<aside> <img src="https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/secure.notion-static.com/647983c2-ccf2-4bc1-a21c-928d6cbb827a/naomi-impressed.png" alt="https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/secure.notion-static.com/647983c2-ccf2-4bc1-a21c-928d6cbb827a/naomi-impressed.png" width="40px" /> This interview originally ran in our May 2021 Goodbye Volcano High newsletter, which you can sign up for right here!

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Back in June of 2020, we brought in a new writing team and rebooted Goodbye Volcano High's entire narrative direction. What began as a daunting and intimidating change in the middle of production has become a chance to tell a story that we're proud as hell about, alongside a group of people that we trust implicitly with the material. I wanted to talk to the team behind the reboot and ask them all the things I'm too shy to ask on Slack.

Marcela Huerta: Jumping in to work on a project that's already in progress must present a totally different set of challenges than starting one from scratch. What would you say were some of the trickiest parts about rebooting the narrative direction when you took up work on Goodbye Volcano High?

Kim Belair: It’s funny; I think when you join a game already in motion, the first couple weeks are a bit like putting together a puzzle. You have a lot of pieces left over from the original narrative, and you sort of have to pick through them and figure out, “Okay, here’s what’s unchangeable, here’s what’s flexible, and here’s what’s still missing.” And then you have to build a story within parameters you weren’t around to set. We had an extra challenging job I think, because it’s not just about story-- it’s not just, “Oh this plot point would work better later.” It’s about the fact you have all of these assets already developed, bits of animation already done, gameplay sequences mapped… so you really are doing the work of making connections and building narrative between them, rather than coming in and making something from the ground up.

Paula Rogers: I’ll start by echoing what Kim mentioned about the realities of production and having some assets that had already been created that we had to work around. The formation of every story is such its own animal, and you need to be free to follow what your characters dictate, so shaping that formation around some parameters is always going to feel a little different.

Character informs my entire process (and joy) in writing, so I think when you’re coming into existing characters it just takes some extra time to internalize them and find your connection to them. Yet it was also very unique because we did have room to change Fang and the cast, and we did change them all in significant ways. So I know Camerin and I had a lot of deep (and wonderful!) talks about just finding what we wanted to change and why, and getting to a place where we gave ourselves permission to do that took some time and internal processing. Also I just really enjoy having deep talks with Camerin! Highly recommend!!

Camerin Wild: Yeah, we all have wild imaginations and came in with a lot of ideas and energy. At some point we had to really reign it all in because the production is already committed to certain things. We also had to reverse engineer certain story decisions that we would have treated differently if we were starting from scratch. A bit like an elaborate game of exquisite corpse. Both of those realities were challenging, but they're also probably a part of any collaborative project to some degree whether you start from the beginning or not.

Marcela: Branching from that, Have you found that a lot has changed? What has remained of the original narrative?

Kim: Yes! I think it really took two passes for us to get to a place where the story feels fully and confidently our own, in spite of it sharing some touchpoints and scenes with the original. The first time we did it, I think we were still figuring out how much was “stuff we really need” versus “stuff we’re biased towards thinking we need, as a result of us spending so much time with it.”

Paula: I’m a bit of a broken record on the craft of writing—character! We changed a lot about Fang’s motivation and their personality and let the story changes ripple out from there. Specifically, Naser 2.0 is probably the most different from the original narrative, both in the way he acts as an opponent and as an ally to Fang. Unfortunately, the meteor remains. But we added pets into the GVH world, so... cute pets!