Temple Run: Legends was a really interesting challenge in general, but the trickiest part was definitely the limited time events that the design team wanted to do as post-launch content.
The "main game" is a linear string of hundreds of also linear levels (it's the first Temple Run game where you can reach a finish line!)
This linearity gave us the power to have a fun Saturday-morning-cartoon-show-style narrative attached. (Time and budget and layoffs complicated things, but the end result is still a zany little linear romp with a fun roster of pulp adventure heroes from across time and space that I'm still quite proud of.) The player started out with franchise mascots Guy Dangerous and Scarlett Fox, and then made their way across Temple Run's lost world, discovering mysteries and unlocking new allies to run as they went.
NOW, having established this zany little linear story, the design team wanted to add limited time events that players could participate in. These events would give players an optional new map with a new linear string of levels to complete – kind of a mini campaign – that would be available for (you guessed it) a limited amount of time. Halloween would have a Halloween-themed limited time event, Thanksgiving would have a Thanksgiving-themed limited time event, and sometimes there would be gonzo-themed events just for fun. But these little standalone campaigns weren't just set dressing, they were also going to have stories! These unique, limited time narratives would spotlight one or two characters from the game's roster and offer unique rewards – often times a new skin for one of the spotlighted runners. My job, as you might have guessed, was to write the character dialogue for these stories.
From a narrative design perspective, the most critical part of all of this is that these stories would be accessible to anyone as soon as the event went live, regardless of where that player was in the progression of the main game.
You may have already guessed the narrative hurdles that this creates:
- The player can access a limited time event regardless of where they are in the progression of the main game.
- This means that they may or may not have unlocked the characters who are currently being spotlighted.
- This means that the characters themselves are quite possibly meeting characters that they have never met before.
- But maybe they have!
- In fact, the player might not even be able to play as the spotlighted character during the limited time event.
- But if they have them unlocked, they could!
- Oh, and if the player meets a character in a limited time event that they haven't met before, when they go back to the main game, that character is still going to be introduced in the main game's narrative as if they have never met them before.
So, whatever I wrote, it needed to make sense if the player had the spotlighted character or didn't have them. It had to feel like it was picking up from the main story if the player saw it after the character's introduction, but also not undermine the main story's introduction of the character in case the player saw the limited time event first.
There were a couple of things that I knew that I could count on:
On a thematic level, Temple Run takes place in a classic pulp adventure lost world where time gets a little wonky – cursed conquistadors and ancient Egyptian sages all end up tossed together with 1950s jewel thieves, 80s super cops, feudal Japanese Ronin, and every other cool, archetypical adventurous hero who's ever accidentally sailed off the edge of the map.
On a mechanical level, the player starts the game with series regulars Guy Dangerous and Scarlett Fox, so I knew that I could always use them as viewpoint characters: each event starts with them stumbling across the spotlighted character. The spotlighted character could be written in such a way that they can feel like the hero of the event (if the player has them and chooses to play as them) or an NPC quest giver (if the player does not have them and chooses to play as other characters, like the aforementioned Guy Dangerous and Scarlett Fox). However, I still had the mind-bending task of figuring out how to write the scene in a way that could happen anywhere in the timeline of the main story without breaking the narrative.
…Sometimes, the best way to meet a problem is with blunt force.
Here's chaos gremlin Guy Dangerous meeting 80s supercop Barry Bones in a Halloween-themed limited time event that can happen before – or after – Barry Bones is introduced in the main game:
Temple Run: Legends
“Curse on the Bayou”
Curse_beat_1 [intro]
GUY DANGEROUS
(discombobulated)
Whoa, did you feel that?! Some bad juju just went down on the Bayou.
BARRY BONES
(shocked)
Who? What? When? How?
BARRY BONES
(thoughtful)
Also, do we know each other? Everything's all... fuzzy.
GUY DANGEROUS
(thinking)
GAH! I knew it! We've stumbled into a CURSE!
BARRY BONES
(shocked)
CURSE?!
GUY DANGEROUS
(discombobulated)
Aye! The dreaded curse of THE LIMITED TIME EVENT!
BARRY BONES
(shocked)
...You're making this up, right?
GUY DANGEROUS
(pointing)
Ask not for whom the bad juju juju's, it juju's for thee.
Curse_beat_2 [middle beat]
BARRY BONES
(thoughtful)
This does feel different than normal. Maybe there is something to this whole 'curse'...
GUY DANGEROUS
(pointing)
Duh. I think I've stolen enough cursed gold in my life to recognize the feeling of unholy
energies closing around my soul.
GUY DANGEROUS
(thinking)
Either that, or the hallucinogenic toad burrito I had for lunch was improperly cooked.
BARRY BONES
(tough)
...I gave you a whole pack of government food rations.
GUY DANGEROUS
(excited)
And I traded them for hallucinogenic toads!
GUY DANGEROUS
(pointing)
They're great against curses.
GUY DANGEROUS
(excited)
Oh! If we can make it to my toad stockpile, I should be able to make enough burritos to
break this curse for all of us!
Curse_beat_3 [Ending:]
GUY DANGEROUS
(excited)
Yes! Burrito time!
GUY DANGEROUS
(normal)
Take that, dreaded curse of THE LIMITED TIME EVENT!
GUY DANGEROUS
(pointing)
Nothing wards off bad juju like some good old medium rare hallucinogenic toad meat.
GUY DANGEROUS
(normal)
I learned that back in Cambodia, when I broke up with this pirate queen I had been
dating for a while, and she kind of hired a –
BARRY BONES
(tough)
Just break the curse already.
GUY DANGEROUS
(excited)
Eat your burritos, and everything will go right back to normal!
GUY DANGEROUS
(pointing)
Once the trees stop melting.
Thanks to the franchise hallmark "time-wonkiness" of Temple Run's lost world beyond the rules of reality (and Guy Dangerous's penchant for culinary experimentations involving hallucinogenic toads), this style of zany, temporally-ambiguous writing worked for all kinds of events: moviemaking, Valentine's Day romantic melodrama, ninja hunts, 80s buddy cop training montages, meeting the villain of the game before he was the villain but also possibly after but hey he also turns into a hero so who knows, etc., etc., etc.
Instead of accepting a big old heaping dose of Ludo-narrative Dissonance and giving players an incomprehensible jumble of clashing narratives, we managed to thread the needle while also supporting the essential elements of the Temple Run brand: the player fantasy of being in a lucky explorer in lost world outside of time! Also, hallucinogenic toads.
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