Let's do a thread of Harding sketches and talk about the crazy Twine file I made. There was a visual novel style version of Veilguard's earliest story outline that was written by Trick and the writers and assembled in Twine by me. These black and white sketches are what populated the Twine file. - ThreadSky

nickthornborrow.bsky.social • 100 days ago

Let's do a thread of Harding sketches and talk about the crazy Twine file I made. There was a visual novel style version of Veilguard's earliest story outline that was written by Trick and the writers and assembled in Twine by me. These black and white sketches are what populated the Twine file.

1 / 4

Comments

nickthornborrow.bsky.social•100 days ago

Let's just pause and enjoy these two drawings side by side.

nickthornborrow.bsky.social•100 days ago

Back to the Twine file. It was meant to emulate the flow of the narrative and broadcast that narrative out to the wider team. "Here's what we're trying to make." The challenge I put on myself was to reflect the narrative branching we intended to build.

nickthornborrow.bsky.social•100 days ago

So I did what no one asked for. You couldn't simply plow through the story. Side missions would become available on a cadence and would be assigned to numbers on a dice roll (a certain amount of variability in side content was planned in the early days of Veilguard).

nickthornborrow.bsky.social•100 days ago

You would need to accumulate enough trust with a certain number of factions, and/or progress enough of a companion's story line in order to advance the twine version of the game simulating the rough gating envisioned by designers and writers at the time. (This was a hugely collaborative effort).

nickthornborrow.bsky.social•100 days ago

Finally the twine file was sent out to the team. I was frustrated while working on DA2 and DA:I where team members had no idea what the narrative of the narrative-based game we were making was. It would lead to disjointed decisions being made completely divorced from the efforts of other teams.

nickthornborrow.bsky.social•100 days ago

Like bright and cheery level art being constructed where a world ending apocalyptic magical event was occurring. With Veilguard, it was the earliest into a project where the narrative team could be like "Hey team, it'll change along the way, but this is the story we're going to be iterating on." END

fresiann44.bsky.social•100 days ago

Amazing. Canon from now on in my head.

sonoftheparson.bsky.social•100 days ago

Love all the Harding content! I've seen sketches of cut romance scenes with Lucanis, on a gondola or in a hot spring of sorts. Are there any scenes like that of Lace? Cut romance scenes I mean.

nickthornborrow.bsky.social•100 days ago

No, I've posted all the romance drawings for Harding in this thread.

thelittlestgiant.bsky.social•100 days ago

I really appreciate that you've been sharing all this with us, makes my day a little brighter when they come up. And I've enjoyed learning so much!

leliwardens.bsky.social•100 days ago

Love all of this so much gahhh. Is the Twine file something that could be released + playable atp?

nickthornborrow.bsky.social•100 days ago

No, sorry. It was very much an internal facing thing.

imatotach.bsky.social•100 days ago

Would it be okay to ask to remove "sign-in required" to see the content? I was "reposting" your work on reddit, including 3-4 illustrations as a sample and link to your original post for more (I hope that's fine?). But some people do not have and for whatever the reason do not want account on bsky.

nickthornborrow.bsky.social•100 days ago

Didn’t even realize that was a thing. I’ve gone ahead and changed my settings. Thanks for pointing it out.

astraltadpoled.bsky.social•100 days ago

Love all of these, thanks so much for sharing this! Was there more to the lyrium-touch plot line in this visual novel that wasn't just offscreen?

nickthornborrow.bsky.social•100 days ago

Not that I'm aware. I'm telling on myself here: I haven't finished playing Veilguard yet and I've kept myself in the dark about how the story has changed since I left BioWare in 2022.

astraltadpoled.bsky.social•100 days ago

That's alright, thanks for answering!

Comments

Posting Rules

Reply