The Making Of...
THE MAKING OF...
How Inkle built a nebula of ancient civilisations and lost languages in archaeological adventure Heaven’s Vault
How Inkle translated millennia of human history into a unique archaeological adventure
At the beginning, there was Stargate SG-1. In late 2014, less than half a year from the release of the critically acclaimed 80 Days, Inkle founders Jon Ingold and Joseph Humfrey landed on space archaeology as the theme for their next game, inspired by Stargate and driven by the realisation that this was still unexplored territory for videogames. After initially experimenting with a comic-book presentation that let you move the camera around static panels, the pair knew they wanted players to move through a 3D environment – something new to Inkle games – and talk to characters, but weren’t sure what they’d do in between. And, as it turned out, they weren’t entirely sure what archaeologists did. “Very early on, Joe asked, ‘Well, what are players actually going to do?’” Ingold recalls. “And I said, ‘I don’t know – push levers and buttons, avoid spike traps, that kind of thing. That’s what archaeologists do’. And Joe said: ‘Is it, though?’”
As the team swept aside their pop-cultural preconceptions, they gradually began to excavate a potential structure for the game. “We prototyped a puzzle mechanic around the exploration of old sites,” Ingold says. “We had an idea for a holographic projector that was going to ‘rebuild’ old ruins, because we already had the robot design with the projected head, but we always ran into the problem of ‘so what?’ Once the player has uncovered a space, what do they do with that information? We didn’t feel like there was an endpoint to any of those explorations.”
In the end, it wasn’t Stargate that provided the answer but another piece of archaeologically adjacent pop culture: Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade. Specifically, the scene where Indy solves a word puzzle to reach the Holy Grail. This got the team thinking about the connection between archaeology and language. It was the practice of translation, and the thought processes behind it, that fascinated them most. Ingold likens it to teaching people how to read: before you could read a sentence, you had to learn the meaning of individual words. In Heaven’s Vault, you begin with a small set of glyphs, from which you can guess at the meaning of other glyphs. As your vocabulary grows, so does your ability to translate new material from context.
A further twist emerged from Ingold’s research into hieroglyphs. He discovered that scribes cared very little about legibility, and didn’t like to leave large empty spaces between words. It meant that learning to read hieroglyphs wasn’t limited to knowing single words, but being able to tell whether you were looking at a single word or a compound. You had to be able to tell where one word ended and a new one began. In the finished game, the option of picking between a longer compound and breaking up a compound string into several shorter words is always there,
INKLE HAD TO BUILD NOT ONLY AN ENTIRE LANGUAGE BUT ALSO AN ENTIRE NEBULA TO GO ALONG WITH IT
and your choice between both options is contextual, based on what other words in a given sentence you’ve already encountered.
Many prototypes later, Humfrey realised it was all coming together when he started to encounter a feeling familiar from his time learning German: the satisfaction gained from correctly guessing the meaning of an unknown word by breaking it into separate elements. Inkle realised that language worked in logical ways, much like a puzzle, and that by applying different methodologies you could arrive at an end result that seemed right to you. Whether it was actually right or not wasn’t that important. And, as more people started to play the game, Inkle discovered there were more methodologies than it had anticipated. “We showed a demo of Heaven’s Vault at GDC and asked one journalist how they guessed the meaning of a word,” Ingold says. “And they said ‘Well, this is a long word, but two of the options [available for its translation] have very simple meanings; it’s a long word so it must be a more complicated concept’. We hadn’t thought of that strategy before, but even without our intent it was a valid strategy that produced results.”
With a solid foundation in place, it was just a case of building out the game’s language of glyphs, which encompassed thousands of words by the time of release. “Our 3,000-word vocabulary wasn’t designed in order to meet some abstract goal of making the language practical for real-life use,” Humfrey says. “Rather, it evolved gradually over the project to support the things that we needed it to say.”
Of course, an archaeologist isn’t much without a good civilisation to uncover – and so Inkle had to build not only an entire lost language but also, in the game’s setting, an entire nebula to go along with it. To populate the nebula’s moons, Inkle started to look to real-life ancient ruins for inspiration. A visit to an exhibition on underwater archaeology taught the team more about sculptural styles, as well as the pleasure of finding remnants of a civilisation in unlikely places – an inspiration for the different items you can find strewn across the game’s many planets.
“In a way, we took human history and used it to build our own world,” Humfrey says. The team started with the most obvious inspiration of Egypt, he says, “because you often associate Egypt and the pyramids with archaeology”. But as the project went on, the net was cast considerably wider. “These days, if something is obviously inspired by ancient Greece, players immediately go, ‘That’s ancient Greece’,” Ingold says – and Inkle wanted to avoid the associations that came with such well-worn territory. “Instead, we wanted something visually appealing that were still places people actually lived in and used.”
Heaven’s Vault ended up drawing from the Mali Empire as well as Persian and Moroccan architecture, with senior artist Laura Dilloway drawing up an architectural timeline, allowing eagle-eyed players to place a site in the nebula’s history just by looking at the shape of its doors. Ingold admits that at first he thought Dilloway’s dedication to an architectural calendar was “a bit mad”, but it worked with the game’s theme of tracing history, whether through language, archaeological finds or even your surroundings.
In the game, players can freely traverse several 3D environments as protagonist Aliya
who, like all characters, is rendered in 2D. (A nod to that initial comic-book concept, as well as Inkle’s love of 2D design.) Humfrey describes the style as a happy accident: “We created 3D environments primarily for flexibility – to be able to compose camera with the character art superimposed over the top. Then we started to experiment with subtle camera pans in the 3D environment, combined with character frames cross-fading from point to point. By this point, our illustrator Anastasia had systematically created hundreds of frames already, so that we could present the character from every conceivable camera angle. Within Unity we were able to spin the camera around these characters, and we fell in love with the way the frames responded like a flipbook. The final step was to implement a 3D character controller, allowing you to move the character and camera with left and right thumbsticks.”
In Heaven’s Vault, you often start with little to no idea where a find is going to lead you, an experience familiar to archaeologists. Unearthing useful finds is a minor miracle in and of itself, and to determine where a find originated or even what it was used for, archeologists have to consult a number of experts and examine prior discoveries. Similarly, Aliya travels all over the nebula to discover the meaning of her finds. Even so, Inkle was keen to avoid a common frustration with adventure games – overlooking a critical item and subsequently having to dig back through every location to find it. Instead, Heaven’s Vault is designed to encourage you to follow an interesting thread in the story regardless of whether or not you’ve found absolutely everything a location has to offer. “We just wanted to make sure people found interesting things in the world and that they didn’t backtrack too much,” Ingold says.
Once you’ve found enough clues to continue to your next destination, robotic companion Six will pipe up and ask you if you want to leave. When we ask whether Six’s insistence to move on doesn’t end up making players defiantly want to stay in a location and keep looking, Ingold laughs. “Maybe the solution isn’t the most elegant, but the point is that it’s possible to leave, that you’re not stuck in one place forever.”
Heaven’s Vault is full of options – where to go, how long to spend there, whether to engage in conversation or not – but Inkle resists calling it player freedom, chiefly because what players decide isn’t what drives the game. “This isn’t a
branching narrative, there’s no tree in place,” Humfrey says. “You don’t make decisions that inevitably alter the course of the game.” Instead of locking yourself out of a narrative branch through some previous decision, the game opens up conversational routes based on what you’ve discussed and discovered so far. “It’s all about creating an interesting narrative space to explore,” Humfrey says. There might not be multiple endings, but there’s plenty of reason to go back – it’s impossible to see everything the game has to offer in a single playthrough, and there might be some lines you’ll never hear at all.
“You could think of it like designing a garden,” Humfrey says. “It needs to be large enough to create variety; it needs constraints and paths to guide you to various corners. And like a garden, it also needs corners that are designed to feel secret and special that only a small number of people will discover. But, by making as many of these little corners as possible, the majority of players will feel like they’ve had a unique experience. Of course, all this needs to be done on an indie budget, so – at the risk of overextending the metaphor – the plot of land for this garden isn’t huge.”
The same could be said of the player’s relationship with protagonist Aliya. You aren’t able to remould her character through the responses you pick; the idea is that every conversation option you can choose from is equally valid for her personality. “With Heaven’s Vault, you’re not in control of the character, you’re with them,” Ingold says. “There should be a tension between what the player wants the protagonist to do and what they actually end up doing. That’s what makes it dramatically compelling. If a player doesn’t get to have a say, there’s no point in playing, but if a player gets to have their way all the time, from a writing point of view you might as well not bother writing any dialogue, because it gets overtaken by the story players have written in their own heads.”
To Ingold, giving the player full control of the journey and its characters removes the possibility for surprises. “Choices aren’t the only way to make a player feel involved in a narrative. Anything you find can open up the next thing. The fact that the overall story doesn’t branch or that there’s a fixed end point is neither here nor there, because it doesn’t matter where you end up, it’s about how you get there. You can get to the end point with a very good understanding of the history of the nebula, or a very poor one or even a wrong one, and that possibility to misinterpret things is something we’re actually quite proud of, because that’s something that can happen to archaeologists all the time, too.”
More than the original inspiration of Stargate, it’s that link to real-life archaeology which ultimately came to define Heaven’s Vault. There’s a maxim that Ingold and Humfrey reiterate throughout our conversation, and it’s not hard to imagine it driving Aliyah’s real-world counterparts to keep searching for the secrets of human existence, just as much as it guided the game’s development: the journey is the goal.