In one ordinary black Friday on January 13, 2017, our debut title 2D psychological horror game Detention was launched on Steam. Upon the release of the game, we received overwhelming attention from the media and players. People were curious. The local media wondered what triggered us to created a horror game like this? The foreign media, on the other hand, were intrigued by the Taiwanese folklore in the game.
A week after, 6 of us sat in the office temporarily drifting away from all the chaos. We sat still and wondered, what just happened? Never did we know that the game will draw such response. After all, we were just a group of developers who enjoy making games. Thinking back, it took lots of effort and failure to make Detention. But we feel that this is a story worth sharing on Gamasutra. And to begin with, it all started years ago.
Detention is the brainchild of Coffee Yao. If you know Coffee, he is a man that enjoys late night walk and somewhat a bit nostalgic. Sometimes, memories of the 1990s flow back to him like a wave. The incense smell from the Taoist temple, the Taiwanese movies in the New Wave era, the taste of the street food, the sound and visuals of the glove puppetry show, and other stuff he did as a student back then. It was a time when Taiwanese culture blossomed.
Growing up as a gamer, he played plenty of Japanese cultural-centred games with characters like Ninja or Samurai. However, there had yet been a game that centres around Taiwanese culture. Feeling an urge to show the Taiwanese ambient to the world, he thought, “Why not make a game with Taiwanese folk culture?” By that time, Coffee hasn’t had a solid plan nor enough skills to initiate the project, but this idea has since planted in his mind. Three years later in 2014, he finally started making the prototype of Detention as a sole developer. Then one thing came to another, 6 of us got connected and started working together to pull off Detention.
While developing the game, a question kept haunting us. “How will the Western players take it? Will they be confusing with a game based upon Taiwanese/Eastern Asian culture?” We aimed at the globe, so the understanding and acceptance from the Western players are crucial. The localization is the key to us, and in our case, we paid extra attention to the level design and translation. To successfully transplant the Eastern Asian culture into the game, Detention underwent 4 times of major adjustments throughout the course of 2-year development. The adjustments almost reshaped the original setting and made everyone in the team insane. Yet, the response from the fans let us realize every adjustment that we made for the localization was worthy. And in the following, let me share our struggles and experiences to you.
Set the Strategy - Flatten the cultural element
First thing first, since one of the crucial thing was to make a game that everyone would enjoy, even for the non-native Chinese speakers. In order to achieve this, we decide to flatten the cultural element.
There is a reason behind this. At an early development stage, we were having arguments about the cultural understanding we input in the puzzle design. Each of us has different opinions about the applied religion ritual, things like whether to burn the incense or spirit money first. This argument let us realize that, even if 6 of us share the same cultural background, there are still agreements and disagreements toward the cultural understanding. When there are already disputes among us, how can we even get Western players to understand our culture? We don’t want to let the cultural barrier be in the way of the storytelling and gameplay. As we are well aware that it is unlikely for the players to understand Taiwanese culture within a 3-5 hours gameplay, and to clarify, cultural understanding is not our intention as well, we just want to make a game with Taiwanese elements. Therefore, we followed the golden rule “less is more,” and made the choice not to apply the traditional cultural rules to the puzzle design, making them more about logical thinking instead.
Additionally, by transferring the cultural elements to different symbols, and sort of hiding them in the game setting, we managed to transform these symbols as the tools for the puzzles, pieces of note, background music, the setting, and etc. Eventually, these visual and audio symbols became the reinforcers to lead the narration and create the ambient in the game. If the players like the atmosphere that we created, I believe that some of them will look up the cultural and historical background on their own once they tried the game.
The visual design of the costume and architecture help build up the atmosphere of the 1960s Taiwan.
Alright, enough with the theory, let’s dig more into the actual examples!
Dos and Don’ts for Level Design
Case 1: Journal as the introduction to the general cultural setting
Normally, the notebook is constantly seen as a tool in various kinds of games, and it is not an exception for Detention. In Detention, we created the tool "journal" to keep track of the game progress, to help players reach the next level, and most importantly, to illustrate cultural background.
The journal serves as two functions in the game: the cues and notes. Throughout the gameplay, players will come across pieces after pieces of notes. Some of them are cues that assist players to survive or solve the puzzles, and others are notes that help shape the general cultural and storytelling of the game.
Cue in the journal: Information and survival skills when facing the Lingered
Note in the journal: The school announcement depicting the martial law period
Case 2: Folklore/ local belief application to the game mechanism
In the beginning, we set up our mind to make a horror game. Just like every game that falls into this genre, it always come with some jump scare scenes or terrifying monsters. This time, we asked ourselves the question, "How can we combine culture with horror game mechanism?" It got us to dig back to the East Asian folklore and mythology in which monsters and evil spirits are common and well descriptive, making it easier for us to adapt them into the game mechanism.
The Lingered
The man-eating skeleton figure, the Lingered(魍魎), is a well-known ghost spirit appearing in numerous Asian folktales. We embodies the Lingered’s characteristics in the game as one of the attackers that player encounters. To give additional touch to the game mechanism, 2 survival skills, originating from Taiwanese folk culture, are added.
Traditionally, food offerings is served for the dead as farewell. In Detention, it helps distract the Lingered from chasing you.
In East Asian folklore, you can fake your existence in front of the zombie(jiangshi) by holding the breath. Likewise, to escape from the Lingered, the player must do the same and silently walk away.
HeiBai Wuchang
HeiBai Wuchang(黑白無常) are the death messengers in the local belief. Legend says that each of them holds a feathered fan and wooden token in hand, and these items become the tools to solve the puzzle, holding the key for players to reach the next level.
The door is locked, and something is missing. With the completion of the puzzle collection, the door is finally unlocked
Case 3: Religion rituals embodiment in game narration
Rituals are a part of the culture. To add ritual practice to game narration, we intended to transfer it to in-game items. At first, we thought that it shall be an easy task, and we could simply follow suit from our past experience, making a depictive illustration to explain it all should be enough. But we were completely wrong. Neglecting the complexity of the ritual was a big mistake. Nonetheless, we managed to learn from the mistakes we took, and correct them accordingly.
Spirit Money
For the Taoism praying process, there are rigid rules and steps to follow. Initially, we came up with this illustration to depict the religion ritual.
Yet, when we did the demo testing, we found out that such illustration was not effective enough. The literatural description was somewhat too complicated. There should be something better than this. Thus, we did a bit of brainstorming, and voila.
First, keeping the golden rule “less is more” in mind, we got rid of our original plan to showcase the whole ritual. Alternately, we only focused on a part of the ritual - the representation of the spirit money burning process, and transformed it into the game narration.
Ying Yang Poe
In the Taoist temple, the wooden pieces ying yang poe(擲筊) can often be viewed as a tool to ask advice from the god. For Detention, we utilized ying yang poe as the plot accelerator to pinpoint Ray’s concern towards love, prospects and family.
To give a bit of idea how ying yang poe works, here was what we did at first.
Just like the previous example, there were lots of wording in it. When presenting this illustration to a Taiwanese friend, it took him a while to understand the whole saying, and that’s when we realized changes must be made.
Again, the same “less is more” technique is applied here. The literature description was minimized to the least and replaced by the interactive visual graphics.
Case 4: Pop culture employment to level design
The cultural cognitive difference is the constant dilemma for localization. From the beginning of the game development, we know that we would be facing two groups of players. The local players who understand the culture, and the foreign players who don't. When dealing with the use of pop culture in level design, we encountered the same problem. After tons of arguments and discussions, we came to the conclusion: Cultural understanding or not, so long as the players enjoy our game and things make sense to them, it will be fine.
April Rain
In Detention, the electronic lo-fi music played with traditional Asian instruments is used as the cultural atmospheric creator. Apart from that, the audio element also holds the key to level design.
In one level that requires the player to travel to Ray’s 3 distinct past memories, we designed this radio as the transformation port, with the musical suite April Rain(四月望雨) acting as the connection for players to shift to different time and space.
The 1930s April Rain is the combination of 4 widely-known Taiwanese songs during the Japanese Occupation Period, that later banned in the martial law period.
3 of the songs are employed in the radio station puzzle design. By tuning in the right radio stations, the melody of each song appears, and all of a sudden, the player is in different time zone.
