Dhruin
SasqWatch
Jay Barnson writes about developing the story for Frayed Knights:
More information.Originally, Frayed Knights was intended as a single game, which I expected to clock in at around sixteen hours of gameplay. It grew. It grew a lot. Even after splitting it into three parts, the first chapter – Frayed Knights: The Skull of S’makh-Daon – is about thirty hours of solid gameplay.
The original story had to stretch to fit. It wasn’t too hard to fit things into the first game, with a bit of expansion. The conclusion is largely worked out for the final game, though it, too, requires a bit more fleshing out to fit the larger canvas. The “middle” act – which I now recognize as being a little weak to begin with – was inadequate to the task of supporting a stand-alone game. I’ve had to re-work a lot of it to make it (I hope!) a really enjoyable and compelling story in its own right.
A critical goal for the second games’ story is it must be a stand-alone tale: A player must be able to play this game “cold” without even realizing it had a predecessor, and not feel like they missed anything. At the same time, there should be some rewards for the Frayed Knights veterans where they get some payoffs for some background elements set up in The Skull of S’makh-Daon. It has to reach a satisfying conclusion at the end of the game, wrapping up the primary storyline and only leaving a few threads hanging for the final title to tie up.