The Making Of...
How Echodog Games played its conversation cards right and created Signs Of The Sojourner
Format PC, PS4, Switch, Xbox One Developer/publisher Echodog Games Origin US Release 2020
As it takes friction to polish a gemstone, so even the most seemingly perfectly formed games only come to be so through months and years of iteration. Their constituent parts abrade one another until eventually those coarse edges are worn down to fit smoothly together. Echodog Games’ debut is so holistic in its design, its mechanics and story so tightly intertwined, that it’s almost hard to imagine in its nascent form. But like every game, it started with a rough idea that only began to resemble its final shape after some time.
Designer Dyala Kattan-Wright founded the LA-based developer in 2018, before recruiting art director Holly Rothrock and technical lead Zach Vinless – with whom she’d worked at mobile game studio Nix Hydra – shortly afterward. While the team came together quickly, she admits her original pitch was rather vague: a card game where the deck is your character. “We spent six to nine months prototyping ideas, [asking] ‘What does that actually mean?’” Kattan-Wright says. But from the team’s very earliest conversations, the idea of a card game reflecting the idea of travelling and encountering new cultures – and how a person might be changed by those experiences – was already in place. “We’ve all lived abroad and been able to travel from a place of privilege,” she says. “But also, at least personally for me – like, my family are refugees and immigrants. Even though that’s not something I’ve experienced, when we were thinking about the different ways and reasons people travel and how that sort of intermingling of cultures impacts people, those were the kind of pillars we started building around.”
She says it took a long time to settle on the kind of game Signs Of The Sojourner would eventually become. Early mechanical prototypes drew from games such as Slay The Spire and Hearthstone, and were much more strategy-oriented as a result. More than six months were spent on what Rothrock calls “a pretty thorough vertical slice of a game” that was eventually completely scrapped. “It was a little heartbreaking,” she continues, “but I think ultimately it was for the best.”
The biggest problem was that these games were built with confrontation in mind, whereas Signs had been conceived to be more convivial. Every approach they tried along these lines felt combative, while Kattan-Wright had always imagined something more collaborative. “It always felt like you were having a battle and not really working together to have a conversation.”
Sure, at times exchanges with more defensive or brittle characters can feel like a struggle, but the game needed to accommodate cooperative chats alongside the more antagonistic ones. “And then on top of that, one of the biggest complaints – we had friends playtesting all along, especially Holly’s husband, who played every version – was just the mental load of having complex mechanics to strategise around and also trying to follow this deep story. It was just too much,” Kattan-Wright says. As a result, testers would focus either on the systems or the story, depending on where their interests lay, but rarely both. “People weren’t taking away what we wanted them to take away from the game,” Rothrock adds. “They were thinking about energy points or their inventory or something else – anything other than the narrative – and that’s why we had to kind of strip everything away.”
Once Echodog simplified things to the intuitive, straightforward symbol-matching approach used in the finished game, things started to click into place. Each character has their own deck, composed of cards which are designed to reflect their personality and the way they respond in conversations. If a character has a lot of red circles in their deck, they tend to be more empathetic and observant and will thus be more deferential. Cyan-coloured diamonds, meanwhile, are reserved for the curious, creative types, while someone who plays a lot of blue squares will be more direct and forthright.
Kattan-Wright says this idea came about fairly early in development, though she was keen to avoid the pitfall of anyone effectively being defined by two or three attributes. “That’s really oversimplifying things,” she says. “It’s like, ‘diplomatic or logical’ aren’t necessarily always paired together, right? Someone can be logical but not at all diplomatic. But we decided to pair these broader terms together so we weren’t saying, OK: here’s your one defining personality trait.” The dominant symbols in these hands might reflect the prevailing characteristics of the people you encounter on the road, but as abstract as it may seem when you’re looking to match circles triangles or spirals, the smattering of narrative context and economical interstitial dialogue helps distinguish each and every member of Signs’ extended cast. Some shrewd refinements to card descriptions helped in that regard: Kattan-Wright wanted to use adjectives that didn’t have strong positive or negative connotations (“We say stubborn, rather than hard-headed”) to give the player room to interpret character, motivation and intent.
Yet if there’s a single mechanic that really is the making of Signs, it’s the decision to force the player to swap out one of their cards for one held by their conversation partner (‘opponent’ isn’t quite the right word, even in the testiest exchanges). In some cases, the choice is obvious: you can pick a card that offers more flexible options than one you already own, or perhaps one that also conveys a special ability, letting you come to an accord more easily, or letting you play another card to prevent your opposite number cutting you off. But combined with the decision to make you return home every so often, at times you’ll find yourself agonising over the choices: filling your deck with symbols alien to your friends back home, for example, will make it harder to talk to them. Yet arranging your cards so you have a wider array of symbols doesn’t necessarily pay off. Trying to cater to all eventualities can leave you struggling to win over anyone: a people-pleasing approach might let you lead with a strong opening gambit, but
“IT ALWAYS FELT LIKE YOU WERE HAVING A BATTLE AND NOT REALLY WORKING TOGETHER TO HAVE A CONVERSATION”
risks leaving you short of options as the conversation continues.
The card-swapping mechanic came about from a simple desire to control the player’s deck size, Rothrock explains. “Because we didn’t want you to have, like, 50 cards. Limiting the card amount really makes you feel the changes – it puts a lot more weight on the decisions.” But while the story was always meant to be about heading out from home, none of the early prototypes explored the notion of coming back. “We just started off having you exchange a card every time to see how that felt. And once we started playing with that, it was like: OK, this works really well, but having you return? That really highlights it.” As Rothrock puts it, “We wanted Elias, your best friend, to be like a foil for you to really feel that growth.” That idea was in place before the story fully took shape: originally, you played a character who’d gone to college and come home, with the associated disconnect between you and your childhood friends. “But there are a lot of slice-of-life games, so we decided to try to go in a different direction,” Kattan-Wright explains.
Then came the special abilities, all of which reflect a type of conversational gambit. Accommodate, for example, duplicates the symbols of the previous card in a sequence, while Clarify can be inserted between matching cards to push you closer to an accord, and Reconsider lets you discard your current cards in the hope of drawing a more favourable hand.
These began with Echodog considering concepts that would work with the core matching mechanic, before the team worked out how each would fit the theme of the game. “It was like: how does it actually feel to use them?” Rothrock says. “We went through a few iterations of really just naming them differently, and seeing what really reflected how that behaviour represented a conversational move.” As the characters were fleshed out, their decks were shuffled, ensuring their cards reflected their personality. “In development, we had a lot of ‘all Accommodate’ conversations, which is basically where you’re just nodding and smiling at each other,” Kattan-Wright laughs.
But that doesn’t happen too often. Some characters become impediments to specific plot threads you might be following: not every conversation can be ‘won’, and it’s unwise to think of exchanges that way anyway. Instead, you get more realistic scenarios where you visit a new town and find yourself labouring to make a connection with everyone you find there. It’s never made explicit, but when two symbols don’t match, you can imagine yourself having made a slip of the tongue, or having perhaps stumbled across a topic that makes the other person uncomfortable. Or maybe they’re simply in an argumentative mood, and you come to understand they’re not really in the right frame of mind for polite chit-chat.
Nor will you be, on occasion. The longer you spend out on the road, the more your deck will fill with fatigue cards, leaving you too tired to make small talk. The team experimented with different resources, Kattan-Wright notes: at first it was homesickness that gradually took over. “Fuel…” Rothrock interjects. “Fuel was another one, yeah,” Kattan-Wright continues. “But ultimately, we didn’t want to have all these other resource systems for you to keep track of, like fuel where you have to worry about replenishing it or whatever. And so fatigue really fit well, both by not adding too much complexity but also thematically fitting really well with the idea of travelling. Like, when you get off the plane, even if you’re excited to see your best friend, you don’t always have the energy for that kind of thing.” Rothrock agrees that it’s a good way to tie everything back to the idea of how life on the road is affecting you. “Everything ends up back in your hand. And you don’t have to keep track of that, because you see it in your deck.”
We suggest that this pinch of frustration is what ultimately makes the game’s systems and story sing so harmoniously – though even on an audio-only Skype call we can detect Kattan-Wright wrinkling her nose slightly. “There was obviously quite a lot of time spent on balancing it. I would say that, at least with our playtesters, there was some frustration expressed, but never really to the degree we had once outside folks [started] playing it.” But as they released beta versions and gathered Discord feedback, the studio tried to resist softening those edges, before questioning whether it was the right thing to do. “I’m glad we didn’t kind of cave and make things too easy,” she continues. “One of the core points of the game is that you can’t go everywhere and be everything to everyone. And I think it would really have undermined a lot of the themes of the game if you could. There was a little bit of second-guessing ourselves, at least on my end. But in the end, we stuck with what we set out to do. And I’m glad we did, even if that means it’s not a game for everyone.”
But then you return home, and your dog Thunder – whose cards all match with whatever hand you throw at it, because, well, it’s a dog – is there to greet you, and suddenly all is right with the world (and your fatigue cards are removed from the deck). “Thunder is actually Holly’s dog,” Kattan-Wright says. “Yeah, he’s real!” Rothrock laughs. “I think from the start we knew we needed a dog in there, because we all love dogs,” Kattan-Wright chips in. “I mean, that’s why the name of the company is Echodog!” her colleague replies. They both laugh, and we join in. Clearly, we’ve all reached an accord; we can only hope they’ve gained as much from the experience as we have.