not letting them have their space or vent when they need to, it will go poorly.

AM: Yeah. Because you had an interesting reaction to the end of the episode.

CG: Because I know things about the future of the game, I intentionally played the episode with the least inquisitive main character ever in terms of Aeran. Never pushed him on anything, never questioned anything, gave him his space as needed. And that was one of the things I really thought about… When you are playing this less like an RPG trying to make sure you go through every single conversation branch and think of it more like a regular conversation, you don’t have to get all of your information right now.

AM: Yeah.

CG: In fact, with the mental state of your friend here, trying to push him for details is probably not a good thing. This person is clearly telling you he does not want to talk about this, he does not want to deal with these issues right now. And, in fact, there’s some conversations on the branch where he tells you “I can’t tell you right now.” He doesn’t lie to you.

AM: Yeah, no, he never lies to you.

CG: He just is not willing to talk about this at the moment. Whereas if you think about this, once again, like real life and not a game… My player character’s view on that was: All right. We’ll finish this job, and then we’ll talk. Let’s get out of Velantis. Let’s get out of this place that’s clearly stressing you out. But I’m going to need to know about this Wayfarer stuff at some point. It doesn’t have to be now—because why would it have to be now?

AM: Yeah. And it was maybe a little too forceful on my part to shove the player into a position where they don’t have a choice but to set him off. Because the thing that bothers him… The thing that causes the fight to happen in the first place is the main character asking about the Spire, which is a question I force you to select. There is no other option, you must click on the question to order to proceed.

And I did consider that really carefully. Because in a game where your gameplay is choice, you do need to consider your bottlenecks carefully. And this is a bottleneck you can’t escape. What happens during the fight scene is setting up for something else, and if you skip that entirely… if I had written another path… it is going to make that alternative path not feel satisfying in terms of narrative pacing.

CG: And that’s sort of where the fact that it is very intentional comes in. This is not something that happened because you had a whim about Aeran and the main character having a big fight. You’ll read and find out.

AM: Yeah.

(Laughter)

CG: Will we have the chance to restore or rebuild the Wayfarer Order? One that can once again rival the Guild of Mages?

AM: No. Well, that’s the short answer. The long answer is: your main character will be able to think about it and consider their feelings about that. It could be a goal that they have in the long term. But the game itself is not about rebuilding the order. So, no.

(Laughter)

CG: It’s a little beyond the scope of the main character.

AM: Yeah, they’re going to have other things that they are doing.

CG: Any predictions on who you think might be a fan favourite character in future episodes?

AM: Okay. I have some thoughts. Well… I think the character who has surprised me the most is obviously Veyer, because everyone loves them and I did not expect that. (laughter)So, I’m kind of guessing that when Episode 2 releases publicly, that trend will continue.

But in terms of future characters who haven’t shown up yet, I think Ren’s going to be pretty popular. But he fits certain character tropes that are pretty popular—

CG: Also, the characters within Ren’s storyline.

AM: Yeah. And you’ll be spending a lot of time with them in Act 1, too, so they’ll be very present. And the more a character is present, the more time you’ll have to get attached to them, and that kind of thing.

CG: I think sort of depending on the choices somebody makes and depending on what their particular playthrough looks like, I feel like after a few episodes from now, there’s going to be fairly big fights between the Mel crowd, the Calla crowd, the Ren crowd, the Alexia crowd…

AM: Yeah.

CG: With the Aeran stan still standing strong.

(Laughter)

AM: Yeah, I think the clown car might get pushed off a cliff… but they’ll survive.

CG: Exactly.

AM: Maybe they need to get pushed off the cliff. Maybe, you know, there’s not a gigantic void at the bottom. The car will just keep rolling… I think this metaphor is getting away from us.

(Laughter)

CG: But yeah, I think we’re quickly heading into the place where the fan favourite characters are going to be wide and varied.

AM: Yeah, especially because of the way I write side characters and minor characters. This kind of reaches back to a question we answered at the beginning with how I do my characters… But characterization for side characters and minor characters… With it not really being pre-planned in advance, I just feel it out as I’m writing. I make a lot of decisions very, very quickly about that character when I introduce them. And that usually goes back to what is their motivation, what is their goal, and then I imagine a couple different character traits. There’s usually a defining one that I latch onto.

So, for example, with Veyer, it’s like… They cannot not lean on something. And their physicality became a huge part of how they approached the scene. And with the type of physicality I gave them, they ended up being very sarcastic and snarky, and that informed a bunch of other things. So, I think—

CG: So, the real answer to this question is that the fan favourite character is going to be the librarian in Episode 6 but you have no idea who they are yet.

AM: Yeah, exactly, the fan favourite character doesn’t exist yet, but they’re coming.

(Laughter)

CG: Some librarian, some courier, some merchant, whatever, that just gets thought about five minutes before you write them and suddenly there’s a ton of fan art of them specifically.

AM: Yeah.

(Laughter)

CG: But that is all the questions that we have today. And so, thank you once again for answering these questions, Anna.

AM: Thank you. Thank you, friends, for submitting them.

CG: And definitely keep an eye out for future Q&A sessions if you have any more questions.

AM: If you’re new to my Patreon, I usually do these Q&As after I release an episode. I do have a stretch goal where after I reach a certain amount I can hopefully do shorter versions of them monthly. But there’s always a major one after I release an episode, so there will be another one when Episode 3 comes out.

CG: And don’t forget to check out the Discord, if any of you haven’t yet. Because if there’s one thing this fanbase loves more than anything else… All these fan favourite characters, all these questions, and all these theories, oh my goodness does the Discord love talking about them.

AM: Yeah, if you’re not familiar with Discord, but you would like a community to chat about alpha build stuff with, then the Patreon Discord is a really chill place to come and chat with people about how your playthroughs are going and any theories you might have and all that kind of stuff… And it is accessible for everyone, regardless of what tier you’re at.

CG: That is all for us. Have a wonderful day or night, wherever you are, and we will see you another time.

Thanks for listening! 💕