Radiance tells the story of Clarus, a human test subject tasked with reactivating the emergency systems aboard a research vessel under attack. The game is fully voiced and subtitled. It features intro and outro cutscenes that provide context and objectives for the player. Adding to the narrative are collectible datapads that are scattered around the map. These optional collectibles get added to the player’s database, and provide additional context, giving information on the player character, setting, and Radiance’s backstory.
Developing the Narrative
We knew early on in Module 3 that we wanted to provide players with a mysterious narrative that they’d piece together as they played. We would provide players with essential, core narrative through cutscenes and dialogue, with deeper lore and backstory revealed through collectible datalogs scattered throughout the game. This is a common storytelling technique in third-person action adventure games, with games such Control, Alan Wake, and Prey doing similarly. This combination of overt core and obtuse supporting narrative remained in place throughout development to final release, but the contents of the core narrative underwent several transformations.
Initially, when we were going to be producing a longer vertical slice with more varied environments, we’d planned to interweave narrative and gameplay more tightly. We’d planned to have the player start in a test chamber, with a voiceover coaching the player through a series of tests that would serve as the game’s tutorial. Midway through these tests, the Erudition would come under attack. Scientists would evacuate, and it would then be up to the player to eradicate forces of Darkness from the rest of the research platform.

The Hero's Journey. The first three points (highlighted) were initially intended to be included in Radiance's vertical slice. This changed when the vertical slice became a prologue.
We’d planned to incorporate several steps of the Hero’s Journey (Skolnick, 2014), with the attack midway through the tests serving as the narrative’s inciting incident (ref). To ensure I got to grips with the story being told and the characters we were introducing, I wrote a full synopsis and character briefs (these briefs later formed the backbone of the briefs given to our voice actors). Having a full synopsis would allow me to write datalogs that foreshadowed things to come, ensuring that even the narrative in our vertical slice alluded to a wider world and the more complex narrative that would be present in a theoretical full game.
I also developed a backstory. While this backstory wouldn’t be initially relayed to the player, they’d be able to piece this together through datalogs and - in the theoretical full version of Radiance – they'd have a good picture of what happened by the end of the game.

Radiance's backstory
Scope Change & Narrative Prologue
Due to a slower than expected development velocity, we reduced the scope of our vertical slice midway through production, going from having a sprawling map to having only a few rooms to play within. I began looking at ways to adjust the narrative without requiring a full rewrite, and – after a suggestion from Zuby Ahmed – decided that our vertical slice would become a prologue to Radiance. This meant much of the game’s backstory remained intact, as did established character briefs and art direction, but allowed me to create a short, standalone story segment with its own beginning, middle, and end. Where previously the attack on the Erudition was planned to start during the tutorial, now the attack is already underway as the game begins. Clarus – our player character – is a scientific experiment who gets activated in order to restore power to the Erudition’s emergency systems. Julia – chief researcher in charge of the experiments involving Clarus – tells him what to do. Prologues like this have been used in games previously, and often feature a character at the height of their powers who is then stripped of their powers at the start of the story proper. Notable examples include the opening levels of Star Wars: The Force Unleashed (Lucasarts; 2008) and God of War 2 (Santa Monica Studio, 2007). If taking Radiance from a vertical slice to full production, this is the approach I would suggest, stripping Clarus back so that he begins with only his telekinetic ability.
Julia is only telling Clarus part of the story, however. Activating the emergency systems will allow the escape pods to launch, but Clarus won’t be on them. This provides a twist that will impact the player, and a cliff-hanger ending that would entice players to continue to the theoretical full game.
Between this beginning and ending, during mid-play dialogue, Clarus asks about the location of the escape pods and whether there’s a source of G-Light (the substance Clarus needs to survive) aboard them. Julia answers quickly and sheepishly, hinting to the player that she might not be telling the whole truth. Astute players might pick up on what Julia’s doing before reaching the final cutscene, providing a degree of satisfaction when they’re proven right.
Character & Script Development
To get started in developing Clarus and Julia into well-rounded characters, I had to figure out what each character wants. For this I used the Pyra-Grid (Bryant and Giglio, 2015), determining character traits, goals, and more. Narratively, Clarus' main objective is to figure out what's going on. Julia's main objective is to manipulate Clarus into helping her and her colleagues escape. I also needed to make sure each character’s personality and traits shone through in the script. This was easier to do with Julia than with Clarus, because Clarus starts out not remembering very much about who he is or why he’s aboard the Erudition, and initially doesn’t display too much of a personality. While this made scriptwriting a little trickier, this does make him more of a blank slate, which is easier for players to project themselves onto. If we were to develop Radiance from a vertical slice into a full game, I’d expand Clarus’ story to slowly reveal who he used to be, and his personality would grow throughout the game to be more well-rounded and human to reflect this. The beginning of this change is subtly reflected in the dialogue of the vertical slice, with Clarus initially talking in incomplete sentences and going on to form full thoughts.

Julia begins by being supportive and encouraging towards Clarus, but as time ticks down she gets more impatient, a hint of panic appearing in her voice. The vertical slice ends with the cliff-hanger twist that Clarus was never going to be aboard the escape pods. All of the work he’s done was so that Julia and the other scientists could escape. Furthermore, Julia’s parting line outright tells Clarus that she values him as a scientific experiment and nothing more. This plays into the trope of the ruthless scientist who’s kind to people only as long as they’re useful.

In a theoretical full version of Radiance, we’d develop this story further, with Clarus now forced to find an alternative way off the Erudition, bearing in mind that he’ll need a strong source of G-Light with him to avoid fading away forever. When writing the script, I had to bear in mind that certain aspects of the game’s features and mechanics were likely to change. Chief amongst these was the length of the loop, which we knew would be a key variable during final balancing. Because of this, I avoided making specific reference to quantities of time in dialogue. I also designed some dialogue interactions with break points in mind, so a single scene could be split into two separate scenes if there wasn’t enough gameplay time to fit the full scene in one go. For example, the first line in the script excerpt above could be split from the following two lines and played separately if required.
Comments