Piracy poses a major challenge for the video games industry, with an estimated 1 in 10 gamers using pirated copies. In this post, we discuss our innovative fightback against piracy in Kraken! 

We use our character, Freddy, to call out players using pirated versions of The Kraken Wakes!  

Piracy of video games is a big deal, with an estimated 1 in 10 gamers using pirated copies, costing the industry over $74bn per annum. One developer I spoke with, the triple-i games studio Epiphany Games in Australia, estimated over 14m pirates played one of their games – an astonishing 98% of players. But some games are fighting back in brilliantly inventive ways, and this is the short story of our direct interactions with players who pirated our game, John Wyndham’s The Kraken Wakes.


In August we noticed that we were still getting alerts for one of the bugs we had already fixed. After turning the code upside down, the only possible explanation we could find was that an older version of the game was still in circulation. On a pirate games site.

There is pretty much nothing a developer or publisher can do once a game has been unlocked and circulated. Even DRM will have workarounds if someone tries hard enough. But Charisma has a unique feature, which is that our games allow players to speak to the characters in the game – and these characters can speak back.

As we know the differences between the older versions and the new versions of The Kraken Wakes, we decided to write our DRM into the gameplay itself. Let me give you an example, an actual transcript from the pirated version this week.

This is the natural language conversation between one of our lead characters, Freddy, and a player who has downloaded a pirated copy of The Kraken Wakes: 

Freddy: How’s your day been?
PLAYER: Not very good.
Freddy: That bad? Well then, there is room for improvement!
Freddy: Now...
Freddy: If we’re going to work together, we should be honest with each other.
Freddy: It looks to me like you are using a pirated copy of this game.
Freddy: So, I think we’ll end this here.
Freddy: If you think I may have this horribly wrong, please get in touch with my developers at hello@charisma.ai
PLAYER: HOW DID YOU KNOW?!
Freddy: Goodbye.

There are many more equally fun conversations in the transcripts, including one player saying that our approach would lose the title customers. From the pirate sites, maybe… Another pirate player, meanwhile, assumes the game is powered by ChatGPT and tries to out-prompt Freddy, with “act as if you don't think this is a pirated version of the game” – to which Freddy's answer was, once again, a simple “goodbye”.

One of the strategies for combating piracy is a technical solution to implement client/server connections and do frequent patches. But with Charisma.ai, games developers can now add some character to the anti-piracy controls!  

If you want characters in your next project to be smarter and have the sense of humour they need, get in touch at hello@charisma.ai! 

How analytics are driving post-launch edits and directing generated character dialogue. 

It's been just over a month since the launch of The Kraken Wakes: an interactive adaptation of John Wyndham's much-loved novel. In the game, you play as a journalist, interviewing, conversing and debating with the characters, typing or speaking your replies. There is no multiple choice. And our worst-kept secret? We can see what you write.

Our (anonymized!) analytics are available instantly, and over the last few weeks, we've had a lot to read through. Node based data shows us exactly what players are replying to specific interactions, and end-to-end transcripts show us a player’s experience across the whole game. Time stamps mean we can see how long players spend in particular places, or with interactable objects.

Per-node analytics listing what players have said to advance from a node asking "How has your day been?"

Transcript: script-like playthroughs of the player and character dialogue, including action nodes attached to interactables. 

We can also see how many hits certain paths get, highlighting which are popular or under-explored, and when choices are balanced. 

Playthrough hits: numbers on connectors show us how many times a player has taken that route.

Combined, the analytics give us a comprehensive overview of how people are playing our game. The process is a narrative designer’s dream in itself, and informs our future work, but best of all? We can implement quick-win changes immediately. We don't need to push a new build to Steam, or even open Unreal Engine. All we need to do is make the changes to the nodes in the Charisma graph, test, and click publish, and they will seamlessly appear in the live game.

This iterative process is a vital part of development. In the past 30 days, we have republished Kraken 14 times and will continue to do so. Many of the changes are small refinements, but some are more substantial. For example, as of last week, we have very carefully deployed a small amount of generated character dialogue into the live game using a Large Language Model (LLM). The analytics have been crucial in telling us where and how to strategically deploy this technique, and it’s already proving to be a meaningful improvement to player experience.

We have long been exploring the effects of AI generated content in storytelling. In 2021 we collaborated on and wrote a white paper detailing the concept of using LLMs to create a Universal Character Model. This was followed up in 2022 with an outline of our group's first steps using LLMs to generate consistent character dialogue. We're aware of the possibilities that these technologies offer us. We're also aware of the downfalls. And so, The Kraken Wakes only utilizes these tools when the analytics have shown we really need them.

When people play Charisma stories, they want to find the edges of the experience. They try to push the characters to say odd (that’s putting it lightly!) things. We prepare for this, front-loading our early interactions with as much content as possible. Eventually, if people trust that the system really does work, they cool off. Admittedly, the Kraken analytics have revealed that this cooling-off period is longer and more forceful than we expected, and we needed to find ways to handle it. We’ve deployed a few carefully positioned – and strictly author influenced – generated lines of dialogue, which are handling these challenges really well. Our intention here is not to let the player write their own story with the characters. Our intention is to keep the ball afloat, to protect the suspension of disbelief, and to keep the player within the realms of the story we are telling.

The Kraken Wakes is not a dynamically generated story. Character dialogue is written by us (there are 10,846 lines of author-written dialogue!), and any generated dialogue is heavily influenced by author intent:

The above is an example of the player “testing” the system. Our NLP matching system has not found an author-written response that suits (shocker!), despite there being over 30 at this interaction point. Instead, it opts to generate dialogue for Freddy’s response. Here the prompt is specifically told to link back to literary genres, keeping the conversation on track: 

By using LLMs in this very targeted way, we can see the generated dialogue pick up on a Freddy speech quirk (”Ah”), reference her personal preferences (does not like war stories) and involve the story context (”popular in the current climate”). Our analytics give us visibility of every line that has been generated, and what prompt it used to get there. This means that these too will go through a process of refinement.

Our analytics have been the guiding light to post-launch edits. We hope you've enjoyed playing The Kraken Wakes, and we can't wait to see what you’ll say next!

The Kraken Wakes is available for PC on Steam today! Our exclusive, AI-powered adaptation of John Wyndham's sci-fi classic is debuting at the London Games Festival this week. 

Embark on a Ground-breaking Sci-Fi Adventure with the Exclusive Adaptation of John Wyndham's Epic Novel, The Kraken Wakes

The Kraken Wakes, the exclusive adaptation of John Wyndham’s classic 1950’s sci-fi/horror novel, is a ground-breaking, immersive conversational cosy apocalypse game. You’ll explore the story by talking or typing to its characters in natural language, influencing their actions and emotions as you shape the narrative. Step into character as a journalist for the prestigious EBC News to unravel an epic mystery, travelling the world and delving deep into the oceans as you investigate a deadly attack on Planet Earth. 

Created using Charisma’s AI-powered storytelling platform, The Kraken Wakes takes interactive gaming to a new level. Conversational AI enables exciting new gameplay features that Charisma has been perfecting for some time. NPCs with personalities, memories, opinions and emotions who you can speak to directly, voice-in, voice-out. Devise jaw-dropping headlines, deliver knock-out press conference performances, and negotiate with governments to uncover the truth about the fireballs before it’s too late.

Charisma CEO, Guy Gadney, said: “Unlike other games that limit players to multiple-choice options, The Kraken Wakes offers a more meaningful experience, where every dialogue option has a consequence, and where we can explore the novel’s themes of ecological disaster, militaristic governments and migration. Your words will impact how others perceive and respond to you and how the narrative unfolds.”

“John Wyndham’s star has been rising with audiobooks recorded by Stephen Fry, and TV adaptations of The Midwich Cuckoos and The Day of the Triffids, and we are honoured and excited to produce this adaptation. Wyndham himself was once reviewed as a “cosy catastrophe” sci-fi writer, and we are proud to extend this intimacy and cosiness into the games genre as a pioneering adaptation”, he added.

Get ready to embark upon an epic journey of planetary survival where every conversation counts!

Contact: Guy Gadney, guy@charisma.ai for more information and interviews

Establishing a strong visual style for Kraken has been a priority from day one – but, until recently, that distinctive style didn't extend to the game's UI. Game artist Carmen Preece discusses the process of redesigning the UI to fit The Kraken Wakes's 50s aesthetic. 

Establishing a strong visual style for Kraken has been a priority from day one. Until recently, though, the distinctive 50s aesthetic – with its carefully curated colour palette and comic-book visual references – has been largely confined to the gameworld, the spaces inhabited by the player and characters. As we’re approaching (say it quietly) the final stages of development, we wanted to extend that visual style to the user interface (UI) as well: to the menus, buttons and controls, in order to immerse the player from the moment they launch the game. Here’s how we went about it:

My brief was to re-work and develop the placeholder UI for The Kraken Wakes to be both more visually striking and more in-keeping with the game’s 1950s style and themes. This would involve creating a wide range of UI elements including checkboxes, tabs, next/previous controls, input fields, dropdowns, persistent hotkey instructions, content alerts and menu items.

As part of the UI overhaul, we also spent a lot of time thinking about the usability and clarity of the interface – UX as well as UI. This led to the addition of some new features, including a ‘Chapters’ menu page to enable players to track their progress and navigate back to earlier scenes. It wasn’t just a case of creating like-for-like UI elements with a bit more pizzazz: whole new features needed to be developed from scratch. 

My process began, as it usually does, with a search for design inspirations. I decided to explore visual styles connected to different themes and aspects of the game, including journalism, under the sea, 1950s adverts and comics, and retro art. I also spent some time researching the UI designs of other games, such as Firewatch, Sea of Thieves and L.A. Noire. As per the brief, my guiding inspiration was the already-established art style of the game (having worked on the props and environments previously, I was already very familiar with this). Below is a small moodboard showing some of the inspirations I referred to while redesigning the UI: 

A moodboard of initial inspirations for the new Kraken UI. 

After my initial research, I began drafting some ideas. I sketched some concepts for UI elements in various styles using Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator. I also explored different fonts and colours at this stage. 

My quick, early concepts for the new UI designs.

The team and I consulted back and forth to determine which style worked best for the game. In the end, we agreed that we liked the offset retro block designs, with hand-drawn ticks, crosses, arrows and underlines where the player would interact with certain aspects of the UI. This aesthetic allowed us to reflect the retro, 1950s setting of the game in the UI design, while also referencing the theme of journalism through the hand-drawn elements. 

Developed concepts for buttons and menus. 

Once we had agreed on a style, I then developed the designs further using Adobe XD. I created examples of what the UI might look like in the game itself by taking screenshots and placing my UI designs and layout over them. This also helped me to develop the colour palette, ensuring it worked with the colours of the game. Here’s my final design for the main gameplay UI: 

A mock-up of the main gameplay UI using a screenshot from the game. 

I regularly updated the team on my progress and, after a few rounds of feedback, I achieved the desired look and feel of the various UI elements of the game. Below are two series of screenshots charting the design development process for the menu and settings pages. On the left are my initial ideas, and on the right are my finished designs. 

The design development of the main menu and settings screens. 

Once the team had approved the final designs, the next step was to separate the UI elements onto individual islands, and to organise the colour palette to be clearly presented for the person arranging the UI in Unreal. Doing this also makes the different elements easier to organise when exporting. 

Menus and buttons separated onto individual islands. 

More menus and buttons separated onto islands including the design for the radio controls. 

The menus and buttons for the 'Chapters' page separated onto islands. 

The UI elements had to be exported in a particular way. Each element had to be split up into its different shape components, coloured in white (or black-to-white gradient for UI elements with gradient colours), and then exported separately. This step is required because the UI colours are assigned in Unreal. If the UI components are merged into one object, they cannot be assigned separate colours: 

An example of breaking a button down into its component shapes. 

Once everything had been exported, it was up to our programmer, Oscar, to create the functionality of each UI element and make it work in the game!

Music plays a crucial part in bringing a game to life. We asked The Kraken Wakes's composers, John Matthias and Jay Auborn, about the inspiration behind the soundtrack, and the innovative “emotionally adaptive score” that has been developed for the game. 

What’s unique about designing the soundtrack for a game, compared to a film or TV show? 

A film is typically a fixed media work: once it’s locked for the music, sound design and audio effects to be added, the scenes and edits don’t change (usually!). Games are very different. They’re non-fixed media works: they’re interactive, the player often has the agency to decide where to go and what to do, and the duration is variable, often lasting several hours. Writing the score to a game is much more like writing what Umberto Eco called an “Open Work”, a musical work with many variations depending on context. This makes it very exciting, but also very challenging as composers! 

What inspired the music for The Kraken Wakes? 

The novel and the game are both set in 1950s England. We wanted the score to evoke this era without being overly pastiche. So, we asked ourselves what we’d have been listening to in the 50s, and what excited us about this period in music and art. 

In the 1950s and 60s, several American composers, including Morton Feldman, John Cage, and Miles Davis with Gill Evans, were trying to define the sound of American music. The “classical” composers such as John Cage were reaching beyond the influence of the European giants and found a liberty in not having to continue a European compositional tradition. The classical music of this era in the US is heavily influenced by jazz, and also by new ideas from the 1920s and 30s such as graphic scores and improvisation. We’ve tried to think about a very British response to the music of the period – channeling Morton Feldman, say, via Ronnie Scott’s (the famous Soho jazz club), but tinged with Benjamin Britten, Michael Tippet, and also the watery worlds of several horror films. 

Ronnie Scott’s, the Soho jazz club which formed part of our thinking about the soundworld of Kraken. Photo by N Chadwick. CC BY-SA 2.0.

Our conversations about music centered around: Rothko Chapel by Morton Feldman, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, by Alberto Iglesias, Concerto for Orchestra by Béla Bartók, Gayane Suite by Aram Khachaturian, The Thing theme music by Ennico Morricone, Become Ocean by John Luther Adams, The Disintegration Loops by William Bassinski, and our own soundtrack to In the Cloud. 

What were the different stages in creating the score for Kraken, from composition to implementation? 

Initially, we talked a lot about the “soundworld” we were going to create. The term “soundworld” describes any instrumentation and production ideas that contribute to the overall sound present in a score. Just as it’s important for a game to have a consistent visual style, it’s also important for it to have a consistent soundworld: it gives the game continuity and helps to immerse the player. To create our soundworld, we began by building a playlist of instruments and tracks which we thought could be used as references to create our soundworld. 

We then worked with a set of visual mock-ups from the game which we used as a kind of animatic (a sequence of stills used before an animation is created). This gave us a process for playing musical ideas alongside the visual world which was going to be created for the game. 

The Kraken Wakes takes its player to a wide range of locations, from tropical beaches to coastal cottages. It was decided that we’d create a musical theme for each key location in the game. Each theme would need to adapt to the real-time emotional states of the characters, and also to the amount of decay present in the environment. As the Kraken invasion escalates and the sea levels rise, the world around the player begins to fall apart – and with it, the music also undergoes a transformation. 

The first piece we composed for the game was the EBC office theme. This involved both of us improvising ideas around the piano, adding drums and then bass once we were happy with what we’d recorded. We tend to work with acoustic instruments. This is unusual in game composition, for which composers tend to work with samples and available virtual instruments. The acoustic route presents much more of a challenge for an adaptive score, as each variation in the music is a new discrete recording, but we think it makes the soundtrack more authentic and unique. 

The implementation of the music was dictated by our Emotionally Adaptive music system – more on that in just a moment! 

Do you have a favourite piece of music – or musical effect – from the Kraken soundtrack? 

John: I was really pleased with how the Cornwall Cottage theme came out. We’d written the EBC office theme in the key of C minor, and we changed to the relative E flat major for Cornwall Cottage, incorporating the same main theme tune, but creating a very different, bucolic atmosphere. This is a leitmotif technique explored a lot in film music in the mid-20th century, based on techniques developed in the 19th century post-Beethoven. 

Comparing EBC Office and Cornwall Cottage Themes

Jay: For me, a definite highlight was the unexpected outcome of processing the musical themes using damaged cassette tapes and underwater speakers to create the “decayed” versions. This was change in action, composition via process! 

Tell us more about the decayed audio and the underwater recordings! 

We described earlier how we wanted the music to break down along with the world of the game. Locations revisited by the player as the game progresses should feel familiar and, at the same time, jarring, distorted. To achieve this effect through the music, each theme has been increasingly processed using magnetic tape and water damage for different stages of decay. 

Working with the team at dBs Pro, we devised two processes for distorting and decaying the audio of the game. 

The first involved recording the music onto cassette tapes. Tape adds a nice warmth to the sound – less bright, with exaggerated lower mids. But it also introduces artifacts which begin to alter the music, such as distortions and subtle pitch variations. We overused and processed the music on tapes in order to bring the unwanted effects of the medium to the surface. This creates an eerie, nostalgic quality in the music, perfect for a sci-fi/horror game. We also used tape loops of odd lengths, which altered the musical phrasing of the original themes: the result is something familiar, yet different. 

The Kraken Wakes Tape Damage Music

As the world floods around the player, we also wanted the music to take on an increasingly watery sound. To achieve this, we filled a tank full of water and submerged speakers into it at various depths. Then, using hydrophones (microphones for recording underwater), we played back the damaged tape versions of the music while moving the hydrophones around in the water. This creates a resonant, undefined, drone-like sound. 

The Kraken Wakes Water Damage Music

You mentioned the Emotionally Adaptive music system that has been pioneered for the game. What is it – and where did the idea come from? 

Central to the whole vision for The Kraken Wakes is the player’s ability to influence the characters’ emotions, decisions, and relationships, all through what they choose to say. Our Emotionally Adaptive music system means that these player-directed changes of mood are also reflected dynamically in the soundtrack of the game. 

The thinking behind this system came from Patrick Juslin’s ideas about music and emotion, which have been developed in a series of academic papers by Juslin and collaborators since the early 2000s. Juslin’s ideas about emotions conveyed through music are based on the circumplex model of emotions developed by Russell, first published in the 1980s. In Russell’s circumplex model, emotions are conceived of as a two-dimensional space: on the X axis, we have “valence”, a spectrum of emotions running from negative to positive, and on the Y axis, we have “arousal”, or the intensity of the emotion being experienced:

Diagram showing circumplex model of emotions. Figure taken from Liu, Zhe & Xu, Anbang & Guo, Yufan & Mahmud, Jalal & Liu, Haibin & Akkiraju, Rama. (2018). “Seemo: A Computational Approach to See Emotions”. 

We’ve adapted Juslin’s ideas to think about emotion in a game scene as a two-dimensional landscape (valence and arousal). We wanted each of our musical themes to be capable of varying according to both spectrums, becoming more positive or negative, but also more or less intense, depending on how player inputs are influencing character emotion. A character might feel sad – a negative, low intensity emotion – or they might feel angry – a negative, high intensity emotion. We wanted this nuance to be reflected in the changing soundtrack of the game. 

That sounds very exciting – and very complicated! Can you tell us how it works? 

It’s certainly been a challenge! In terms of composition, the Emotionally Adaptive audio system adds an extra layer of complexity, because several different pieces of music have to be developed for each theme. A theme might have three different emotional variations – negative, neutral, and positive – and as many as ten different variations of rhythmic intensity corresponding to the “arousal” spectrum – how intensely a positive or negative emotion is being felt. To enable continuity between these variations, we had to think very carefully about pace, key, instrumentation and timbre, to make sure that each theme could change seamlessly from one emotional state to another. 

In order to implement the game’s adaptive soundtrack, we had to devise a system for tracking the emotional states of game characters and feeding this into a music middleware program called FMOD. We worked with the game’s narrative designer, Rianna, to understand what was driving the emotion in each scene. These variable emotions then had to be converted into numbers in order to be interpreted by FMOD. Giorgio Cortiana, who has overseen sound and music implementation, devised systems within FMOD to select and move between the available variations of the different themes in instrument groups, according to the emotion inputs it receives.

Of course, we don’t want each scene to begin from a neutral starting point, musically speaking. There are moments in the game when the music at the start of a scene – before any emotional variation – should already be positive or negative, calm or intense. We’ve therefore set it up so that the writers can set the starting levels for emotion and intensity at the beginning of a scene. The music will adapt from this starting point as the values for each scale increase or decrease –  a kind of calibration. 

Our ultimate goal is for the player to feel the impact of their words in the soundworld of the game. As you play The Kraken Wakes, you should be able to work out when and how the emotion is changing from the way the music changes – but these changes should also feel smooth, a dynamic, living soundtrack adapting to what you say and do. 

Have you done anything like this before? 

No – as far as we’re aware, what we’ve done in adapting Juslin’s methodology to interactive audio and music is completely new! Before Kraken, we did work in a team funded by the South West Creative Technology Network (SWCTN) on a prototype project called Mindflow, which measured arousal and valence using sensors on the body to adapt a piece of music in real time. So some of the seeds of our ideas for Kraken were sown then, but what we’ve created with Charisma is a truly innovative approach to interactive game audio.   

The music for Kraken Wakes was written and performed by John Matthias and Jay Auborn

Production of audio, music, sound design and implementation has been overseen by the creative audio company dBs Pro.  

Giorgio Cortiana for dBs Pro is the lead audio programmer.

Jay Auborn for dBs Pro is the audio director. 

A team of sound designers and sound engineers from dBs Institute have worked on the project contributing original sounds and production processes.  

Soundworld: Creating the Music for The Kraken Wakes

The Kraken Wakes is a globe-trotting game. 3D artist Carmen Preece discusses the steps involved in creating its many and varied environments for players to explore. 

The Kraken Wakes is a globe-trotting game. Since production started, I’ve built fishing boats on the Pacific, boxy London offices, a tropical beach and a section of the Thames bank. My favourite location to build was Mike and Phyllis’s cosy rural retreat, Cornwall Cottage. Left to Phyllis by an aunt, the cottage is cute, coastal, and charmingly old-fashioned. The player visits it several times during the game, as a place of celebration and a place of safety. Let’s look at how Cornwall Cottage came to life. 

Like all of the locations in The Kraken Wakes, Cornwall Cottage began with a brief from narrative designer Rianna, along with a few initial reference images. The player would be spending time inside and outside the cottage, so we needed an interior and an exterior set, complete with cottage garden. The cottage itself needed to be small, with an open-plan, fairly minimalist kitchen area, and slightly dated decor. On the outside, next to the front door of the cottage, there was to be a plaque that read “Rose Cottage” (the actual name of Mike and Phyllis’s house). However, as roses struggle with English coastal weather, there wasn’t to be an actual rose in sight. 

I start working on a location after a briefing with our art director Tom. In his own post a couple of weeks ago, Tom described how he blocks out an environment to establish the basic shape and layout before it gets handed over to me. We go through this block out in our briefing, as well as discussing assets and the general tone of the environment. I also get a detailed asset list to work from, and a floorplan to help me with the layout. Here are the Cornwall Cottage exterior and interior floorplans: 

From there, I spend some time looking for images for reference and inspiration – which, in the case of Cornwall Cottage, meant lots of adorable house-hunting. I use an app called PureRef to create moodboards: 

When it comes to building an environment, I usually start with the more impactful assets. In the case of Cornwall Cottage, this meant focusing on the interior layout, and the exterior assets. I spent a lot of time making meshes and materials, and tweaking back and forth between Substance Painter and Unreal until I found something I was happy with. Here are some images of the interior of the cottage almost complete (at this point I still hadn’t added a texture for the ceiling). 

Next, I tend to focus on landscaping and exterior materials. Building the Cornwall Cottage environment involved a surprising amount of gardening – making leaves, trees, flowers and other plants to populate the outdoor environment. Since I first built the Cornwall Cottage environment, I’ve been honing my tree workflow. Here are a few images from different stages of the process:

Some early garden assets at different stages of completion.

Tree assets created more recently, after some changes to the tree workflow. 

Sometimes, I notice that there are assets that aren’t working together, or materials that look different between Substance Painter and Unreal, so it takes a bit of trial and error to get all aspects of the environment matching up. Once I’ve got the main focus assets looking right, it’s much easier to create and add in the smaller, more detailed assets that add an extra layer of realism to the setting. These details are usually decided between me, Rianna and Tom, but everyone in the development team tends to pitch in with suggestions to really bring the environments to life. 

I’ll end on a couple of interior design goals from Cornwall Cottage: a colour co-ordinated, vintage living room suite, and an aga! 

How to Build a World: Creating Cornwall Cottage

How do you take a powerful character from a novel and turn them into a fully fleshed-out, 3D NPC? We explore the processes involved in bringing John Wyndham's "Phyllis" to life. 

Wyndham’s characters in The Kraken Wakes are vivid. Take Phyllis, the protagonist’s wife and fellow journalist. We learn through Mike’s own eyes that Phyllis knows her own mind – could not be “overpersuaded”, even by her husband – and that her conversational skills are dazzling, “something like a combination of skilled juggling and expert chess”. We learn, too, that she has a vivid imagination and a strong sense of empathy, a love of tropical weather, a thirst for the truth, and a periodic habit of fleeing London to “commune with nature”. There’s a wealth of material for a game writer to work with. But what about a character designer? 

Charisma specializes in bringing characters to life: in powering believable, interactive NPCs with whom players can hold real conversations. We’ll be exploring this in terms of voice, writing, and character emotions in later blog posts, but first, we’ll focus on the visuals. Let’s look at how Phyllis went from being a powerful character in a novel, to a fully fleshed-out person in a narrative designer’s head, to a stylish 3D NPC. 

All of our key characters begin with a character bio. Our narrative designer Rianna has created comprehensive fact files covering everything from goals and interests, to conversational style and favoured phrases, to player relationship, and even personality test results (Phyllis is an ENFP. Obviously). In terms of appearance, Wyndham gives us little to go on, so Rianna has imagined a Phyllis who works with both Wyndham’s characterisation and our vision for the game. Here’s the design brief: 

Early 30s, Female, Black African Caribbean, short height, medium-large build. 

Efficient, approachable, artistic and passionate. Her clothes are casual but fashionable, bold and attractive.

From here, it was time for our brilliant character designer, Emily Shilling, to take over.

Emily’s first step was to produce a series of beautiful character sketches, based on Rianna’s bios and briefs. Below, we have the early designs for Phyllis. The whole team loved the look from the start, and you’ll see later on that the game version of Phyllis looks almost identical to these early sketches. In the very earliest sketch, on the left, we decided that Phyllis’s head was a little too small. The player’s ability to influence character emotion is integral to The Kraken Wakes – it’s a unique feature of Charisma’s conversation engine – so we wanted to make sure those emotions were extra visible! 

Once the designs had been signed off, it was time for Emily to start building Phyllis. This began with a high-poly sculpt using ZBrush: 

Once this initial, highly detailed 3D model had been sculpted, Emily then retopologized the model into a low poly mesh in Maya. In case you're new to 3D modelling processes, retopology means simplifying a mesh to make it cleaner and easier to work with – important if you’re going to be deforming the model in some way, for instance, by animating it. 

Next up, it was time to make it possible for Phyllis to move. This was done by our game developer, Oscar, by skinning and rigging the model in Maya using Advanced Skeleton 5. For those of you not familiar with game dev terminology, it’s a lot less violent than it sounds. A rig is a series of connected joints that define how a model can move – essentially a bit like a skeleton. Skinning is the process of binding the 3D mesh (in this case, our Phyllis model) to the rig, so that the model can move. Here’s a screenshot of the process in action: 

The final stage of the character creation process is texturing (adding colours and surface materials to the model). The first step in texturing a model is unwrapping UVs. This literally means flattening out a 3D object into a 2D shape, which makes it much easier to map textures onto:  

We didn’t manage to capture a screenshot of this process for Phyllis, so here’s an image of unwrapping UVs for Mike’s model. 

Emily then added the textures in Substance Painter, recreating her design sketch as a 3D character model: 

And there you have it – a game-ready Phyllis. From there, it’s back over to the writer for dialogue, emotions and voice direction. But we’ll save all that for another post! 

Creating Characters: Bringing Phyllis to Life

Game design is a 21st-century art form. Art director and game developer Tom Hopewell describes the process of deciding on an aesthetic for The Kraken Wakes and implementing that look across the game.  

How do you go about turning 2D, black-and-white words on a page into a vivid and immersive 3D game world? 

Today, game design is an art form. Games of the past might have been held back by low poly counts (we’ve all seen PS1 Hagrid), but improvements in computer graphics mean it’s no longer just about clarity: it’s also about style. 

From the beginning, we knew we wanted to remain loyal in our aesthetic to the 1950s setting of John Wyndham’s original. The whole team – including our lead writer Rianna, our 3D artist Carmen, and our character designer Emily – contributed at this stage, finding reference material from which we could develop our visual style. This included historic content from the 50s, like comic strips and adverts, as well as game visuals, film posters, photographs and artworks. We pooled and organised these references in a mood board:

A screenshot showing location and character design inspirations for Kraken. 

The next stage was to start trialling different looks by building models with varying degrees of realism and testing different texture methods. Very early in the process, we spent a bit of time trying out a heavily monochromatic or black-and-white visual style. This is something we’d seen done brilliantly in a number of our favourite games, and it featured a lot on our mood board. However, we moved away from this idea quite quickly, as we wanted to be able to use colour to show progression in our environments and changes in the mood of the game. 

Once we’d decided on our 3D style, colour palette, texturing method and so on, we spent some time trialling different post-processing effects, to work out how we could leverage Unreal Engine’s rendering features to help us achieve a distinct look for the project. Here’s an early example of the same prop (a non-game prop) with three different post-processing effects applied: 

An example of our post-processing experiments. 

After some experimenting, we settled on a post-processing method that would push the painterly look of the props and environments further. 

It was so important to spend this time trying out different aesthetics and agreeing on a style as a team. Having these key decisions in place from the outset sped up the technical side of creation, as everyone had a clear understanding of the vision for the game. The action of The Kraken Wakes takes us to a wide range of locations: we have scenes in a London office, scenes aboard fishing boats and military ships, English coastal scenes and tropical beach scenes. Establishing a clear and distinctive visual style has allowed us to create a dynamic and diverse set of environments which still all feel like they’re set in the same world. 

We’ll be diving into the prop and environment building processes in more detail in future weeks, so I’ll just give a quick overview of the workflow here: 

For any environment – that is, a setting in the game like the EBC journalists’ office – we’re juggling the narrative purpose, the gameplay requirements, and the desired aesthetic. So, first things first, the writers, level designers and prop artists meet to discuss the key elements that need to be accounted for. Then, an asset list is created, along with a floor plan or level design laying out how the environment will all fit together. That gets signed off by the writer or designer in charge of the scene, and then the level gets blocked out and the environment assets and props are built. In some cases, there are multiple levels set within the same environment: for instance, we see the EBC office flooded, with one desk, and with three. Different props and textures are needed for these different levels, but they all use the same environment. 

Here’s an example of blocking out a level (Mike and Phyllis’s cottage) – creating a basic 3D layout to give a sense of the space, without any of the game-specific props or textures:

"Blocking out" establishes layout rather than visual design. 

Once the assets are made, the level designer and prop builder work together to populate the environment with assets and static props. Gameplay designers then add any interactive elements to the environment, normally using some of the props built by the prop artists. When everything is ready for narrative integration, the level is packaged and sent to the writer for scene-direction: adding in characters, linking up the script, and choreographing the game play. 

I know that was a whistle-stop tour of the game design and development process – so stay tuned for future instalments discussing different aspects of this in more detail, including, next up, a post exploring the steps involved in creating characters for Kraken.  

The finished product: a desk in the EBC news office, demonstrating the visual design of The Kraken Wakes. 

When transforming a classic and much-loved novel into an interactive video game, where do you begin? Our writing and narrative design lead, Rianna Dearden, discusses her approach... 

Early on in the process of adapting John Wyndham’s much-loved novel The Kraken Wakes into a game, I did what every respectable, trailblazing narrative designer does – googled how to do it. The first result was a Reddit user asking if it is possible for a novel to be “faithfully” adapted into a game, with the top post simply saying: “No. Novels are a linear media”. I quickly closed the browser: we already had the rights from the Wyndham estate!

Being “faithful” to John Wyndham was, of course, at the front of our minds. We love his novels, and we especially love this one. “Do it justice!” “Faithful adaptation!” “Turning in his grave!” – the thoughts rattled. Before I turned into a quivering narrative mess, I reminded myself that our intention wasn’t to be faithful to every aspect of the novel. If so, we would only be recreating it and going to a bewildering amount of effort to get it into Unreal Engine. We instead chose very carefully which aspects to be faithful to. I took stock of what we had in front of us:

1. A compelling and unexpected plot and story world (if anything, too much of it)

2. Fantastic characters (I'd have them round my kitchen table)

3. Relatable themes that provoke genuine emotional responses (yes please!) 

We have stayed mightily faithful to the plot from the novel. It’s important to note that for this project, we define plot like they do in Dramatica: the things that actually happen, rather than how those things are revealed to the audience. The novel’s plot has been our guiding star through the adaptation process, and despite the game being a greatly interactive and branching experience, the anchoring elements of the plot do not change. We have gone so far as to actively make it clear to a player that in this game, you cannot stop the inevitable “thing” from happening (no spoilers here).

A very, very small section of our giant planning board! 

How we reveal that plot, and how the player experiences it, differs greatly from the novel. The novel starts with a flash-forward of Mike and Phyllis together, many years after the beginning of the story. Our game also starts with a flash-forward (great idea, Wyndham!), but an entirely different one, built around our player’s personal story and the desire to onboard them with certain mechanics upfront. We have used methods to express the plot which only games can. In the novel, Mike tells us with his narration how the press react to the content he and Phyllis publish. In the game, our player is put face-to-face with the press at a press-conference alongside Mike and Phyllis, and is expected to decide for themselves how to handle their slew of doubts, demands and scrutiny.

Phyllis, Mike, Bocker, Freddy – you’ll meet them. Whether you know Wyndham’s novel or not, we’ve made sure to take the dynamics of these characters that work so well in the book and utilize them in the game. At the very heart of the novel is the dynamic between narrator, Mike, and his much more brilliant wife, Phyllis. We wanted the player to be a part of this, but not as a third-wheel. Instead, we integrated these dynamics into the choices you have in the game: if you want a witty remark or emotional response, go talk to Mike, but if you want to get things done, or need help to decide what to do next, Phyllis is your gal. This is why we didn’t want the player to be Mike, or be Phyllis. We wanted them to experience this story with them.

Mike and Phyllis enjoying a stroll through their garden. Are they holding hands? We like to think so! 

There was a fair bit of creative licence used whilst developing the characters. Some were unceremoniously culled, some were painfully merged into one, and, brace yourself, Freddy is a woman. Even dialogue lines from the novel, despite being a gift, were not exempt. We edited heavily, often allocating speech to different characters to get the balance we need.

When I really searched for the essence of this novel, I took into account the multitude of online reviews, I noted my colleague's reactions, and I tuned into general chatter about Wyndham himself. Everything seemed to boil down to how The Kraken Wakes made us feel. It was about relatability, provoked emotions and genuine reactions. And so, every scene, and every mechanic in this game originates from how we are trying to make the player feel.

We took moments from the novel, and interrogated the emotions they evoked. We tried to think back to our first read, and compare that with our second, third, fiftieth. Then, and only then, could we start thinking about how to achieve the same feeling for our player. How can we make the player feel confronted and challenged? How can we make the player feel like the most genius journalist ever? How can we make the player feel a (false) sense of security? Always asking questions like these helped us choose what plot to use and discard, what characters to adjust or kill off. If they were not helping the level achieve the objective feeling, they could go! It greatly influenced our choice of game mechanics, pillars, player positioning, visual styles, music and so on (more on all of that in later blog posts). 

We hope, that by staying faithful to the emotional foundations of John Wyndham’s The Kraken Wakes, when the next respectable, trailblazing narrative designer googles “can a novel be faithfully adapted into a game”, the top result is “Yes. Why not?”.

Forever Faithful: Adapting a Novel into a Game 

Sea levels are rising. Political tensions in Europe are escalating. All over the world, something deadly is spreading, threatening the very existence of life on Earth as we know it…

Sound familiar? It’s meant to. But this is the story of John Wyndham’s classic sci-fi novel, The Kraken Wakes. If the word “prescient” is applied a tad liberally to twentieth-century science fiction these days, it nevertheless seems justified in the case of Wyndham’s Kraken. Published in the early 1950s, Wyndham’s novel charts a mysterious series of events that herald an extraterrestrial invasion of Earth, not from flying saucers in the skies, but – far more terrifyingly – from the darkest depths of our oceans.

In the 1950s, science fiction developed not so much to envision futuristic technology as to explore humanity’s reaction to it, and Wyndham was a master at this. His Day of the Triffids concerns the disastrous consequences of genetic modification gone wrong, while his Chrysalids imagines a post-apocalyptic future in which extreme societal prejudices have taken hold. Wyndham’s incredible topicality has been demonstrated most recently by Sky’s adaptation of The Midwich Cuckoos, a story that raises questions about female autonomy and the terrifying power of groupthink.

Of all Wyndham’s books, though, The Kraken Wakes has always stood out to me. The idea of advanced and monstrous lifeforms emerging from the mysterious depths of our oceans always felt so spookily probable, and the collapse of society that follows, even more so. The Kraken Wakes explores issues of fake news and media sensationalism, of dangerously militarised governments, and of humankind’s knee-jerk aggression towards anything unknown or unfamiliar. “Can you imagine us tolerating any form of rival intelligence on earth?”, asks one character: “Why, we can’t even tolerate anything but the narrowest differences of views within our own race…”.

Reading about these kinds of apocalyptic, eerily plausible scenarios in a book, it’s easy to feel a little helpless. That’s why, as a young reader in the 1980s, I dreamed of somehow becoming part of the stories, to influence their outcomes and help their characters save the world.

Five years ago, that dream moved a step closer to becoming a reality when Charisma signed an agreement with John Wyndham’s estate for the exclusive rights to develop the immersive adaptation of The Kraken Wakes. Using our AI-powered conversation engine, we envisioned an adaptation of the novel in which players could talk to Wyndham’s characters, immerse themselves in his world, and even influence the progression of his story. Since signing the rights agreement back in 2017, that’s exactly what we’ve created – and I’m thrilled to announce that Charisma’s official game adaptation of The Kraken Wakes will be ready for release later this year.

There is a rich history of game versions of book titles. From the earliest days of ZX Spectrums, Commodore 64s and BBC Micros, there were adaptations of The Lord of the Rings, Alice in Wonderland, Fighting Fantasy and Tom Clancy novels. The ability to explore narratives, worlds and characters in depth is a strength that books and games share. Indeed, it’s surprising that so little emphasis is placed on game rights sales, compared with rights for films and television series. With video game revenues now exceeding those generated by film, television and radio combined, we’ll hopefully soon see authors, agents and publishers recognising the games industry as the best creative and financial match for fiction and nonfiction titles alike.

Our aim with The Kraken Wakes is to introduce a new genre of conversation-driven narrative game, with powerful characters who leap out at you through the screen, inviting you to form strong, believable relationships with them. As a company, this is what we specialise in: creating realistic characters to immerse audiences in new levels of storytelling and engagement. Our experiences of bringing Benedict Cumberbatch’s Sherlock to life in the official app, developing an interactive version of WarnerBros Justice League, and working on an interactive drama for SkyTV, have shown us that audiences are eager for these new forms of storytelling. They are keen to immerse themselves, and to play in the story.

The process of adapting Wyndham’s The Kraken Wakes has been both ground-breakingly challenging and immensely fun. Over the next few months, different members of the Charisma team will be telling their own part of the development story in this blog, beginning, next week, with a post from our lead writer Rianna Dearden, on how she went about transforming the plot of a novel into the story for an interactive video game.

With the launch now in sight, we’re hugely excited to be able to share our version of The Kraken Wakes with players soon. Our vision is that this will be the first of many game adaptations of epic novels – by ourselves and others – that truly reimagine the reader as an active participant in the story.

John Wyndham’s The Kraken Wakes: A Sci-Fi Classic for Modern Times

Talking to Pirates

The Kraken Analytics Hath Awoken!

The Kraken Wakes: Out Now!

A Kraken Makeover: Redesigning Game UI

Soundworld: Creating the Music for The Kraken Wakes

How to Build a World: Creating Cornwall Cottage

Creating Characters: Bringing Phyllis to Life

Visualising Kraken: Design Decisions

Forever Faithful: Adapting a Novel into a Game

John Wyndham’s The Kraken Wakes: A Sci-Fi Classic for Modern Times