Some thoughts about comedy in Skin Deep
We decided very early on that we wanted Skin Deep to be a sort of comedy game. "Comedy" wasn't, however, one of our primary goals during development - we didn't sit around asking each other like "is this enough jokes? is this enough comedy?"
It's better to speak a lot more specifically about what you're trying to do. I've seen folks who talk about their game's humor pretty shallowly, and it's kind of frustrating. You can say "and the writer will just make it funny," but that's almost never useful.
On Skin Deep, we had goals like:
- The combat is slapstick
- You can interact with tons of things, and they usually surprise you with what they do in response
- It's satisfying and good when an enemy is dumb and you can clown on them
- Nina & co often speak like characters from a B action movie, maybe a 1980s action movie specifically
- The combat script is top to bottom one-liners
- All the characters' emotions while in conflict are extremely earnest and genuine
We had a team full of smart people who could internalize goals like these and understand the payload of humor contained within them. If you want to make a funny game, you need to find people like that... and then trust them. Presumably, you hire the people on your team because they can do things you can't do. They know how to tell jokes using the tools you don't know how to use. You gotta trust them to tell jokes with the tools available to their discipline!
That said, it's a lot easier to approach comedy in a game when you have a very practical and direct understanding of how different disciplines in the game can produce comedy. Several of the people working on Skin Deep were extremely multidisciplinary, and everyone had a better-than-usual understanding of how other people on the team actually did their jobs. It let people leave room for other folks to create surprising experiences. It's easier for a situation to be funny if designers are leaving room for audio, if narrative is leaving room for art, if the designers can make art, and so on. Everyone on the team was an extremely funny person who could produce incredible moments in the spaces available for them.
I've blogged a bit about this before, but a lot of our process had pretty intense back and forth between different workers. All story scenes began with a script I wrote. Brendon often interpreted that script into storyboard, then shared the (sometimes extremely rudimentary) storyboard to designers. Designers made a level to match that - sometimes first by pitching ideas back with storyboards of their own. They'd add an extraordinary number of sight gags as well. I then rewrote the script to match the new material in the level.
So any funny moment you are seeing in Skin Deep is, at the very least, the product of three different people's work. Everybody's layering onto the story's preposterous, surprising moments in their own way.
The second half of this post contains spoilers for the big twist that comes after the stakeout mission in Skin Deep!
Brendon and I both believe that things are better when they are laid beside things unlike themselves. Strong emotions in a story feel great when they are in contrast with one another. Things that are sad are sadder when they are next to things that are funny, and vice-versa. Things that are preposterous are more surprising when they are next to things that are completely honest and obvious.
I think personally that this kind of contrast is at the core of whatever I'm doing when I'm writing comedy. I think things are funniest when they are just trying desperately to contain the entire emotional range of the human experience.
When I was thinking about Skin Deep's story, I was thinking about it as a very emotionally genuine story about someone who is being attacked and haunted by her regrets. Zena is the Nina who never learned any lessons. Nina matured and moved on... Zena is still pouring blood on her cereal every morning. They're both in their 40s, but Zena is really just Nina's younger self, coming back to get revenge on her all-grown-up twin. And all Nina has to protect herself is a crew of friends who, at the start, she keeps pushing away! I thought that this was a very thematically fruitful topic. Pretty much every human alive could see something of themselves inside a story like that.
I wanted from the beginning for a lot of the comedy to come from Nina's completely sincere and transparent emotional situation filtering through a nonstop hurricane of bizarre gags. That's the kind of contrast that I like.
For the last few months I've been struggling to write a blog post about being "on the nose", and why I like it. I love how being extremely direct about some things allows you to be extremely indirect about other things. Even if you can see both things coming, it's fun when there's contrast in the way a story handles two thematically connected topics.
I think that in Skin Deep, Nina's story is the direct thing: even when she's trying to hide her emotions, she's obvious about them.
But the way that she operates in the levels builds a more indirect characterization of who she is and how she functions in the world. She's extremely good at her job, but ALSO a hot mess. The line between expertise and disaster is extremely faint and wobbly. She often blows up right at the end of the level when ten insanely ripped guys shoot her with rockets simultaneously, or when she drops a bomb on herself. The easiest way to kill a guy - strangling and brutal slamming him - makes her look ridiculous. Every successful mission contains moments of chaotic panic - she can go from powerful and in-control to basically completely dead in 30 seconds.
I like how this stuff combines with her guileless emotional earnestness to build a portrait of a person who is trying so, so hard, but can't hide anything about herself, can't be anyone other than herself. Nina is a stealth hero who can't hide her real self from anyone. I think that's funny.
I'm very lucky that everyone on this team wanted to make something this earnest, too - and that they were so damn good at it.