Hey everyone!
Before we proceed with talking about game mechanics in future posts, today we want to talk about the story in Critical Shift and explain one important decision we made early in development. When we started building the game together with our narrative designer Guiltythree, we quickly faced a classic question. Should the story branch with lots of player choices, or should it remain a single focused narrative?
In theory, branching stories sound great. But in practice they require a huge amount of additional content. If you want those choices to feel real, every path needs proper development, dialogue, cutscenes, and consequences. Otherwise the branches become shallow or misleading and the main story becomes weaker.
As an indie team we had to be honest about what we could do well. Instead of spreading our efforts across many smaller narrative paths, we decided to focus all of our resources on one strong story.
That story is built around eleven playable agents. Each of them plays an important role in the narrative and in the events that unfold during the campaign. Rather than optional side characters, they act as pieces of a larger puzzle that slowly comes together as the story progresses. Our campaign contains around thirty missions, and many of them involve specific characters who are essential to the situation. Players still have freedom in how they approach missions and which other agents they bring along, but the narrative itself follows a clear path.
This, actually, helps gameplay. Players often stick to a favorite squad, but by occasionally requiring certain agents we encourage experimentation with different abilities, builds, and tactical combinations. Agents who skipped the previous mission can also receive bonuses, which adds another reason to rotate the team.
We also invested heavily in storytelling itself. The game includes a large amount of narrative content, with roughly an hour of hand drawn 2D cutscenes as well as many scenes built directly in the game engine. And of course we tried to keep some mystery. The world of Critical Shift is rooted in science mystery full of strange phenomena, so not every question receives a clear answer. Some parts of the story are meant to be interpreted by players themselves.
We hope you will enjoy discovering how all those pieces come together when you play the game :)