Dredge wasn’t originally going to be a narrative game, but then it became one of 2023’s best

When New Zealand studio Black Salt Games commenced their project on Dredge in 2020, they did not anticipate it would achieve such a remarkable reputation. The team was small—with merely an artist, programmer, and producer—therefore, they were gearing up for the Eldritch fishing horror to be narrative-light. 

“We can’t really create a narrative game,” quoted Dredge programmer Joel Mason during an early discussion at the Dredge and Yarn Spinner: Crafting Narrative with Open Source talk at the Game Developers Conference. Jon Manning, lead technologies expert at Yarn Spinner, talked about how the Dredge team utilized this approach to create what ultimately became one of the standout narrative games of 2023. 

Dredge employed Yarn Spinner, an open-source dialogue tool used by various award-winning games, including A Short Hike, A Night In The Woods, and Little Kitty, Large City. It assisted Black Salt Games in crafting most of their narrative structure after discovering that players enjoyed the unsettling lore of Dredge. 

Islands of Sorrow

“The original concept was that each of the islands in the archipelago where Dredge is set represented the Kübler-Ross stages of grief,” Manning stated. “Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. The characters of the islands symbolized these different phases of sorrow. The fishmonger on Greater Marrow represents depression.”

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Although this idea was eventually discarded midway through development, it reinforced the skeleton of the story and influenced many of the characters encountered during the 10-hour dark journey. Black Salt Games began outlining their narrative in a word processor, but soon realized they might need to integrate directly into the engine after generating a considerable amount of dialogue. 

“Now, dialogue systems can be deceptively complicated. I firmly believe they are likely the second most intricate system in a game, and certainly the most complex user-facing system,” Manning remarked. “[Many people] tend to write lines in a spreadsheet, but [overlook] that if you do that, you’re essentially missing the larger landscape of challenges that exist.”

Manning highlighted that scripting all parts of your game in something like Microsoft Excel or Notepad could lead to numerous issues with localization, asset management regarding specific lines, and event synchronization. Yarn Spinner is a tool designed to simplify and address these challenges more effectively. 

Hook, Line, and Sinker

Dredge’s gameplay centers around the player portraying a new fisherman who arrives at the archipelago—sailing to various fishing locations and islands, engaging with characters, and accomplishing tasks for them. The narrative unfolds mainly through the dialogue in these exchanges. Other narrative elements exist in Dredge—messages in bottles, quest descriptions, etc.—however, those were not managed in Yarn Spinner. 

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Black Salt Games established specific guidelines for effective dialogue within Dredge. They did not place more than 4 or 5 text boxes in front of the player in succession, limited each text box to 3-4 lines, and determined that every piece of text should achieve one of three objectives:

Yarn Spinner facilitated the team in blending that dialogue with various systems within Dredge. Lines featured different prompts and directions that highlighted a range of elements to combine with dialogue. Names triggered a specific character portrait to appear, colors would emphasize certain words based on their significance to the player, and while there was no direct feedback, a voice would prompt characters to produce a variety of sounds. 

“The overall concept behind Yarn Spinner is you create a script and then the game reads and interprets it, passing content into the game,” Manning explained. The method through which this happens is via a system we refer to as the dialogue engine.”

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Part of the remarkable feature of Yarn Spinner is its ability to connect dialogue with various other narrative elements. It can track how long a player has gone without speaking to a particular character, triggering a specific response when that character finally reappears on the screen. It can also initiate visual elements—like a lightning strike—in the backdrop for dramatic impact at the precise moment. Moreover, it allows developers to add and remove features by merely editing the text within Yarn Spinner, making iteration much simpler.

“Seeing