Working on a musical theater production is multi-faceted—music, contracting, stage performance, and more. And one of the most exciting things about working on Fatebound the Musical—a new musical adaptation of the Illiad—is having the opportunity to work with talented artists, animators, and visual artists.

In November, Wavyrn had the opportunity to present at an annual game development event where Alex Guldi, lead artist of Fatebound, also presented their experience as a concept artist. How do you avoid storytelling tropes in worldbuilding?

Alex Guldi is an artist working in the indie film and game industry with a specialty on narrative writing, design, and concept art. He is currently based in Scotland where he creates based on the social issues that he observes, and works to create an impact. His current interests in his field include, but are not limited to, learning about ancient civilizations, writing mythologies, and figuring out how a werewolf could hypothetically exist.

Below is an abridged summary of the presentation, highlighting the important questions and answers delivered at the panel.

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So how do you avoid tropes within video game design from a visual art perspective? You can avoid them, or weaponize and make tropes into satire. Pick a genre, then try to do something you haven’t seen before, and if you end up doing something trope-y, you’ll need to be conscious about it. To avoid tropes in games, there’s really one big thing that you have to do, which is research. You have to understand the topics you’re talking about, and to find similar things that do what you want your trope to do. You have to see what does work and what doesn’t work, and what makes a trope a trope. So what is a trope? A trope is generally a piece of narrative or content that can affect the tone, genre, or style of a game massively. Tropes can make games cookie-cutter shaped, seeming identical to one another. There are three examples of tropes, one being mascot horror games with jump scares, such as Bendy and the Ink Machine, Poppy’s Playtime, or Five nights at Freddy’s. There are also first-person shooters that have political commentary, such as Doom, Halo, Call of Duty, Fallout, Counter-Strike, or basically any other first-person shooter that you can think of.

The next trope is kind of interesting, which is the ‘facing the past’ trope, or playing a character that is supposed to uncover something horrible (or awesome) that they’ve done, then facing the consequences or growing as a result. Some examples would be Firewatch, Gone Home, and Still Wakes the Deep.

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When avoiding tropes, you want to work on the story first: a good what-if statement and a response, which doesn’t have to be a complex statement. Let’s say, you’re on a planet with an oppressive government and then you have your response to it—do you want to work with the government? Against it? What’s going to happen with this what-if?

All the characters, locations, and assets that you use have to be important to the story and game. It could be as big or little as you want, but it needs a relative importance that either establishes tone, setting, adds to a narrative, etc. If you make a story that’s personal to you, write what you know—however, you also need to research and understand what you’re writing from outside of your perspective.

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So your story is going to come first, and then you add the art; you’ll want to have a well-informed narrative to have visuals that compliment that narrative. Set the rules of your world, then follow them—don’t just ignore them whenever it’s convenient. Realism does not mean it has to be realistic visually, so long as it obeys its own clear rules that make it grounded.

Take the game Superliminal: visually, it’s realistic… but the actual gameplay is absolutely not. On the other hand, non-realistic visuals does not mean that you have a “cartoony” game—for example, Ori and the Will of the Wisps. If you also want to experiment with mechanics to avoid tropes, you can look at a game like Disco Elysium, where it focuses on politics and morals, then introduces the concept of using a dice roll to play with the idea of never truly understanding what others are thinking. Whenever that happens, the game introduces a new ‘character’ in the main character’s head and you develop the skills of this new character regardless of how good they are. This leads to situations where your knowledge in this one skill set is not going to mean anything, so it’s a really interesting mechanic.

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Werewolves are interesting because in traditional lore, they only come out about once with a full moon, so maybe the science there is that the moon causes so much energy and heat that a person would literally explode. (obviously you would have to mess a lot with science and magic in order to make that work). One way I’d do it is make the transformation more like a cycle that matches the moon itself: more moon, more wolf, less moon, less wolf. There would be a very gradual transition where they have higher body temperatures and lots of body hair, like a weird amalgamation whenever it’s halfway. You could also introduce a lot of magic to it, where it’s akin to a phoenix and kinda explodes on a full moon into the werewolf.

Choosing when and how to use or avoid tropes also means taking your audience into consideration. Look at the How to Train Your Dragon franchise: the original movies are really good, have a decent grasp on anatomy and biology, and are more grounded in a ‘realistic’ approach to design. The shows and cartoons are aimed at younger kids, so you go from the movies with very grey, Scotland-ish weather and toned down dragons and and interesting plot points, to something really simple with a lot of bright colors and scenery and a simpler story.

Then there’s the live-action, which is more realistic and complex—I love it. The dragons are a lot more accurate to reality, with considerations for keels, bat wings, and flexible fingers. The story itself is more complex, introducing the idea of Berk being a hodgepodge of different clans allied after the dragon raids.

So having knowledge about your audience really impacts how complex your story and your art can get. In kids cartoons, you’re not going to see a lot of Wyverns with a ‘two legs, two wings with claws’ configuration. Kids shows like having the full range of expression that arms give. Shows like Jake Long and Dragon Tales have dragons with arms so you can get that “human” expression. Then there are more “realistic” series like Game of Thrones, where the dragons are almost exclusively wyverns, and very big and scary. You can also branch out to different dragon designs based on the tone you’re putting in or the environment they live in. Looking at birds, anything in wooded areas will have short wingspans and big keels in order to go between narrow spaces and flap really fast; whereas anything that soars or moves through very open spaces will have wide wingspans and narrow keels. You can consider alternate wings like bats or bugs or bird wings, and see how that affects your design. A dragon with bug wings will need many wings because they’re fragile, and if they have bird wings they’ll have feathers.

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Magic is very complex in tropes, especially with so many different archetypes of magic users. For example, in Dungeons & Dragons, there are wizards who learn magic through books, witches who use magic through spiritualist beliefs, and sorcerers that are magical beings themselves. So a witch from, say, the Appalachians isn’t going to know magic that comes from like a Slavic country. These are wildly different mythologies, spirits, resources, and cultures. A wizard may not know much about magic outside their specialization, like how you wouldn’t ask an astronomer a biology question. Then there are worlds where magic is just magic, or Narnia’s good and bad magic, or Brand New Cherry Flavor’s alleyway magic.

Mythology can be a pitfall of tropes and unrealistic history. Take EPIC the Musical, for example, which is an adaptation of Greek Mythology and Homer’s Odyssey. However, the tone is greatly shifted to where the gods are like superheroes and characters are really cliche and tropey. You’ll see depictions that have inaccurate armor or weapons or clothes, and it’s much more a modern take on the Odyssey.

Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey also falls into these same pitfalls. What we’ve seen so far is that he’s using Roman Bronze Age armor and Viking ships, and the locations have Mycenaean era friezes and art that would’ve happened thousands of years before. He may have done the research and chosen to ignore it, but at the end of the day, his audience is more likely to enjoy tropes rather than accuracy.

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Many depictions of Greek myth ignore the tons of research we’ve had on Ancient Greek history, like the historical site of the island of Ithaca. There’s even enough evidence to suggest the Iliad and Odyssey might have been real events placed around the 8th Century BC, right before the Roman Empire. Hades is an example of Greek Myth done with a lot of research with many callbacks to actual myth and history. In the game, Orpheus sings a song called the Hymn to Zagreus, which references the myth where Zagreus, the god of rebirth, gets sewn to Zeus’ inner thigh after he is killed, and is rebirthed as Dionysus. The song references this with “the seed of Dionysus grew,” and it’s a great reference.

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The key thing is that you have to not only be able to describe your setting and explain what’s going on, but also prove that what you’re doing will be unique. So many mascot horror games are just copies of Five Nights at Freddy’s original formula and style, but there are exceptions to that rule. Bendy and the Ink Machine establishes the mascot characters as actual people with wants and lives and motivations for why they’re fighting and working with you. What makes Five Nights at Freddy’s so successful is that it did this thing before anyone else—before it was super oversaturated—so it stood out. It’s so important to be able to do your research, and to understand and know where a trope came from so that you can navigate it uniquely and respectfully.