GW: Don't Go Back
Mystery, Suspense, Psychological, Drama
Overall View
In 2024, I joined Blocktober in X (formerly known as Twitter) for my level design portfolio. Because my level design tends to be narrative-heavy, a thought came into my mind: “Why don’t I make the story to be used for the level? It’s also good for my writing portfolio." And so, I did it.
Because Blocktober is an event held on the entire month of October, the story concept should be within topics which I have enough knowledge of to shorten the research duration and maximize the writing period.
Thankfully, I was researching various things to conceptualize the Taksa Semesta (a monster universe in Black Puddle and Future Siren) and human trafficking, so those ideas mixed in my head and formed a new concept— a kid must escape from an abandoned satanic church while being chased by human trafficking abductors.
To accommodate the level design needs where it happens inside the church, I decided to make the story when the kid (the player) enters an abandoned church to escape from abductors. Later on, he finds out the truth about this place—a satanic church—and he must escape through the underground area, which was used as a child sacrifice ritual.
Worldbuilding: Satanic Church
The story happens in a normal human world (earth) in modern days with paranormal creatures like demons, ghost & spirit. It’s not the type of story to explore different regions across the world, but the kind that digs deeply into the stories inside a certain place, so I’ll focus on explaining the backstories related to the place where the game happens.
Inspiration From Real-Life Stories
To make sure the story doesn’t feel too fantasy-like, I researched people's experiences with cults, human trafficking, and the Salem Witch Trial in general. Then, I adapted those data to deepen the story concept that's been lingering in my head.
Nessie Judge - KESADISAN SEKTE SETAN INDONESIA ft. MONGOL | #NERROR
Inspiration for: helpful customs between the cult society, different kinds of sacrifices in the ritual & hierarchy between members.
BuzzFeed Unsolved Network - The Horrifying Abuse Within Children Of God
Inspiration for: restricted environment for apprentices, brainwash them so they have no right to say ‘no’ & corrupt cult members.
Hirotada Radifan - MENJADI PENGIKUT GEREJA SETAN
Inspiration for: new apprentices must serve the cult members until they bear babies to be sacrificed for.
Soft White Underbelly - Sex Trafficking Victim interview-Clover
Inspiration for: underage kids become victims and can’t do anything because older people are dominating them.
Bailey Sarian - Witches in Salem or Something Much Darker? The Salem Witch Trials - Mystery & Makeup| Bailey Sarian
Inspiration for: the snowball effect of normal civilians & government fears to the cultist members that caused ‘witch trial’s 1&2 and all of it’s aftermath.
Backstories: Satanic Church
Because the main theme of the story is ‘satanic cult’, it’s important to detail the backstory of it to make a solid fundamental for the further writing process.
I continued to detail the next important aspect: people who are entangled in the cult, whether it’s voluntarily (normal members) or involuntarily (apprentices). I wanted to show the cruelty of power hierarchy and social injustice through the difference scouting process between the normal members and apprentices, because “righteousness can only be obtained by the riches.”.
In the early days, at the same era as the Salem Witch Trial, this cult gained tons of followers by implementing mutual benefits between high-profile members and low-profile members, but overtime the joining criteria are more favored towards the high-profile potential members since they’re prioritizing qualities over quantities, and this method made them survive two ‘witch hunt’ trials and still exist today.
While the normal cult members got profited, the ones who must bear the weight are poor kids who have no power to fight back— the apprentices, and they can't stop this cycle because the root problems (higher ups in the cult society) are out of their reaches, so it's become a repetitive cycle of hell.
Story Progression
Since it'll become the Intro to Act 1, beside introducing the player's character and the backstory, it will focus to introduce the branching story with fast-paced combat gameplay. Fun and different narrative experiences will become the final target of the story, so seamless transition between different branching route while maintaining the tension become a crucial aspect.
Inspiration From Musics
For the core story itself, it has been decided since the early days in Blocktober, but as the scriptwriting process is going through, there are some musics that greatly inspired the ambience and characters feelings.
Nathan Wagner - Angels vs Demons (Piano Version)
Inspiration for: kids who became ritual sacrifices helps the player escape through the underground tunnel.
Rituals - Jiovanni Daniel
Inspiration for: tough survival process of the player to escape from the abductors & the bobby traps in the underground area.
NF - Intro III
Inspiration for: player has multiple personalities, and the psycho one becomes dominant after one of the abductor almost kills him.
Sleeping At Last - "Eight"
Inspiration for: the realization where the player must fight back the abductors in order to survive.
Citizen Soldier - Words That Don't Exist
Inspiration for: apprentices desperation to escape from the satanic church, either die or alive.
I've made the timeline to show the relevance between the cult history, what happened near the time period of the game, and when the player is playing the game, so everything is coherent.
Player & Human NPC Concept
Player Name: Aster
Age: 13 years
Aster is an intelligent kid from a rural town. He doesn’t go to school to help her parents with their field, so he’s very close to his family. A rough childhood leads him to mature faster. He had been kidnapped once, and it traumatized him until he got dissociative identity disorder (DID) and memory loss, but his family hid it from him.
Being tricked by other people trains him to be calculative and cautious of new people, so he’s fast at catching people’s emotions.
Working in the field trained his body and stamina, so he’s more resilient than his peers. But he has asthma and low blood pressure.
He isn’t the leader of his peers, but he’s the one who makes sure everyone is safe; he’ll only take charge if the situation forces him to.
His other personality is unempathetic and solely focused on surviving because it was created to protect his past self when he was kidnapped and helpless.
Muscular Abductor: Paul
Age: 36 years
Personality: hot-headed, strict, dominant, abusive
Paul is a tall-built man who forces others to do what he wants and take charges through violence. He only hears advice from people he thinks are capable and trashes the other. But he’s very capable in the human trafficking world, causing him to have strong international connections.
Knives Abductor: Gibbs
Age: 34 years
Personality: quick thinker, loyal, easygoing, sociable
Gibbs is a free-spirited man; he only joins Paul’s group because Jay asked him to. As a former circus performer, he’s agile and incredibly good with knives. A bit docile and doesn’t care that much about everything, but will kill someone if they mess up with people he holds close.
Gun Abductor: Hans
Age: 30 years
Personality: calm, efficient, logical, wary
Hans is a quiet man who talks only when he needs to. He’s a bit of a perfectionist and too good at everything he does. He’s the right hand of Paul and the one who directs the group from the shadows without everyone noticing. He cares about his friends but at a distance, keeping everything professional.
Drunk Abductor: Jay
Age: 32 years
Personality: stupid, stoneheaded, sharp-witted, honest
Jay is a clown of the group who talks with no filter. When he’s drunk, he talks all over the place, is dumber, and can’t fight well. But if he’s sober, he has sharp instincts and reflexes that make him on par with Gibbs in close combat. He doesn’t like being told what to do, but he’ll comply.
Areas Scope
Since the story is an Intro to Act 1, and my previous project named Black Puddle happened entirely inside a building, I decided to make this story happens on exterior setting, specifically: a small seashore city. I will also incorporate bits of nature areas before entering the city so it doesn't feels boring.
Mission Flow Version 1
In the earliest until mid Blocktober, I was fixated with two game mechanic ideas: “There are some rooms that can be only entered once, so the player must investigate the areas thoroughly before it close.”, and “It has a certain place to hide like a closet in Outlast.”
On paper, this idea was interesting, but the more I did the level blockout iteration, the more experiences humbled me that this idea created a suspense and gore-like feeling that doesn't intended to be in this area, and has high risk of rushing the player which doesn't go well with narrative-heavy theme. So, I scraped this idea and made a new one on the next iteration.
The hiding space doesn’t affected the mission flow, so the flowchart is focused on the narrative progression.
Beside the game mission, I also considered the optimistic personality of the player’s character to make the game beats.
Game Beats Version 1
Mission Flow Version 2
The mission has adapted so it's more narrative focus without making major changes in the story flow.
The second version used the basic exploration and finding clues-style. Since it has an escaping theme, there'll be ‘hide from the abductors’ events but it'll use crouch and holding breath mechanics just like Until Dawn.
After checking back and forth between this mission, story flow, and the level design, this concept turned out to be suitable with every aspects of it. So, it continued into the process of making script and barks.
The transition between one story to another has also becomes more seamless and the optimistic personality of the character has also been toned down to shows it's character development & made the story more believable.
Game Beats Version 2
Script & Barks
From my previous projects (Black Puddle, Future Siren & Snow Church), I learned that making tables and descriptive novels are inefficient, so I decided to directly make the script format in this project. Because of that, the script only has two versions: the first version was done at the end of October 2024 for the Blocktober, while the second one is the polished version, which was done in early 2025.
Things I’ve Learned
Getting inspired by real-life things is normal, but some aspects (culture, history, religion, etc.) tend to have more sensitive boundaries. To avoid problems in the future, mix fictional ideas inside it so the player subconsciously understands the story is fictional. So, it’s okay to tweak things here and there.
Sometimes how the story is going is heavily affected by the environment that has been designed from the start, so the writing must adapt with it. Make sure to deeply understand other teams’ works (if you’re not working solo) to avoid unnecessary revisions because of misunderstanding.
The story build-up before the peak tension must be reasonable. Minimize loopholes and sudden progression that made the player harder to catch up on what’s happening. Treat the story like a roller coaster, not a teleport machine.
Problems that hinder the players from getting what they want are our best friends. It keeps the story and tension going, but don’t overuse it. Give them breathing time and rewards so the game becomes fun and enjoyable rather than a marathon of punishment.
Sometimes, the project timeline prohibits you from doing further improvement to make everything perfect—that’s totally normal. Adapt to it and optimize the time. That way, even though the story won’t become a magnum opus, we can deliver the best output within our capacity.
Compromising ideas and changing them so they’ll become more feasible within the team’s skill set and current situation are crucial. Understand the development process, put down the ego, and focus on adapting the ideas compared to becoming a blockhead that insisted on something too idealistic & unachievable.