Stray: The Wayward Path

Stray: The Wayward Path is a 3rd-person action-adventure game for the PC, where you play as Aapo, a small boy with a magical grappling hook. Your people were wiped out years ago after a volcanic eruption, leaving only you and your caretaker, Kunara, to fend for yourselves. Terrible creatures roam the wild, and corrupting magic threatens to consume the world.
One night, Kunara vanishes; left alone, you must brave a tumultuous land and find your only ally. Learn the history of your people, uncover a sacred prophecy, and stamp out the corruption before it's too late.

Role: Narrative Lead
Team Size: 14
Platform: PC
Engine: Unreal Engine 4

Find the game here!

The Pitches

When I was assigned as Stray's narrative lead, the game's premise was simple: A boy and his companion are lost in a broken world festering with corruptive energies. The companion disappears, and the boy must search for them; this serves as the inciting incident. However, the game's plot, the characters' relationships, and the world's historical context had yet to be decided.
The first goal was to lay a foundation. I proposed drafting a series of pitches to present to the team. I outlined five ideas, narrowed them down to three, and then wrote a pitch for each idea. You can find these pitches on the right.
Pitch #3 won by a landslide; a volcanic setting appealed to our artists and level designers, and the characters' relationship felt the most potent out of the three.

The Narrative Bible

After committing to our premise, I began work on Stray's narrative bible. This document was integral to preserving the world's core details and upholding narrative consistency among the team.
The prioritized order exists mainly as the document is written: before I delved into who the boy and his companion were, I wanted to define the world around them, beginning with the volcano, the Ampato's history, and their relationship in history. The initial narrative specified that a war had occurred in the land, so I developed an ideological conflict that led to the volcano's eruption. Jenova Chen's Journey was a vital inspiration, where wordless hints at the world's violent past litter the levels. Just as the robed figures also underwent a civil war, so did the Ampato in Stray, and both are communicated through environmental cues and level construction.
Fleshing out the world made it much easier to conceive who Aapo and Kunara were: Kunara was a shamanic leader who miraculously survived the volcanic cataclysm, and Aapo was a newborn she'd found during the eruption. The two survived and were now left alone in the world. Kunara's motivation began to take shape; she'd taken little action to stop her people's conflict and felt immense guilt over their decimation. Aapo, meanwhile, undergoes a classic coming-of-age story befitting the game's smaller scale.

The Golden Path

The next step was outlining the game's golden path, the essential plot points the player encounters throughout its progression.
I wanted to relay information about the game's past in a non-linear fashion, inspired by horror games like Silent Hill 2 and Until Dawn. Though Stray is not a horror game, I still wanted the player to feel intrigued by the world's past. Journey relays its past in chronological order, but Stray has a more predominant narrative: that of Aapo searching for Kunara. So Stray's in-game past should be more of a puzzle for more narrative-invested players to piece together.
It felt natural to divide the game's events into two chronological orders: the world's history and the game's progression. That way, I could monitor the player's linear progression while having greater control over the details the player encountered.
Of all the narrative documents, this was the most subject to change. Our narrative had to work within our short semester, so I included pertinent details that could be removed without hindering the story.
For example, we debated for about a month whether we should include two choice-based endings at the end, where Aapo could volunteer to sacrifice himself. We were enamored with giving the player a choice at the game's conclusion, but as we grappled with how that world functions ludically and narratively, we grew concerned we were providing the player a choice just for the choice's sake. So we cut it, and it smoothed the storytelling considerably.

Ludo-Narrative Beats

Once the golden path was complete, it was time to start designing levels. Our level designers required a beat-by-beat rundown of how each level would flow. They could create visual diagrams of these beats from here, providing a more straightforward representation of how the game's story would flow.

The Script

The penultimate thing to tackle was the script. We wanted to keep it barebones; the game focuses on enjoying the open spaces the game has to offer. Therefore, my job was to make the dialogue snappy, flavorful, and narratively informative.
The dialogue frames the game: In the beginning, the dialogue informs the player of the narrative's contexts in ways visuals cannot accomplish, and the end serves as the necessary denouement. The game's middle also gets away with being communicated without dialogue.
Regardless, it was crucial to establish the relationship between Kunara and Aapo through these mundane interactions; that way, the player would establish a relationship with the status quo and feel Aapo's desire to find Kunara when she disappeared.

Concept Art of the journal by Jocelyn Bedell

The Journal

The last puzzle piece was the journal. A collaborative project between our lead artist and me, the journal records the narrative beats the player has already encountered and calls attention to narratively important details via a notification.
Journals aren't new in video games, but 2016's Night in the Woods revolutionizes the idea. The protagonist, Mae Borowski, keeps a journal throughout the game. Instead of writing straight prose through her voice or the narrator's, the journal is riddled with her nonsensical and juvenile doodles like all our old High School composition books. Remember those?
I wanted Aapo to do the same. He's a 10-year-old boy in a grand, open world tackling the unknown. He has no concept of his people's violent past or the nature of the volcano's corruption, but by using his journal to digest it, we—the players—learn alongside him.