A Cruel Fate: Emergent Tragedies in The Shrouded Isle

[Music] hi my name is John Kim I'm from Kitfox games and I'm here to talk about a cruel fate emergent tragedies in the shrouded aisle just a quick note about our studio we were based out of Montreal and previously we released our moon hunters which is a co-op action RPG with procedurally generated world and trait based role-playing mechanics last year we had a highly successful Kickstarter campaign for a boyfriend dungeon which is a dungeon crawler crossed with dating sim but today we're gonna talk about something very different has anyone played the shredder oil some of you okay I'm gonna play the trailer anyway because you know I get to do that let's see here we go [Music]

[Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] not so much power tripping sorry I'm

just gonna grab back my annoyance here all right so as you saw in the trailer the Shraddha doll is a human sacrifice cult simulator you play us the high priests of this a small island village that worships a slumbering dark God and in preparation for his awakening you try to maintain the faith of your people maintain the loyalty of the five Great Houses of the village and make a human sacrifice at the end of each season the project began as an entry for a game jam back in 2015 we really loved the concept so we decided to fully develop a game so

in August 2017 the full version of the Shraddha doll was released for PC and OSX later that year due to positive reception we released a free expansion pack called sunken sins and just recently in January we released the switch port of the shrouded Isle and in March up we released it for Japan region as well so what do I mean by emergent tragedies and what does that have to do with the shrouded Isle it goes back to the game jam the theme was you are the monster and instead of making a game about a physical monster we wanted to explore why someone makes monstrous choices why does the leader of a community take actions that clearly harm members of that community and in tackling that theme we wanted to maintain ludonarrative congruence which is to say that the narrative is told through the gameplay but you might be more familiar with the more common term ludonarrative dissonance in which the narrative is undermined by the mechanics so our creative goals were difficult to achieve because we needed to pick depict

this dystopian society of the cults but a lot of the design references we could find had this underlying utopian or heroic assumptions and had the risk of undermining the tragic narrative that we wanted to tell to give a quick comparison we wanted to depict the stagnant society that tries to control and constrain its people by contrast utopian games tend to focus on growth through the empowerment of a protagonist or the expansion of a community we wanted to explore the divisions within the cult what political games are being played who is seen as virtuous or sinful but most games we found depicted unity or assumed unity instead whether it's a band of adventurers or an army that's loyal to a greater cause most importantly though we wanted the gameplay to depict failure telling a story about a corrupt society in which the leaders do whatever it takes to maintain their regime but the majority of examples we found had an underlying

message of triumph depicting victory over an evil foe or prosperity of a community so why make emergent tragedies because it allows us to depict dystopias and moral greatness while achieving ludo narrative congruence the narrative is told through the gameplay we can make more impactful experiences than scripted content because the player becomes an active participant and thereby causes their own downfall or in rare cases succeed at an immense cost but doing this is very challenging because we have to find alternative gameplay elements to replace key aspects of utopian design so this talk will be analyzing three gameplay elements that were used in the shrouded Isle to create emergent tragedies so first we'll look at how physical resources were replaced entirely with psychological resources then we'll talk about the core gameplay examining how process-oriented mechanics were replaced with character oriented

mechanics finally we'll talk about progression systems spatial expansion or tech upgrades were substituted with progression through information gathering so let's first talk about resources in the game Jam version 2 of the town's resources were physical food and shelter this was a sensible need for the town but it was too easy for the player to stock up and fill the bar and imply a state of prosperity for the town and we could have balanced the resource management to make the state of prosperity difficult to achieve but there was a deeper problem in that directly managing food and shelter really felt irrelevant to a cult leaders interest so in the final release we replaced all physical resources with psychological resources this way the core economy of the game revolves around what a cult leader would care about faith and politics so in the bottom row there you see the five virtues of the cult ignorance fervor discipline penitence and obedience these variables

are affected by the actions and traits of the townspeople if characters behave virtuously the bars go up if they behave sinfully the bars go down if the bar slips below the threshold for too long the people lose faith in the cult and the game ends the upper row holds the political resources the five great the opinions of the five great houses of the village so on the far left you'll see that house Cagney feels satisfied with the regime while the neighboring house yosef kind the second column feels merely neutral when you bestow favor on a house by using their members as advisors their opinions go up and their opinion goes down when you exclude them or kill members of their family for those seasonal sacrifice if any houses opinion drops too low for too long they revolt and the game ends so the big benefit of using psychological resources is that the player embraces the values of the cult implicitly even if the player personally will disagrees in the

real world that raising ignorance is a good thing they quickly learned that it is absolutely necessary for their call to survive in the game furthermore they are the psychological resources are divorced from objective reality or survival of the townspeople so as a result of players narrative interests are dissociated from the villagers narrative interests which motivates the players to make rather Machiavellian decisions when difficult situations arise there's a further benefit in that you can keep the game in a state of volatile stagnation as opposed to having an economy that just keeps growing and growing and growing over the course of a playthrough the overall size remains relatively stagnant or even a slight decline so at the same time the individual resources have high volatility so that the crises in the game emerged dynamically so let me give you a quick example I'm going to select chesa on the very far left of the advisors list as my lead advisor this

season she belongs to house kidney she specializes in burning books if she succeeds she'll raise ignorant I a moderate amount this month she's also personally a sadist so she'll race a fervor significantly by her example this is really great because fervor is dangerously low right now she is also rebellious which is a major vice by using her as an advisor her her example will reduce obedience of the town below the critical threshold and therefore caught create and overall disobedience problem for the village in terms of politics House cagney will understandably be very happy that you entrusted chesa to lead the town and they become zealous supporters of your regime in exchange every other house is somewhat insulted and envious and counterbalances the economy in the Air Force's case it pushes them down so much

but rather it like just enough so that it breaks their camel's back so to speak and they will rebel next season so maybe choosing chesa isn't the best option right now as we saw with the example a simple choice of who should lead the town for a month was given a complex nuanced because of the volatility of the individual variables each gain is counterbalanced by a comparable loss and other variables so while having the high volatility for the individual variables we avoid having a spiraling growth or collapse which would unbalance the gameplay and also undermine the narrative and me theory theoretically could have done this with physical resources but I find that psychological resources are far easier to justify as having this volatility that I need it because it's easier to explain that chesa is a fervent person who sometimes goes too far and tends to be disobedient and rebellious rather than trying to justify why gathering food would result in destruction of

shelters or decay of shelters reigns is a game that uses psychological resources to depict tragic outcomes the resources in the games simultaneously represent the physical amount of something as well as the faction strength so for example the sword represents the the physical size of your army as well as that our relative political influence within your kingdom if the bar is empty your kingdom can't defend itself and becomes conquered by an invader if the bar is too full your general overthrows you in a coup d'etat this careful balancing act combined with the volatile outcomes creates cascading crises but at the same time their economy is very fragile and strategic plays difficult without memorizing the card outcomes so at some level I do find that this undermines the player ownership of choices but it works fine for reigns because it embraces death with the whimsical tone and has a dynastic meta progression system so even if you die you get something in the end moving on

let's talk about character oriented mechanics utopian simulations tend to have process oriented mechanics critical actions or systems in the game are abstracted industrial processes or are done through an organization a residential zone is strong income is received every month a research project is chosen and just completes over time even when characters are involved they're largely interchangeable and only matter as far as how quickly they gather something or speed up a process so going back to the game jam version for a second at the time we also had a very process-oriented game the player gave orders at the house level so like house Cagney would gather food or a house Yosef cow with bills shelters and so forth and the results were calculated in aggregate because it really didn't matter how each house gathered a particular resource this felt dissatisfying because similar with its like similar to what we were talking about with the psychological resources earlier it didn't seem like what a cult

leader would want to do or care about we wanted the player to engage with individual characters judging for themselves whether a villager is virtuous or a sinful we wanted the player to have a reason to want to sacrifice somebody so we changed the mechanic to be entirely character oriented instead the goal was to dramatize resource management by having the player act through or act upon characters whose behavior was fundamentally unpredictable while the player can order characters to do something they can't fully control what they do or what the outcome will be so let's go back to chess again so in this playthrough I don't really know her very well but I'm still going to select her as a representative for house Cagney I'm going to need her help desperately the season because ignorant is at a critical level and members of house Cagney are responsible for raising it as I don't know her very well it's going to be hard to predict how she will impact

the town we know that because she's part of a the Cagney family she will most likely raise ignorance but we don't know how severe her vices according to rumours as you can see under like a second trait under her name she is rumored to be disobedient so I'm just going to trust for now that it's not too serious unfortunately chess screw is up she failed to find enough books to burn and instead of raising ignorance she actually reduces it instead not only that her vice might be severe we don't know exactly what she did but she completely reduced the town's obedience this is an infuriating outcome because not only did she fail at what I trusted her to do she turns out to be a terrible sinner who is misleading my people I trust the chesa because I was as the player I was engaged with her at every single step I personally appointed her and then I personally ordered her to burn books due to this trust I had a certain expectation of her which she did

not fulfill I felt betrayed by her because she was an individual that did this and that she was personally connected to me with as a result of my orders to her if an industrial process or an organization resulted in this outcome I would only have myself to blame but due to having character oriented mechanics we add a dramatic context to what would otherwise be a really banal resource acquisition action another game that uses character oriented mechanics to tell emergent narratives about expectations that betrayal is of course darkest dungeon the player sends parties of adventures down to these deadly crypts and for the most part the characters will obey the player's orders however as the their stress rises from all the horrors that they encounter the party gains afflictions which are negative traits that permanently change how the character behaves so for example being hopeless not only causative buffs to the character it causes the character to

ignore the players orders having one character with an affliction is manageable but it snowballs very quickly and eventually unless you pull out the entire party will be full of afflictions one thing that darkest dungeon does well is counterbalancing this act is subverting this with the mechanic of virtues so there's a small chance that instead of gaining an affliction you gain a positive trait which boosts the party instead so for instance being courageous as opposed to being hopeless by doing so the game subverts the players x- expectation in a positive way creating emergent narratives of heroism and turnabout moving on let's talk about progression systems we looked at two conventional approaches which would have been to go wide and allow for spatial expansion and go tall and allow for upgrades but thinking about it it felt

incompatible with the narrative because the island is isolated from the world and has a dwindling population due to ritual sacrifices to have a progression system without having the cult grow in any way we decided to use information the way it works is through the townspeople and their traits so let's take bogdan here for an example at the start of the playthrough we might not know anything about bogden's behavior but as the cult leader the player has the right to investigate excuse me investigate members of their village for their behaviors so if we inquire about Magnus virtue the next at the next stage he we understand that he's rumored to be obedient but we still don't really exactly how much he will affect the town's obedience until we inquire about him again and then it's revealed that he is timid and will add five points obedience every season there were revealing traits the players

given subjective rewards the characters themselves do not change at all they behave exactly the same no matter how much their trade has been revealed instead the players perception of that character changes since the player can most more accurately predict the character's impact so they can make better decisions as they reveal more trains there's also change in the villagers perception of that character in the final phase so if the player unveils the fullest extent to about character's virtue or vice it changes the bonuses and penalties in the sacrifice phase so let's go back to chesa she drained the town's obedience because of her vice but we don't know exactly what that vice is yet when we inquire about it we discover that she is rebellious this is a major vice at the end of the season we have to choose one of the five advisors to sacrifice and I'm going to make an example out of chesa because I've exposed that she is rebellious I'm able

to make her family grudgingly accept this final outcome furthermore her village sorry her death will send the message to the village restoring some of the lost obedience with chesses death justice is served and the villagers have learned a lesson as you saw the benefit of using information progression is that it allows us to temporarily blind the player by giving access to incomplete information we can create scenarios in which players good intentions go terribly wrong it's in the players best interest to gain information so therefore the player is motivated to get to know the characters which adds support to the character oriented mechanics that we talked about in the previous section and granted this approach can be frustrating if the situation is completely opaque or unreadable but the gameplay remains fair as long as the player is given some information and has active means of acquiring more in fact I would say that

the players rewarded for being prudent and having foresight as long as they can make reasonable assumptions about the missing information probably the single best example of information progression is return of the aw burden the player is trying to figure out the fate of the crew and passengers on the call burden by using a magic pocket watch to go back to the moment of their death by carefully observing the snapshot flashbacks for what the characters say what they do and who they whom they associate with the players slowly of pieces together faces with names until the truth is revealed the game discourages guessing by only confirming your answers in sets of three and directly warning the player if not enough information has been found to be able to actually identify the character all the same and is stood player is able to make reasonable predictions about a character's identity long before having

enough evidence based on their appearance occupation and the language that they speak so to bring this all together emergent tragedies allow players to create their own downfall we can tell narratives about dystopias and moral grayness not through scripted content but through gameplay itself psychological resources are the key the fundamental step in this and that encourages players to embrace alternative paradigms and discourage min maxing even if the player personally does not agree with the values of the cult in the shraddha doubt they must implicitly accept them within the game as their survival and success depends on them character oriented mechanics then dramatize this resource management by having most if not all mechanics in a game revolve around characters we can tell a powerful narratives about expectation and betrayal finally

progression through information allows players to improve over time without direct empowerment instead of gaining more resources through a spatial expansion or refining them through technological upgrades players effectively become more intelligent through the course of a playthrough by being able to better predict the consequences of their actions this also creates opportunity in the middle of the playthrough for a good intentions to go terribly terribly wrong for our latest project we take in principles from the shredded I'll and adapted them for the mystery genre it's an experimental project that focuses on subjectivity of testimonies and relies entirely on information progression if you're curious we'll be showcasing a seven-minute demo at the experimental gameplay workshop on Friday that's it for the top thank you very much I think we have time for questions I the

microphone is in the middle I'm just curious you've got a game about dystopia and mechanics there you know about managing psychological needs did you ever have confusion when playtesters were playing to try to determine like what what constitutes a win in your game like how do I make a decision that I know is is does the game think this is a good decision it seems like a bad decision are you asking like were there are cases in which the player were player was confused about the the purpose of a certain resource or than by the goal of the game more like the the goal of the game like was the intention to leave players kind of wondering whether or not they're progressing to what would be defined as a win state or is that kind of part of the purpose of the game that the players are questioning am i winning this game am i you know clearly I get getting you know the bars below the threshold and I lose but like what is the some of the correct

decisions that I've made is that going to take me to something that constitutes a win or at the end do I just feel like a bad person okay so to summarize and the question is were there confusions by players about the goal of the game and was that intentional like as far as the experience is concerned I would say that at the start at the start of development it was not intentional but as we observe play test and that we found that by the second playthrough players Crockett or just certain the survival of the first season of the players Barak that we just embraced that side of the game an interesting anecdote for me is that I often observe that the player tends to embrace their inner tyrant on by the second season so the first season of a game you know like people will try to be good whatever that means but then they realize that hey being good and my sense doesn't actually help me be successful in this game and then there are mines that shift and it's a bit disconcerting okay disconcerting to

watch but I mean in some ways it's a success in other ways I wish that there was a morale like a longer moral dilemma that happened and that would be the intended experience from my perspective thank you Cheers Hey so sort of bouncing off that first I love the game thank you for making it the game made me turn into a bad person which is normally hard in RPG games for me but something I noticed is that yeah like around the second season I began to feel more apathetic because I was embracing this like dictatorship role in the community and it began to in some ways sort of conflict with some of my gameplay behavior because I was developing a kind of apathy to the characters to the world because I wanted to succeed so well so I was curious if you had any thoughts on how you know I think this awesome goal of having people embrace this more darker side of leadership and playing with apathy as a narrative construct can sometimes conflict or maybe in some ways enhance the apathy that we can develop

as a player and if that's something that is negative earth that's something you think we can gain some cool experiences from okay so sorry I'm just trying to drop the whole question yeah so is the question something like given that like there's a certain apathy or a distance that like it that's like inherent to the structure of the game how like how do I feel about that as far as like a design choice or yes and how does that conflict with oftentimes as game designers we want the opposite of that for gameplay right so how does that apathy that you get as being this protagonist conflict with the gameplay apathy and just if you have any thoughts about that right um so the interesting thing about that is that I often find that P players have very let me rephrase that certain players have a certain desire to be empathetic with the characters so the generation of the characters are it's very very simple and there's trotted out compared to like yet roguelikes let's say or like it dwarf

compared to something like Dwarf Fortress like it doesn't hold a candle but there's a portrait there's two traits one positive one negative and for many players that's enough to perceive a personality within that and P players tend to get attached to those personalities and we also have a system where you can rename the characters so in some cases like you know you've named this person after your friend are you really gonna you know and so that sort of attachment I feel like there's just little things that adds up to if you will like certain threshold in which the players become attached to that character and so like I didn't feel for this project anyway that the the the apathy that you developed would like conflict with my motivation but if I were trying to make a game in which I wanted the player to deeply deeply care about the people in the town I I would agree that the the Machiavellian nature

of the project would have been a poor fit okay thank you cool thanks no other questions you mentioned like a randomness in the in the different heads of the houses and things like that and I was wondering if if it cuz I haven't played it myself but it looks really cool if it is just completely random of like you know given the context of the of the state of the world state of the game and you know the resources you could get something really good you could get something really bad or have you guys considered or tried to put in like you know any sort of AI that would kind of read the room and decide based off of what the players doing on what they have what would be the most interesting you know traits to give something okay so if I understand you right is it like how did you balance the randomness versus like the intentionality of the project like if it's just you know pure is it a full-on

slot machine of what you get or is there a little bit of like crafted behind it I would say that initially I would have wanted to the project to be as deterministic as possible other than the initial starting conditions for the town but what I've observed over time is that the design space becomes very very narrow and the in because the game is about failure right imagine if like you're able to predict every other let's say we play rock-paper-scissors right and then I tell you hey I'm gonna play rock next turn are you ever gonna use scissors other than for just for the fun of it you know so in that way like to keep the gum the feeling of being the leader in a terrible situation like like as as relevant as long as possible for the experience like some amount of randomness was at it but for the most part there is very little of it I would argue there's more of missing information if the player were able to have like all

the towns that characters traits from the get-go are the the lack of randomness and the shrouded Isle would be more apparent I'd say no thank you sure since the shredded Isle deals a lot with kind of using gameplay mentors with systems and kind of exploration head you guys think it Fox ever considered like maybe like basic Adani like historically you know like power strikes structures or systems or maybe like using this kind of gameplay to explore like kind of more historical event ideas so the question is have we considered exploring historical situations and ideas with a systemic game plate like this right to tell you the truth for the shrouded aisle we didn't have something specific in mind as I said it came out of a game jam but what I find interesting is that after release a lot of our colleagues kind of projected like what the game was actually about like it whether it's at a workspace or like you know I got a

political party in particular or whatever I would want to like so I have a background in Soviet history and so I do want to depict you know a single party structures like I think it would be a good fit for the shrouded aisle but we haven't moved for like in pursuing those project jet but it's something that like we'd be definitely interested in thank you hi there thanks for to talk I I was wondering you said players took like a whole Act to really understand the game what do you think that kept the players interested in the game before they truly understand it if I'm gonna be blunt the art so I mean it's an interesting question so we thought that so this we show the shroud around multiple times up axes and we're always surprised at the relative amount of attention that a game about bars going up and down frankly gets at our convention and it's because

of the striking art style and just like the harsh like nature of the game the tickles like you know the bright parts of brains I guess it's really hard to say so honestly I underestimated the level of interest in this project I thought that it would it's too weird and a too cruel of a project but overall like I'm I'm really gratified that it's it's received the attention that it already has frankly so does that answer the question Cheers okay that's it for the talk thank you very much please fill out your evaluations [Applause]