It's been wonderful seeing the reaction so far over Build 0.5's Hinterlands 3 section. When we started on it I was aware it was a bold idea at best, a crazy one at worst, to interrupt the story we had going to tell a seemingly unrelated tale about a different duo of characters. We had a goal with that, but as we went on I was no longer sure my writing would be good enough to convey it.

Thankfully, the reaction so far has been great. We did get some very fair suggestions — mainly people pointing out that Hinterlands 3 dragged on a little and that its placement in the story could have been smoother. Those are fair points, and partly were issues we anticipated as possible reactions. Still, the sheer fact that these have been the main criticisms is a victory, as the very idea behind the Hinterlands was so alien and hard to execute.

Structurally, Hinterlands 3 is probably the most complex and intricate section of Minotaur Hotel. It was extremely challenging in a number of ways and a gigantic departure from our usual storytelling format. After giving it some thought I decided to write this DevLog to chronicle how we developed it, so we could aid other VN writers in similar endeavors. This post should, also, stand as a sort of celebratory landmark on its own as September 7th 2021 marks the 2nd anniversary of Minotaur Hotel's release.

Now, before we start the postmortem proper I have to establish a few things:

• Spoilers ahead! Don't read this if you haven't finished the current build of Minotaur Hotel.
• This postmortem will mainly focus on the "game design" of the Hinterlands and how we wrote it. I am making an effort not to talk too much about the themes, the twists, what this or that means because (as you will see) the process of interpreting what's being shown is part of "the game".

Writing the Hinterlands

I am a firm believer that stories benefit from mixing together emotions. To make a plot out of a single emotion is shallow, it makes the whole thing feel like a cardboard cutout, while a complex pattern of interwoven emotions can make give verisimilitude even to the most fantastic stories.

Minotaur Hotel begins with a lingering sense of sadness (the prologue), then plummets into a pit of sorrow (finding Asterion in the cold room) before climbing the way up to ever-increasing heights of joy. This, I hope, has been conveyed well enough with Build 0.5, and it was our vision all along.

For joy to be meaningful, however, we need the other emotions. Asterion's coming out of his shell could only carry the mixed burden of joy and sorrow for so long, and past a certain point we needed someone to take on that mantle while Asterion climbed up to a new height. We required something on the bitter side of things that would reframe things and reveal that, outside the titular Minotaur Hotel, the world is filled with lost people who still require help even if Asterion is doing well for himself.

Perhaps a better way to put this is that Asterion's story needed a mirror, or its negative image. That might be more descriptive.

And so we decided we had to write what, later, we would call "The Hinterlands".

The Goal

As I stated above, the Hinterlands provides Minotaur Hotel with a touch of needed bitterness, which in turn frees Asterion's story to climb up to a new level of joy. That is good enough a reason, but we had more going on that made it necessary for us to do something.

Another key element is that we wanted to iterate on the themes and threads we had established previously. We thought it was important to show more about the charms, the emotional state of being lost, the impact of being accepted into (and removed from) the hotel, what the world of Minotaur Hotel looks like, why Asterion thinks giving a home to the lost is so important, etc.

On another note, the Hinterlands carried an extraordinarily difficult burden: the introduction of Storm.

Going back to another topic for a second, why did we have to write the Ruthless Route? Why did we make Mintoaur Hotel, a story about treating Asterion as someone worthy of love and dignity, and then write a whole branch where that was thrown aside? The answer is that the story would be thematically incomplete without it.

It's the same with Storm. Asterion's personal conflict does not exist in isolation, it's not about him sitting on his hotel and doing nothing. No, he wants the hotel so he can provide a home to those who are lost — and the Hinterlands is the deep, intimate exploration of that concept. It's about Storm, a young man who was given no chance in his life, and his own personal valley of abuse. It's about showing that the abuse Asterion suffered, as fantastical and mythological as it was portrayed, is real and possible.

This sounds easy, but it isn't. Simply put, Storm's story has to be profoundly tragic because, well, there are people like that. Their story deserves to be told. But, at the same time, it's too tragic and runs the risk of becoming sickeningly so.

So we needed someone to counter-balance that. That's where P came from. If Storm is (like Asterion) the victim of abuse, we needed someone to take on the position of power above him. Someone who can either do good or bad. And together, inserted in the context of the Hinterlands, they make up the dark reprise of Minotaur Hotel.

The location itself was important. We were iterating on the relationship between Asterion and the Hotel's Master, but this time with the two in a much more precarious position. Storm and P are not afforded the power to create diamonds from their fingertips, they are not surrounded by flawed-but-kind people, they do not have limitless time, they are never safe from physical violence. They have much less to work with.

In other words, Storm was necessary for Minotaur Hotel to be complete. And for him to be complete himself we needed P, his guardian, and a valley wherein he was abused. Altogether they made up a beautifully complex tapestry of emotions when, in isolation, they were all flat and unengaging.

A Writer's Toolbox

In Stephen King's book On Writing he talks about the writer's "toolbox", which is one's collection of skills and techniques. For our own good, we writers should be continuously trying to perfect our tools and learn new ones, but at the same time we must be conscious not to go for the fancy techniques when the most classical, traditional and accessible ones would do just as well.

Coupled with the fact that the fancy tools can make things hard to follow for many readers, what this means in practice is that a writer can end up writing on a level of complexity that is below their true capacity. This can grind one's creative spirit down and make the whole thing a chore at best, and a regretful enterprise at worst.

This is relevant for the Hinterlands because it ties with one of my (personal) reasons for wanting to write it: truth be told, I felt that I generally was writing below my true capacity in Minotaur Hotel. I wanted something to spread my wings with and show a fuller pallet of skills, which would help with keeping the story from becoming monotonous.

More specifically, with this section of the story I wanted to go back to my roots and use more elements from Latin American magical realism, which is both very close culturally to me and a genre I wrote in a few years ago.

I suppose this desire to more strongly insert the spirit of magical realism into Minotaur Hotel came out of seeing some of the reactions we had to the game until that point. I don't think many readers realize that I'm not a native English speaker (in large part thanks to all the editing we do!), so very often people assume I'm American or that the whole team is coming from an American perspective. I can fully understand why this happens, but I couldn't help but feel a bit uncomfortable with it. I am proud of my Brazilian literary tradition and of the writers from which I learned, so the thought of being miscategorized as anything but Brazilian is unappealing to me.

And so I set out to write the most essentially Latin American story I had to tell... And I just happened to have an idea lying around, one that preceded Minotaur Hotel by a few years.

It was the story of a troubled detective who went into the hinterlands of Northeastern Brazil to investigate a series of murders, and the neglected young man he met on his journey. This story was largely inspired by places I visited, tragical local stories my family told me and my own reflections on the lives people lead in these places.

All I had to do was tweak the details here and there to adapt them to this new setting... And so I started writing the Hinterlands.

Limitations

The Hinterlands' main limiting factor was size. After an initial assessment of how much content it would require to make it work we figured out that it would be, inevitably, big — but how big was up for debate.

Right off the bat we understood that we'd have to drastically change our writing style and restructure our modus operandi for setting a scene. P's detective-like internal monologue was a deliberate choice as it, among other things, reveals his judgments and impressions about people and locations, which sets him up to be quicker and punchier than our standard narrator.

The car CG (where P and Storm are shown driving around) was another way we came up with to shorten things. If we could keep most of P's and Storm's character building dialogue in a single "location" we would save on backgrounds, scenario descriptions and we would greatly reduce the complexity of structuring the whole thing.

While sizing all of this up, we pondered how many in-game days this section should have to make it work. We figured out that 7 was the right number based on the following points:

• We specifically did not want the player to have time to do everything in the Hinterlands. This was important to keep things balanced, to push people towards replaying the game, but mainly it is thematically necessary. Unlike the MC and Asterion, P and Storm do not have infinite resources and so must pick and choose.
• We wanted the Hinterlands to have "quests" which the player could try to accomplish. With the previous point in mind we decided that having three quests with it only being possible to accomplish two in a single playthrough would be the smallest execution possible that still conveyed everything we wanted to.
• What should these quests be about? For starters one would be about spending time with Storm, and if you hang out with him enough he'd develop a crush on P. That was simple. The other two quests were about the history of the Hinterlands per se.
• How many days should it take to finish a quest? They are meant to be sort of like mini-puzzles. They should be long enough that people don't solve them by accident. But they don't have to be too complex that they become "Eureka!" moments in their own right — because the real puzzle box is the Hinterlands itself, as a whole. So, how long should they be?
  • One day: not a puzzle at all, people would "solve" them without even noticing there was something to think about.
  • Two days: still too little, could be solved by accident and that would feel very shoddy.
  • Three days: the smallest amount of in-game time wherein the chances of a player solving things accidentally was acceptably small.
• We want three quests, each one requiring three in-game days. By this measure a player would need nine days to finish them all — and we can't have that. Six days would be too little as players would have just enough time to do two quests with no sightseeing. We went with seven days because two of the quests could be accomplished in five days if the player managed their time really well, so having eight days would allow them to do everything.

• How many locations should it have?
  • 4 locations for the quests. The non-Storm quests would take 3 days each, but we went with the two sharing a location (Flooded Town) so only 5 locations were necessary at first. We reduced it down to 4 locations because one quest would reuse its starting point as the final one as well — we did this because that location was interesting enough to warrant a revisit.
  • 1 location to pick Storm's clothes (the Tailor).
  • 2 locations to explore P's and Storm's past (their families' homes.)
  • 1 joke location, exclusive to the Speedrunner route (the Anthill).
  • We wanted 1 location to be the Minotaur Hotel equivalent of a "harder, bonus level".
  • That's 8 so far. Considering there were going to be 7 in-game days, we felt that adding 6 more locations would make everything meaty enough that players wouldn't stumble on the second, hidden quest too easily (while also not making the whole area so bloated it became too much.) Over these locations we spread the other ideas we had.
  • Total: 13 locations for most players, with 14 for the Speedrunner.

Structure

The premise of the Hinterlands is that you can play detective, explore the region to try and find the Hotel, solve mysteries and get closer to Storm.

But how should we structure this content and keep track of all the variables going on? We already showed the rationale behind the number of locations and what role they had structurally, but that's only scratching the surface of what went on in writing the Hinterlands. Another important thing, perhaps the single most crucial one, was getting the chemistry between P and Storm right.

Once we figured out that the Hinterlands section should happen over 7 days, I came up with the idea of each in-game day having fixed morning and night sections. These sections would carry the largest load of exploring P and Storm as characters. To be precise they had to do the minimum work required to get their chemistry to work, and the exploration sections would do the rest... But let's take a closer look how this all was structured.

The Hinterlands section has a main set of "variables":

• Did the player fulfill Nini's questline?
• Did the player fulfill the second questline?
• How many times have P and Storm hung out in situations that made them closer?

With this in mind, what I did was writing the morning and night segments with variations here and the accounting for those factors.

The most writing intensive of those was how close Storm and P were at any given moment. We measured this by checking how many times they hung out and had an emotionally intimate moment together — which could range from 0 (never did it) to 7 (did it in all the days in the Hinterlands.)

If P and Storm hung out 3 times or more by the end of the Hinterlands, Storm would develop a crush on P. That was our landmark: 3 was the threshold for Storm developing feelings. As such, the third night in-game was a particularly important point as it marked the first moment wherein the player could have reached that threshold. As such, it was a very deliberate choice having P mention his sexuality during that night. Placing Storm's attempt at stealing P's money on the morning before that was also deliberate, as it was an important trigger for the two of them to understand each other better.

The ritual involving salt was also important for the third night, as that served as a hint (right in the middle of the Hinterlands, when there's still time) pointing the player towards the Salt Plains.

Overall, however, writing the morning/night segments was a reasonably free-flowing process. More often than not I was seeking out genuine moments that captured P's and Storm's growing chemistry. Around those interactions I would just let all my themes and ideas flow freely. This is how scenes like P and Storm sharing a cup of coffee early in morning came to be — I was pulling from beautiful moments I had experienced myself. Same goes for the existential terror of seeing a young woman, no older than 13, pregnant in a horrifying house in the middle of nowhere.

It's been very interesting seeing people discuss the Hinterlands. For the most part it was built on top of very personal experiences and ideas that had been rolling inside my head for years. After so long the inspirations that went into it weren't very conscious anymore, as they all had melted together into a more flexible mix of ideas. So I'd say it's been very interesting seeing people interpreting this segment of the story, giving names to things that had become something like second nature to me.

P as the Narrator

We simply could not have our usual narrator for the Hinterlands.

...Well, we could, but it wouldn't hit as well if we did. We needed a snappier narrator, someone quick-witted and more likely to interject with his personal views. That's the kind of person who could make a setting as unpleasant as the Hinterlands come across like we wanted. P had to be the narrator for this reason — and also to reinforce the parallel between him and the player character back in the hotel.

As I said before, we were trying to juggle a lot of things with the Hinterlands. One of the first that had to be addressed was how to transition from the rest of the game to it, which was a tough challenge already. So, we didn't think people would be interested in P right from the get go, but I suspected that Storm would hook people in. Storm's story is, I hope, captivating, immediately so, and P becomes engaging by coming into contact with it.

Then we get P's internal monologue — and his self-hate. This was essential to build on the damage caused by Clément's actions, and necessary to reveal how P could be interesting in his own right. From that point we could then make the transition to showing how the Hinterlands and its mysteries are engaging too — only for it all to wrap back into P and Storm in the end, leading up to their arrival in the hotel.

So... There was a chain of interesting things. Asterion is interesting, and Storm inherits that by being a minotaur in a similar situation. Then P carries that engagement after we leave Storm point of view, and takes the reader's attention to the Hinterlands, which later returns everything to Asterion and Storm. It's a chain.

Or a spiral.

Managing Themes

I won't spell out what are all the themes of the Hinterlands, that would spoil the fun. If you want to find out more about this I recommend you check our Forum, where our amazing readers are discussing this and many other things.

What I will talk about here is how I managed the themes of the Hinterlands, which is a different thing.

For starters, I had a very well defined idea of what P's and Storm's stories are about. Recursion, of course, was one of them, and around the set of central themes I kept adding more and more ideas that fit together, like exploring the power play between Storm in his precarious position and P, who quite literally has power and authority over him.

Then, around them, I started placing motifs, threads, cultural influences, literary touches which I felt were connected to the larger context of the Hinterlands. It wasn't exactly some large mastermind-like work of tying all the threads together in an infinite web of ideas. It was about having compassion and trying to connect with the reality of what places like the Hinterlands are like.

With this I had the characters and I had the world around them. The last element was the chemistry between P and Storm, getting their banter to flow well.

Unlike Asterion, who is possessed by sorrow when the story starts, Storm is the kind of young man who rises to joy somewhat easily. He hasn't been through the depths of Asterion's abuse. P, meanwhile, carries more darkness than the player character.

It wasn't difficult for me to get the two of them to flow together. As soon as they did I could get the story to move wherever I wanted, which made showcasing all the context of the Hinterlands (and the themes hidden within) easy. Natural.

Mapping the Hinterlands

We only drew a map of the Hinterlands very late in development, if you can believe it.

First I decided what kinds of locations I wanted to explore, then wrote them. This was not quick, there was a lot of back and forth, cut content going out and new ideas popping in as we went on. During this time I had only a few firm ideas about how the map would look like:

• The Hinterlands are a depression in the ground, it's below sea level. The entrance is to the East and you go down by going on a spiral pattern bordering the cliff wall.
• Skinned Tapir is near the entrance.
• At the bottom of the valley there would be the salt plains, and beside it a pond so polluted and salty it is largely incapable of hosting life. The pond is by a cliff wall. The salt plains should be close to the middle of the screen when shown in-game.

With those pointers I then drew up this map...

Which nanoff proceeded to develop into this one:

Literary Interpretation as a Mechanic for a Detective Story

I used to really like Ace Attorney when I was a teen. It was fun, I enjoyed the courtroom and investigation puzzle gameplay, the story was captivating. But over the years I largely lost interest in it (and in many kinds of games, to be fair). I had many issues with it, including the perception that the puzzles weren't really interesting anymore but mainly with the stagnation in the formula.

How many times can you do murder mysteries before it becomes boring by repetition? After so many years and cases, is the premise of a wacky whodunnit even enough to bring in people? At least it wasn't for me, and over the years I drifted off. For a few years I largely stopped playing video games.

As an adult I played Bloodborne then Dark Souls, which captivated me quite a bit. What really captivated me was that these were works with a very depth of literary touches to it wherein the stories were fragmented enough that they, in essence, became puzzles on their own right. If you look into it very carefully you'll find that trying to piece together everything becomes a more interesting game than the moment to moment gameplay itself.

To a large extent Minotaur Hotel is a game that tries to do exactly that. This is why we have the archaeological process of searching the valley for old texts and trying to piece them together. It's why we try to layer many mythological and literary influences on top of each other until they are difficult to pick apart one by one. But I wanted to push this to the next level with the Hinterlands.

Going back to the point about Ace Attorney, I envisioned the Hinterlands section as a sort of deconstructive detective story where the player would, in essence, be given the solution to the "whodunnit" right from the get go. Everyone starts knowing that P's grandfather was involved with the death of twelve mythicals, and it is known he was kicked out of the hotel by Clément. The "murder" is solved, but the "mystery" persists as the context and complete truth of the Hinterlands is yet to be understood.

It's the same with Storm. At first players might think that the point of it all is to take Storm to the hotel. Take him from Point A to Point B. But as things proceed they might realize that there are more mysteries here like understanding Storm's family life, which in turn opens a whole new chest of possibilities as it further sheds light on P's family being an even bigger mystery. Again, the player starts off with a somewhat clear idea of what "the goal" is, and they are left to figure out the context.

After the player is informed of the twelve tapir's deaths, they set off on their journey. Perhaps they'll be skeptical of Nini, but chances are they'll follow her proposed quest because the. If they do bury the remains of the tapirs then P and Storm will express doubt on whether or not anything worthwhile was accomplished at all. More perceptive players might raise the question that "giving a Christian burial" to the worshippers of a pagan deity may not be a good thing (have you checked the name of the Achievement you get if you do it?)

This, I thought, should be the truest and definitive "game mechanic" of the Hinterlands. The map, the exploration, the time management, all of that is a toy box in which we hid the real game — which is actually played outside of Minotaur Hotel, inside your own head.

Late in development we realized that this proposal had a logical conclusion to it: the game must not deliver all solutions to the players. There must be puzzles which P and Storm, as characters, cannot crack. The player must assume the role of detective if they want to understand it all.

This does connect back to Storm, mind you. In other games the player might have been punished by wasting all their time hanging out with Storm, but it's not necessarily the case here. Storm, too, holds mysteries, and even the act of spending time trying to understand his emotions is an investigative choice.

The more the player thinks about the Hinterlands, the more puzzles they will find, all the way to trying to understand the social and cultural context of the Hinterlands as a society — and, by extension, P's and Storm's as well.

In other words, Minotaur Hotel is a game that must reward curiosity. The drive to understand is a great thing indeed.

Cut Content

The Hinterlands is the part of the game with the largest amount of cut content. It was necessary in order to get the game out, we couldn't possibly let it keep going on and on any longer. Tragically, some of the ideas we cut were some of the ones we held dearest to us.

However, the very positive reaction to the Hinterlands (in particular to some of the most mysterious elements) has convinced us to release some of that content after our break. Still, in the name of revealing what the development process was like to help other VN developers, I will list here some of the content we cut.

• "The Brothel" would be a location P and Storm could investigate in Skinned Tapir. By going there P would be able to interview his grandfather's mistress and learn more about some of his life and history. It was meant to give a better understanding on what kind of person Grandpa P was like.
• "The Cave" was a location that players could access by going to "The Pond" after certain conditions were met, and it would take P down to a chamber where he would be shown disturbing things.
• After burying the remains of the twelve tapirs, P and Storm would be able to return to the Colonel's Estate where a new event would play out. The widow would show them that a whole wing of the mansion had been locked off after the Colonel's death because of the many unexplainable and dangerous things that were happening there.
• We wrote a whole scene where P and Storm investigated a truck stop but we cut it to avoid making the map screen too bloated. Nothing of note would happen there except for a comedic little scene where P would find the restroom colonized by a mass of frogs.
• P and Storm were meant to meet Jean halfway through the Hinterlands. They were also meant to take in a hitchhiker. Both those encounters were cut halfway through and won't be restored.

Concept Art

The cranky boy.

The sweet boy.

???

We Asked People to Send Questions, Here's What We Got

Which of the three main Hinterlands quests did you like writing the most (Pedro and Oscar’s relationship, skinned tapir or putting the souls to rest)?

The act of writing Oscar and Pedro getting closer was the most fun in the moment to moment sense, but the Skinned Tapir quest was the most fascinating to work on.

What was your initial plan for the hither lands? Did it change a lot as you wrote it?

Yes, more than any other part of the game. Originally we'd start it with P leaving his apartment in the city, travelling to the West and seeing things getting weirder, then going down to the Hinterlands, meeting Nini, searching for Oscar... Then I scrapped all of that because it just wasn't interesting and went straight to the moment which felt the most fascinating to me: Storm and P meeting.

Another thing that was scrapped is that, for a while, we planned on P meeting Jean in the Hinterlands, who would try get P to give up on the search. That was removed halfway through, but we still considered the idea of Dominikos being sent there to perform a similar function.

Zezé was a very late addition to the story. Nini also appeared more often and was a more present influence in the story.

What would you consider to be the ideal route in The Hinterlands?

That's part of the mystery, I can't answer that!

I think it's very interesting you chose to implement recursion as a core of the narrative in Hinterlands specifically, which takes place in LatAm, since generational trauma and "history repeating itself" is a very common topic in latin american literature, along with the setting of an unfruitful and almost abandoned town and the presence of rural superstitions and rites. Was this intentional? was there any kind of inspiration for this section of the game?

Yes. One of the first ideas we had that led us to writing the Hinterlands was of exploring the theme of recursion, which was absolutely fundamental for Build 0.5 as a whole. It's a cornerstone of the whole thing.

Latin America itself was also another cornerstone of the whole thing. The magical realism style for the story, the folklore, the socioeconomic struggles, the motifs... We absolutely went as far as we could in trying to make the Hinterlands an essentially Latin American piece of fiction.

By far the Hinterlands were inspired first by visiting places like it in real life, knowing people who grew up there, seeing the effects of generational trauma, having to go there as an adult and seeing how hard things are. Very often I was literally writing what I saw in my visits there while adding a thin layer of magical realism and mythology. But I was also inspired by One Hundred Years of Solitude.

I was also... negatively inspired by playing Kentucky Route Zero. I did not like how academic it became, which I find fundamentally incompatible with Latin American magical realism. This is a genre of fiction which, in my experience, "walks barefoot" and is very close to traditional folklore and poor people struggling to get by. I think that, to a certain extent, these stories are anti-academic in the sense that they should be accessible and enjoyable even by people without a deep literary experience...

Mind you, this is why P and Storm getting closer is, to me, important for the Hinterlands to be complete because that sort of very pure and emotional story, of two people getting closer and struggling with their emotions and positions, brings the kind of accessibility that is essential for magical realism.

Are the routes the player did in hinterlands gonna have a huge impact in minotaur hotel later on? For an example getting the salt from the god, doing a proper burial, (doing both) or just commiting fully to being nice to Storm?

Things will change in impacting ways depending on it but it won't necessarily be game-changing in scale. I'd say they will bring about changes similar in scope and impact as the tricking/not tricking Argos earlier in the game, which are definitely relevant for the plot.

What you do in the Hinterlands will also affect your hotel's staff. Unless you have the Leader background you cannot get both Pedro and Nikos to join your team, and P will be more likely to join the more you accomplished during the Hinterlands.

Was it intended from the start for storm and P to be able to have a relationship or was that something that was thought of later?

It was part of the original idea, it's one of the core pillars of the section. From the start we planned that Storm could confess his feelings, but P would softly reject him with the promise that things could change in the future. This was meant as a, let's say, repeat and exploration of what Asterion and the MC have.

What did Storm want to get at his house and didn't?

He never wanted to pick up anything, it was just an excuse to go and show off the charm to his family... But things didn't go as planned, did they?

Conclusion

Was writing the Hinterlands worth it? Absolutely! But, lemme tell you, that was such a crazy risk we took, it could have gone so badly. We went with it because we are crazy like that but I'd recommend developers to be cautious if they ever try to replicate something like this. It was extremely challenging.

And that's it! If you still have questions about the Hinterlands you can ask in the comments and I'll try to answer them.

To close it off, thank you for sticking with us so far! We are overjoyed with the reaction we've gotten so far. Thank you for your kindness, and I hope we will continue to provide with joy as the game goes on!