Lamplight City Narrative Commentary, Part 2: Heightening the conflict
This is a series of spoiler-free (or -lite) transcripts from my portion of the Lamplight City developer commentary, which includes behind-the-scenes insights and anecdotes about the story writing and editing process. Start with Part 1.
Francisco [Gonzalez, creator of Lamplight City] is a pretty nice guy. He’s so nice that his niceness comes through in everything he does — including writing characters, who sometimes end up a little too nice themselves as a result.
Drama is about conflict. One of my frequent notes on early drafts of the script was that everyone was being too damn polite all the time, and that we needed to allow the characters to be nastier to each other when the situation called for it. We needed them to sometimes be selfish, to misunderstand one another, to say mean, hurtful things, even if they apologized and made up later.
This was surprisingly hard to do! It turns out we’re both pretty nice people, and pushing the dialogue in this direction to heighten conflict was challenging for both of us.
The first conversation between Miles and the voice of dead Bill was one place where we definitely needed the gloves to come off. Miles’s mental anguish is the driving force of the whole story, so it needed to be clear from the start that having this voice in his head was a deeply disturbing state of affairs and a constant source of tension and anxiety. In the first draft, Miles’s attitude came off as little more than mild disgruntlement. So we sharpened the exchange considerably, and probably could have pushed it even further than we did.
Next: The process of script editing
Back to Part 1
