Announcing: TRINITY FUSION
Everything Is True
Ada Hoffmann's author newsletter
(Normally today would be a paid post, but I just HAD to make this announcement RIGHT NOW. :D )
On March 20, Angry Mob Games (not to be confused with Angry Robot Books; I seem to attract a lot of angry employers) published the announcement trailer for their new roguelite action platformer, Trinity Fusion:
In Trinity Fusion, a man-made multiverse is catastrophically collapsing. It’s up to a woman named Maya, psychically connected to her parallel selves from each universe, to fuse the universes into a cohesive whole rather than letting them destroy themselves.
I couldn’t say so at the time, but for a good chunk of the spring and summer of 2022 I worked as a narrative consultant helping Angry Mob Games piece the plot, characters, setting and backstory of Trinity Fusion together.
The game designers sought me out because they were fans of the Outside series. They resonated with a lot of elements of that series - diverse characters, cosmic themes, and the question of how to salvage a seemingly unwinnable situation - and wanted a similar feel for their game. I’d never written for video games before but I was intensely intrigued.
Craig Hauser’s post on the PlayStation Blog talks a little bit more about the game concept and my role in development.
The process of writing for a game like this is very different from the process of writing a novel. The designers already had a lot of key elements of the story in mind, including the collapsing multiverse, Maya’s parallel selves with their different skill sets, and an outline of the different locations. A lot of my job was to brainstorm and figure out why this was all happening in the game world. Why, exactly, is it necessary to merge the multiverse? Why is Maya able to do this? Why are other factions dead set on stopping her? Who, meanwhile, is on Maya’s side, and how might all these characters interact? I had immense fun spinning all this out and putting flesh onto the bones of the game designers’ ideas.
I also wrote some dialogue, although I’m not sure how much of it made it into the final game - game dialogue is definitely a different skill from novel dialogue.
I hope I’ll be able to talk about the game and the process more later, and there’ll definitely be more game announcements (like a story trailer) later, but for now: Look at that video!! Look at those moves!! Whoosh whoosh pew pew!! I’m very happy.
Meanwhile:
Check out R.B. Lemberg’s in-depth interview with me on the Angry Robot Books website.