The Design Document That Made Deus Ex: Human Revolution Possible
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The team ended up developing what DeMarle called "The Blueprint" -- a meticulously detailed document completed over several stages, early in production, which laid the foundation for every gameplay encounter and story beat in the entire project.
"You get to choose, by the end of the story, how humanity is going to evolve," said DeMarle. "That becomes very important from a narrative standpoint, and from a game design perspective as well. Significant consequences have to be revealed."
"We want you to feel this story and this world is reacting to your actions. From a writing perspective this gets very complex very quickly," DeMarle said. "It's a massive amount of branching that's going on, which of course leads to a very important question... How do you ensure that branching narrative paths will coalesce into a coherent narrative?"
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This forced them to complete the Blueprint -- an Excel document with every sequence of the game broken down into smaller and smaller chunks, with gameplay elements mapped specifically to each, intertwined with the narrative of each sequence.
In Deus Ex: Human Revolution, "Each gameplay sequence has events or goals that the story requires the player to encounter in order to fulfill the aims of the story," DeMarle said.
"Every gameplay sequence can be further broken up" into blocks that cover the moment-to-moment gameplay. Scripted events, exotic gameplay, dialogue, NPC behavior, and "most importantly, the choices and consequences" were tracked in this document -- for every single gameplay/story sequence in the game.
It's "the entire game in a spreadsheet," DeMarle said.
