Neo Cab

Hello! I’m Paula Rogers, the Story Editor for Chance Agency.

Lately I’ve been asked, what’s a Story Editor? Writing is a familiar enough job, and if you imagine a temperamental housecat who hoards caffeine and sugar between naps, you’ve pretty much got the idea of that part of my workday. But, what does my editorial role mean in games, and even more importantly, can it be explained with a cat metaphor?

First off, I work closely with Patrick, the Creative Lead, to develop the overall plot arc and narrative structure of the game. We’re a choice-based adventure game with a branching story, so we’re designing for several different ways the plot could go at any time. On top of that, our narrative is unique in a few key ways, first being that we have a huge cast of characters when you account for all the passengers (pax). Therein lies the bulk of my work.

To capture the energy of driving in a big city, it had to feel like anyone could hop in Lina’s car—any weird or sad or funny or kind person from any walk of life. That meant not only a high number of pax, but a very broad range of diversity in those characters—while all being thematically linked in some way so everything feels like part of the same game. It’s like a short story collection viewed through a hall of mirrors, or a season of television where each episode is told by a different character.

So, even though we have a fairly traditional story structure of protagonist (Lina), antagonist (Top Secret), and a handful of plot-essential characters who help you along the way, most of the game is not actually spent with any of those characters. Instead, you talk with the pax as you do your job, and most of the game is spent entirely inside Lina’s car.

Sometimes I think we couldn’t have designed a more extreme set of narrative constraints if we’d tried—like, just for kicks let’s also tell a story only through dialogue between strangers and in a very small space where they can’t move or face each other!

So another big part of my job is to keep an eye on how the overall story and Lina’s character journey weave in with all the pax she might pick up at any given moment, while also making sure all these tiers of stories never compete with one another. They should all, in some way, complement each other, but I also need to check that the symmetry doesn’t feel contrived. For instance, I kept suggesting Lina might reasonably pick up a magical talking piglet with an encyclopedic knowledge of Los Ojos, but Patrick and the other writers just couldn’t see it. What might have been, and in a tiny tuxedo, too!

As Story Editor, I am also the keeper of the lore, which in retrospect is a much better title. So I develop and maintain the bibles for our story, our world, and our characters, including each pax. These character guides include their backstories, the way they speak, how they act in different emotional states, and what they want out of life. I work with the writers to create each pax and design how their story can be woven into the larger themes of the game, the overall plot, and Lina’s own character arc.

Lastly, I manage a robust team of writers scattered across the globe. So it’s also my job to wrangle all the moving pieces that entails—grammar, style, voice, and way too many time zones—into one cohesive whole. It hurts me a little bit every time I have to change a lovely, spacious “colour”-type spelling to a painfully straightforward “color,” but alas. I maintain our Inky Cheat Sheet and Neo Cab Style Guide, lead exercises to keep us all thinking and writing as one, manage assignments, review and guide story pitches, edit the writers’ work, and run a weekly meeting where I definitely do not force the writers to answer questions about their favorite animals or how they might dress a magical piglet.

We’re building a story that explores the bonds between friends and strangers, that’s about what tech can destroy and what it can never touch, and that features an incredibly strong protagonist whose deep empathy is the source of her power. I’m so very excited to share it with all of you. Working on Neo Cab is one of the most fulfilling and challenging writing jobs I’ve ever had, and I thank my lucky cats every day that I get to do it.