SIGNING A CONTRACT WITH SQUARE Enix afforded Deck Nine more than a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. It provided the resources to flesh out their team, and to think outside the box as they filled positions. Backgrounds in adjacent disciplines such as film, television, and photography were just as important as bringing in candidates with a background in games.

Two stages of hiring on a developer could be said to carry more weight than others. The first is making sure they're a good fit for the team, and the studio's culture. The second is helping them grok the project. What it is, what it needs to be, where it's going, and how best to get there. During the making of Before the Storm, Deck Nine had a way to address both at the same time: Watch the scene that had won over Square Enix.

"We had that test in hand so when new people came in, we could sit down with them and show it to say, 'This is exactly who we are and what we are creating,'" explains Jeff Litchford, vice president at Deck Nine. "Maybe we wouldn't have had that if we'd spent months in pre-production and [created only] design documents for people to read. Now we had something for them to sit down, watch, and go, 'Oh, wow. Okay, I totally get what we're doing. I'm completely invested in this.'"

Consideration for cinematography informed the development of Before the Storm. It also informed how Deck Nine structured its team. Developers worked in a writer's room, just like writers on a television show. Before the Storm's writer's room was more of a melting pot of all disciplines involved in production. "If you imagine building a story as painting a mural, there are a group of painters, and a dialogue that happens when we're brush on stone, scrutinizing one brick at a time," says Zak Garriss, game director.

Working in close proximity allowed every member of the team to see Before the Storm's big picture, rather than each department fixating only on its purview. "The way we think about Chloe, Rachel, and mystery at 30,000 feet, we ask questions that are relevant," Garriss continues. "Then, when we zero in on a scene like the play, and we're talking about the constituent elements that make that scene work for each character's arc and the story as a whole, the stories are different"

The team functioned as a unit, rather than discrete parts of a unit. Garriss refers to that single-minded decisiveness as dialogic, his term for an emphasis on communication. "Not just in the sense that we as writers talk to each other while we write, but that the work is talking to itself at different registers. It's approaching the story from different spaces where the story lives, high and low, that we're able to find unity. It's definitely an alchemical process. It's not a science, but it's also more than art."

Before the Storm's developers made a constant effort to ask the questions that mattered most. What, in any given scene, is the priority? Moving the plot forward? If so, which plot? The big-picture, three-episode arc? Or a character's growth? One question occurred again and again: What is the human experience that Before the Storm wants to convey?

Garriss and the team broke down the first Life is Strange. Max and Chloe each went on a journey; those stories formed a larger narrative. The developers paid particular attention to Chloe's story, since Before the Storm was intended to follow her during the time between Max and her family leaving her shortly after her father William's death, and reuniting with Max in Arcadia Bay as teens.

Certain literary devices helped pave Deck Nine's path. Max and Chloe had repaired and strengthened their relationship by banding together to solve a mystery. Once Deck Nine understood that, they could take a step back—and up, all the way to the 30,000-foot view—and better understand Chloe's emotions and motivations before those events. All of those emotions could be viewed as pieces of a whole; Before the Storm was the finished puzzle.

"There's the story of her mother moving on and finding new love," Garriss says. "Of being alone in the wake of her father's death. Of missing Max but not getting to reconnect. Of discovering Rachel, meeting her for the first time, and the power and magic that comes from someone looking into your life when you're raw from grief and saying, 'I see you. You matter.' I think that, to us, leapt out as a worthy story. Regardless of where Chloe goes in the first game, it was a chapter worth looking at and experiencing."

AT THE BEGINNING of Before the Storm, Chloe is accosted by two men at a concert. Another teenage girl, Rachel, distracts them so Chloe can get away. Chloe and Rachel run into one another again at Blackwell Academy, skip class, and go on the first of many adventures together.

Across the prequel's three episodes, the girls sneak aboard a cargo train, confront feelings about sexuality, argue and mend fences, reveal deep-seated secrets such as Rachel looking through a viewfinder to see her father kissing a woman who was definitely not Rachel's mother, and learn more about Frank, the fan-favorite drug dealer with a heart of gold. It's a story of emotional peaks and valleys made possible by Chloe's and Rachel's ages. Teenagers straddle the awkward impasse between childhood and adulthood. Hormones rage one minute and cool the next. They are ships on a stormy sea of emotion, thrown one way and tossed another.

Young adult (YA) stories, themes, and characters are polarizing. Commercial darlings such as Harry Potter, The Hunger Games, Divergent, Twilight, Percy Jackson, and Life is Strange draw passionate fans like moths to flames. They also attract cynics who deride theme as too juvenile to be taken seriously. Those detractors either gloss over or are ignorant to the emotional potency that makes YA stories resonate with fans.

"One of the things I like about young adult stories and protagonists is, everything is new," says Litchford. "The first time they've fallen in love. The first time they've lost someone meaningful to them. By the time you're 30 or 40, you might've gone through that experience several times, and you've built armor around your heart and soul. You've also have decided how you're going to respond to it by your defense mechanisms. In these stories, it's all so new to them. In a sense, these stories remind me of what it was like to feel so deeply back when I was that age."

"There's a vibrancy to the emotions and trauma of stories that situate themselves with young people becoming adults," adds Garriss. "That vibrancy creates a lens that focuses on something we all either remember, or things we'll go through later in life. Any YA material has the potential to be mature and shockingly advanced. That's something I learned over the course of working on Before the Storm."

Tapping into the emotions and mindset of teens was one challenge on Before the Storm. Another was telling a story that leads up to another story that players already know. There's little mystery in where Chloe and Rachel will end up. Rachel goes missing, and Chloe reunites with Max, and Life is Strange begins.

That problem is common among prequels in all mediums. Others are unique to video games. Prequels such as Capcom's Street Fighter Alpha, set between the events of Street Fighter and Street Fighter II, feature more characters, better graphics, flashier attacks, and deeper mechanics than the sequel they lead into. Playing Street Fighter II after Alpha 1, 2, or 3 feels like several steps backward when events and characters should be moving forward. Did Ken and Ryu hit each other so hard that they forgot how to do those super-duper-ultra fireballs before the start of Street Fighter II?

There are technical reasons for prequels boasting superior audiovisuals and game systems, the most obvious being that although they precede sequels chronologically, they were made years later, so of course they're mechanically more robust. In terms of narrative, the most important consideration is emotional resonance. Tell a compelling story, and it won't matter that players already know how things turn out for the characters.

"What you have to learn to do is think about different dimensions of unknown—ways a prequel can speak to something you know and love, in a way that shines new and meaningful light on that material," says Garriss.

Deck Nine's mission was to come up with a story and a mystery—the core elements of Life is Strange—from Chloe's past and bridge them to the original game, ideally in such a way that poses new questions players may not have thought to ask. Chloe's anger, the whetstone used to sharpen her tongue, became the developers' guiding light. In Life is Strange, her emotion was secondary to Max's feelings, since Max was the protagonist. Before the Storm presented the chance to examine that emotion up close.

One of the most important events in Life is Strange is also one of its earliest: Chloe being shot and killed in a bathroom. Everything Max does afterwards informs her and players' ultimate choice: save Chloe, or save the town. "We didn't want it to be a de facto state at which she arrives at the beginning of the first game: The angry-character trope who gets shot tragically in a bathroom," explains Garriss. "There's a journey for that young woman that we wanted to take you on, and that would make you look at her differently in the first game."

That journey does more than give players a better frame of reference for why Chloe is so angry in Life is Strange. Rachel, mentioned but never seen in the first game, can be better understood by playing Before the Storm and, thus, taking an active role in the relationship between her and Chloe. "We used the game—play and choice—to make that the player's journey, and shift Chloe from just being an artifact of Max's narrative to a territory the player could own as well," Garriss adds.

Chloe's tendency to speak a good five minutes before she thinks made for the perfect game system to replace Max's ability to travel through time. Backtalk became Before the Storm's event-altering system. It also grounded the game closer to reality, while presenting unique opportunities to alter the course of events in ways great and small.

"What surprised us was that it allowed for the spectacle of Chloe to shine," Garriss recalls. "The moment of selection, picking the line you're going to say, there's a joy to knowing that you picked the one that feels like the right zinger. Then there's the uncertainty of, 'What's she going to say if I pick this line?' Then the reward of seeing the back and forth. It's funny and surprising. That seemed to be the core gameplay loop of Backtalk. for some fans, it was really, really fun to do that."

Backtalk also did away with one of Life is Strange's most useful, yet most troubling mechanics. On a meta level, players could abuse Max's Rewind ability by saving before a choice and then selecting each option until they got what they considered to be the most desirable outcome. Other players never meant to abuse the system; they simply felt nervous about making what seemed a good choice one minute and a bad choice the next. While players could only go back in time so far, the fact that Rewind could be manipulated was still problematic.

Backtalk is no superpower. Players can save and reload if only to hear all of Chloe's snappy comebacks, but there's a momentum to an exchange of words that propels every choice. Players want to see how things play out based on their first response. It also allows players to connect with Chloe more deeply by having a say in her thoughts. In a way, Backtalk performs a mind meld between players and Chloe. With each choice and over each episode, that connection deepens until players feel like they are Chloe, and that the choices they make are the ones she would make.

"That may come down to the alchemy of mundane versus supernatural, the amount of your character's voice you hear as you explore and talk to people," Garriss admits. "But also, the stories themselves are relatable. That's always a pillar for us. I think all of that comes together to build profound connections to the characters we play, even when they're very different than who we might be as people."

What happens to Chloe and Rachel after Before the Storm is bleak. But their development as characters serves as a light that cuts through that darkness. All Life is Strange games share that in common: No matter the destination, the growth players and characters experience is aspirational.