UNTIL DAWN (2024)
Sony / Ballistic Moon
NARRATIVE DESIGNER / WRITER / CINEMATICS ARTIST
UNTIL DAWN - Initial Development
Writing for Until Dawn was one of the most unique and challenging experiences I have had. Being brought onto an already existing and beloved IP was always going to be a difficult undertaking for a narrative designer; I felt like a fan, picked out of a crowd of more knowledgeable and dedicated fans, and knew that I had to learn this story and it’s characters inside out.
I spent much of my spare time reading and getting my hands on anything to do with the original game’s story: interviews, behind the scenes footage, fan theories, anything that would help me understand the process of how the narrative came to be. Thankfully, I had managed to get hold of legacy documents including what I assumed to be the final draft of the screenplay, which stood at 700+ pages and over the years I read that at least 3 times. The details and layers to the story has forever been my favourite aspect of working on this game, and with each day I uncovered something I didn’t know before, perhaps a background detail, a prop off screen, a deleted dialogue line, things that a certain subreddit would fight tooth and nail to get their hands on.
From my first days working on this project I was aware of several key narrative elements that we wished to tackle in the coming years. The largest and most consuming one being the retelling of the prologue. The original had not gotten the time and resources it needed to really elevate it to the level of the later chapters of the game, and this was due to changes in the story during production, removing certain elements, restructuring and editing around what they had already motion captured and recorded. From the structure to the legacy documents, it was very clear that the prologue went through multiple edits and iterations towards the end of the original project, and they hadn’t landed on exactly what they originally envisioned. The second half of the prologue was also mostly recycled animation from other chapters and features confusing moments (Why was Beth running and looking behind her scared of a non existent threat?), so the opportunity to really give it some attention was afforded to us - but not without our own limitations.
The technical achievement of this project should not be understated. A huge amount of production time was spent finding ways to convert the original animations, cameras, lighting and sets of the original. To this day I am still not certain how the team managed to take all these assets and elements, from an engine we had no documentation on, create a pipeline that converted everything into an entirely different engine, and tackle the never ending list of issues that persisted from the original! Not to mention the endless amount of complications and problems that arose from this huge technical undertaking. I will never not be proud of just how well the team, a tenth of the size of the original, did in this project.
UNTIL DAWN - Constraints and Challenges
How do you insert and develop a story that is, by design, a closed web without loose ends? Until Dawn, is THE narrative branching story. It may not be the first but whether it is the original 2015 or the enhanced and rebuilt 2024, it will always be known as genre defining, with a dedicated fan base. I do believe the story has many flaws and issues, the main being the skewed distribution of character screen time. It is an unfortunate truth that several characters have a distinct lack of play time and story beats in comparison to the rest of the cast. I knew from the moment I began working on this project that the question of “new scenes” would be unavoidable.
The sad truth was, new large scenes were always out of the question.The logistics of bringing back actors who worked on the original 10-13 years prior, working around natural voice changes, body changes that would affect the rigging of the models, performance and characterisation changes, the cost, the legal contracts that would need to be worked out, and much more, never stood a chance of getting passed the top. For me personally, as much as I would have liked to have expanded roles and stories for specific characters, even from a writing perspective, the butterfly effect of even adding a small scene, could balloon astronomically. In a game based around choice and consequences, where characters are at specific places at specific times, meant that even adding a small scene of two characters meeting briefly in a shared location, would introduce a huge amount of plot issues down the line.
However, what we could work on without impacting the original direction of the narrative, were specific moments in the story; a prologue, a restructure of a specific scene and even the addition of an extra ending, that was a fan favourite request. Constraints were still in place, such as having to work around pre-existing voice lines but especially in the prologue, it allowed for a large amount of visual story telling.
UNTIL DAWN - Expanding upon Characterisation
Characterisation, is one of my favourite aspects of narrative. When you have a cast of characters who are developed and brought to life so well, that you can begin to place them in made up situations and understand their personal reactions and actions to certain scenarios, then you are on the path to a strong character. While I may not have been able to add new scenes and situations for many of these characters, I could reinterpret certain events in order to embellish specific characteristics or allow for certain flaws and strengths to shine through. My favourite and I believe most successful embodiment of this was Samantha Giddings (Sam), the stereotyped ‘final girl’ of Until Dawn.
In the reworked prologue, I was able to tackle two issues that always felt ‘off’ to me, in relation to Sam as a character. In the very early stages of Until Dawn’s production, Sam was part of the inciting incident, ‘the prank’. Her dialogue lines were originally said as she revealed herself and tried to stop the prank going too far, announcing the cruel nature of the joke to her best friend Hannah. These lines were later repurposed to show Sam busting in late to the prank and stopping it before it went too far, but not arriving in time to stop the humiliation completely.
Now the main issue I always had with this was simple. Sam knew where the prank was taking place, she knew where she needed to be to stop it and intercept Hannah, and based on the geography of the lodge that gets revealed throughout the game, it asks the question ‘How did Sam not find Hannah before she made it to the guest room?’, the answer, plot contrivance. Although this is perhaps a nit-pick, once you notice it, it does bury under your skin as a by-product of repurposing the dialogue for a purpose that wasn’t the original intention. The more encompassing problem this made for me, was the creation of a generally flawless character. Sam has little to no faults throughout the game and so by reframing Sam’s intentions to be a by stander and not getting involved in the prank it allows for a starting point of growth for Sam, one that the original material naturally allows for her to grow from.
We often find Sam standing aside, not joining in fights or actively segregating herself for her own comfort and seclusion throughout the game, but there are two specific examples of development from this bystander attribute, that retrospectively gain more weight from this reworked moment in the prologue. Sam actively stands up for her friend, Emily, when she is threatened by a deadly situation, going as far as to physically stop her other close friend, Mike, from raising his arm with a gun trained on Emily. This feels so much more impactful now that she knows the devastation of her inactivity earlier in the story. This time she intervenes and you can feel the thoughts of Sam racing through her mind, however she is not strong enough to fully stop the escalation of the situation, whether Emily lives or dies, the result for Sam is yet another scenario where she feels like she could have done something to stop it from going too far.
This is brought full circle in the finale of the game, Sam’s heroism comes from her bravery and active influence on the situation, buying time for her friends to escape while actively staying in danger, with the very creature that was once the friend she feels she betrayed. In the perfect ending, all of her friends get out before she makes a final dash for the light switch, turning it on, mirroring the exact moment from the prologue of her turning on the light, changing Hannah’s life forever. However this time, Sam’s actions save her surviving friends, and release her once best friend, redeeming herself from a moment she has thought about every day for a year.
This change was important to me, as for a character who finds herself the ire of much targeting from Josh, it always sat weirdly with the community at large that she was so heavily focused and preyed on, by a man who would have known her only involvement in the prank was to stop it. Therefore reframing it as having a moment of weakness and allowing it to go ahead but still having the emotional intelligence to intervene, allows for minimal narrative changes but a much larger spectrum for Sam to grow. I don’t feel like I could have portrayed this story with as much care had I not been limited to restructuring and using the existing VO.
There was a huge amount of work that I did across the years I worked on this game. Unfortunately most of it falls under NDAs and there is a fine line between explaining my own personal work on this project and exploring aspects that I’m sure would not be taken kindly being out in the public domain. At the time of writing I am working on a couple of blog posts that talk more about the story of Until Dawn, the positives and negatives from my perspective, as well as a look into other areas I worked on such as the Design of the Totems and newly added Hunger Totems, and finally a discussion on the cinematic work I did across the game, exploring the rationale behind some camera changes in cinematics.