A Narrative Multiverse: The Branching Structure of 'As Dusk Falls'

[Music] okay so so in physics there's this idea this idea that reality is like two different things happening at the same time on the one hand it's a world of particles and objects and events basically the everyday phenomenal world that we live in but at the quantum level of course it behaves more like a wave function a field of possibilities or overlapping potential realities or what any Marvel fan knows as the Multiverse now Doctor Strange might have his own definition but for our purposes a Multiverse is a good way to think about the nature of interactive story design uh because in a branching narrative game we use logic and structure to create a sort of multiversal story tree that defines all the many possible paths through a narrative but the story can only ever be experienced along a single path at a time and it's these individual story

branches where we give meaning emotion and value to the audience and to the players so this talk is about how we do both of those things uh together using the left brain to create meaningful narrative structures while using the right brain to tell a powerful and emotionally resonant story that satisfies players no matter what branches they pick through the game and I'm going to do that in the context of six principles that we followed when we were making as dusk Falls uh along with examples of how they show up in the game six principles for growing a tree in the Multiverse okay so before we dive uh before we dive in I'm just going to tell you a little bit about me and about the studio uh I'm Brad Kane I got started in the late 90s as a journalist covering what were then called story games uh I've worked as a producer at Pixar Animation Studios uh as a screenwriter designer and narrative director on a bunch of different games including uh some former some of the former Telltale a few triple play titles some live

action projects at Netflix and I spent over four years creating as dusk Falls along with the talented team at interior night in London uh the company for those who don't know was founded in 2017 by CEO and creative director Caroline Marshall as an independent studio dedicated to making cinematic narrative games and our first game as dusk Falls is a six chapter original interactive drama about two families from different backgrounds whose paths cross at a motel in Arizona in 1998 and the events leading up to and in the aftermath of that one fateful night now it's specifically a branching multiprot Agonist story where player choice and player action determine how the narrative unfolds it's what some people would call a Choose Your Own Adventure game where players can't see everything in one or even three or five playthroughs because there's just a lot of different paths to take through the story uh here's our launch trailer just to give you a sense of the tone in the

look of the game the thing about Shadows you can't escape [Music] them you just learn to keep them behind you and look toward the [Music] [Music] light I represent some business acquaintances of your fathers wow [Music] you help me take care of my family I'll help you take care of yours you swear it won't happen again I just want to know that we can make it through this on the ground now you're making a huge mistake daddy don't go I won't

all you had to do was keep your mouth [Music] shut what are you doing improvising I'm not just going to abandon [Music] you family means [Music] sacrifice when I'm to the death all right so we developed yes it's a great trailer uh so we developed the game with box game studios

and we released Day One on Game Pass last July and the reviews were generally pretty positive we uh we won games for impact at the game awards uh we've had writing nominations at several of the other award shows along with various Noms for directing acting music and so on so now when we started working on this game in 2017 we had a very specific goal in mind which was to move the medium The Narrative game medium away from like adapted games adapted IP games and adventure games uh towards something closer to prestige television we were inspired by and we're still inspired by shows like these these are shows defined by great writing great storytelling great characters especially a lot of them are crime dramas like our game but really it's about a certain creative bar our goal with this game was a TV style experience for every player whatever choices they made along the way and that meant we needed to focus on things such as the inevitable technical

glitch such as having a great screenplay priority number one uh choices that actually matter not just the illusion of choice Original Stories original Ip uh consistent pacing narrative game design is traditionally quite slow and like I said we were going for something closer to a season of Television manageable production complexity which for us would mean we could offer a wider choice field and have more flexibility for iteration and rewrites an experience where all playthrough paths are valid and good which is really important to us and I'll talk more about uh soon and we also have a major multiplayer component in the game that I'll touch back on toward the end of the talk so why does any of this matter hey well at interior night we believe that branching storytelling is not a gimmick but it's actually a medium

and that when we create these games in a deep and approachable way uh they can have Mass Appeal for gamers and especially for non-gamers because people everywhere love good stories uh they love games people really like experiencing these things together socially and they really enjoy learning about themselves and each other in the process which is something that we offer uh through our games so that was our starting point let's dive now into the creative process that led to the game we shipped last summer and I just want to give you guys a spoiler warning morning I'm going to be giving out a lot of them so if you haven't played the game and you're like really excited to experience the story firsthand you can leave now and I won't be offended there goes Caroline creative director all right so like I said there's these six principles and the first is what I like to call no mck break mck be a master of story structure so you can destroy it now who is Robert mck for those who don't know uh mck is probably the best known teacher of story

structure uh specifically cinematic story structure meaning for movies and TV people tend to either love him or hate him he's very polarizing but he knows his stuff and a lot of screenwriters especially when they're starting out will take his three-day Workshop or read his book story it's kind of a like a fundamental one and there's lots of other uh great screenwriting teachers out there too this is just a sample of them but what they all teach in one form or another is uh story and specifically the art of story structure structure so when we talk about structure what do we actually mean well it's this thing we all learned about in school that most people in this room probably understand that stories have a beginning a middle and an end that uh we can divide them into three acts that there are inflection points like the inciting incident the midpoint the low point the climax and the reason that story has this uh looks like this this shape is that the shape itself is what creates emotional engagement it's something that comes from deep within our psyche uh shape is like how we understand and make

greater relevance of an emotional experience it's why it's why entertainment tends to look like this and yet it's really common for trained screenwriters to come into this medium of branching games and they're like ready to exercise their structure muscles that they learned in Hollywood and they're surprised to hear narrative designers tell them like hey your outline doesn't work or that story is ignoring the player or you're you're putting the story on Rails all these ideas and uh everything they've been trained to do kind of fails the spanner in the works of course is player agency the need for the player to be at the center of the experience so writers will then think okay well I'll just create a screenplay but then I'll insert some choices in between the turning points and kind of choice choice ofy my script but these are the moments that don't really matter the ones in between the turning points and so you get choices that don't feel like they matter either you get the illusion of agency uh players can see through that especially these days we've had a lot of good branching games and so there's there's kind of some knowledge around on that and everyone sort of throws rocks

at the game so what do we do how do we solve this well we have to break m key but like not all the way right uh we have to know classical structure well enough to know what you need to honor and what you can adapt in in a game like this what you can afford to lose like you it doesn't you know it won't work to skip an inciting incident or have a story without a climax like that would never feel good it won't have the engagement we're looking for but if the Instinct uh is you know in story terms Jane starts the story lonely and she begins to trust Clara at the midpoint they face a final problem as a team and they wind up friends for life like that kind of model of things might be a little too rigid for what we do in these games we have to break that a little bit so let's look at an example of how we do this in ausk Falls this is Vince he is a former airline mechanic who in book one of the game is moving cross country with his wife his daughter his father to start a new life when they have to stop for the

night at a motel in Arizona on Route 66 and that road trip is the starting point of the story we can represent it as the first point on a story graph like this it's the little yellow dot in the bottom left if you guys can see that from back there now If This Were A Movie the inciting incident would typically happen at about the 10-minute Mark that's what the numbers are along the bottom they a reference point for film um and in this case it's when Vince who Who We Now understand has problems fighting for what he cares about it's like his character flaw he gets taken hostage with his family at uh at the motel by the three h Brothers now in this in the movie The Story might continue something like this uh at the 30-minute Mark which is usually like the start of back two in traditional structure Vince's worst fears are realized when his wife Michelle gets shot and at the midpoint when he can only send one Hostage to safety he kind of gets to be the one to decide who he insists on sending her out of course but

it means his impressionable young daughter Zoe is left inside with the gunmen at 75 minutes which is often a sort of false ending moment in story Structure Theory it seems they're about to get rescued but then the corrupt Sheriff recklessly assaults the motel putting everyone inside in danger at our crisis or low Point Vince and his daughter get trapped in the burning Motel things could get no worse for them but at the climax Vince finds his courage fights off the bad guys and ultimately sacrifices his life to save his daughters now that's a nice shape to the story this curve looks nice and curvy uh and it's going to feel pretty good if it's well written but in a narrative game it's not enough we also need the choices and just as we can't offer meaningless choice we also can't offer choices that do this to the story shape because in that blue path especially what's happening is the choices mattered they've really changed the shape but the story doesn't have really a recognizable shape anymore it's

not going to feel engaging or satisfying in the way you want it to be so instead what we have to do is we have to map the choices onto the inflection points of the story in a way that preserves enough of the structure to keep it meaningful uh in the Vince example it's going to be things like whether his wife gets shot or not that's a variable in our game she might never get hurt at all and in that case their story becomes more about how they work together in a crisis with a kind of marital problems that they have going on which hostage he sends to safety like I said that's actually a choice he might choose his father or his daughter and the back half of the story takes on a whole different context depending on what he picks instead of fighting the Hol Brothers at the climax he can choose to be their Ally fighting against the corrupt Sheriff instead whole different path into the climax there and there's lots of ways the book one can end Vince can be dead or alive he can be uh free or kidnapped and so on and so forth so here's a second curve story curve

made from those same Choice moments we just looked at and it looks kind of similar to the shape of the first yellow one that I put up but if you superimpose them they're they're different enough that the choices matter but the experience and the shape still remain meaningful and engaging it's it's still a story now a classically trained writer might argue that there's always going to be one set of Curves that's like a little more perfect a little more mcke I think mck would probably say that and uh and he's right in in the context of of a film but what we get in the bargain here is player agency and that is the compromise we have to make and that we're happy to make for a good branching game sip of water okay so principle number two characters as questions uh that title is a little misleading because most characters in most stories are questions actually what will Walter White sacrifice in this quest to take control

of his own life can Elizabeth II preserve tradition as the world around her modernizes can Jon Snow a bastard from the north uh save a world that doesn't care about him and hardly wants to be saved these are all Central story questions which is to say they not only drive plot but they also convey theme and themes as we know are often binary uh things like fate and Free Will nature versus nurture the good of the many versus the needs of the few uh binaries L themselves well to narrative games of course and in most movies and shows the exploration uh of theme is closely tied to how character's Arc so this is a this is a character Arc example Rags to Riches um we're all familiar with character arcs assume usually a character starts with one value in this case it would be rags and uh ends up somewhere different riches uh but that could be anything selfish to selfless or shy to confident the key is that the they're they're diametric they form two poles they're not always like

super diametric but there's a change implied in the character Arc now in a branching drama we have character arcs also but we tend to need to start our characters not at the initial point of a journey like with the whole Arc ahead of them because agency so instead it's more like in the middle there beginning in the center of the curve so the story can kind of go either way Rags or riches and therefore so can the meaning in this example maybe it means the protagonist starts out uh with a low-level cor uh corporate employee job boring but stable salary and the question is will she make millions or will she lose everything over the course of whatever that story is and here's the key each answer implies a very different thing about what that story meant after you've seen it so like in a Breaking Bad game for example Walter White might have turned himself in and worked with his cousin Hank to take down the cartel making it a sort of redemption story for him or in the crown uh the queen might

choose to abdicate in the 9s making hers a story about the Triumph of modernity and Jon Snow might have chosen to rule in tyranny with Daenerys or even taken the iron throne for himself turning his story Into A Tale of corruption and probably A better ending so how about as dusk Falls we're going to look now at how we built a story tree for the second main character Jay that took into account the variability of theme now Jay for those who haven't played um and didn't want to leave after the spoiler warning is the youngest of three brothers who try to solve their family's debt Problem by robbing the corrupt Sheriff of turac uh but it all goes to hell when they get Hol Up at this motel with half a dozen hostages and the sheriff outside basically trying to kill them for various reasons his theme question is can Jay Escape his toxic family without becoming just like them uh here's a short clip just introducing the three Hal

Brothers you're always out skulling in the woods climbing trees and all that we all know you're good at it and you want to help the family right you know I do then here's your chance hop that fence and find a way in whoa does ma know you took that no but someone's got to watch your backs okay so those are the Holts and each episode typically has one or two major branching moments that relate to Jay's theme about his like family identity how he feels about that chapter one starts off pretty low stakes because we're early in the story arc and the question is just does he get that money from the safe that they're talking about or does he fail and disappoint his brothers in Chapter 2 he's not actually playable in this one but his story is still evolving and the stakes are still Rising for him thematically it's about whether his family is scraping by through a difficult night or are they kind of shooting hostages making things a lot worse it's kind of building toward where his story is going to go in chapter three Jay either sides with Vince or with his own family in a

certain dilemma further testing everything he believes about himself and his relationship to them and then in chapter 4 which in our game is the beginning of book two and it properly kind of becomes Jay's story at that point uh now the stakes kick into high gear does Jay fight with his family until The Bitter End or does he abandon them and run for it on his own in chapter 5 uh his story is mostly about his relationship with his close friend Vanessa as he's kind of trying to get to the border and Escape but thematically the stakes are getting huge for him because she represents his last best chance at personal Redemption so does he lie about his identity knowing that he could be putting her at terrible risk or does he tell her the truth and face losing his only friend and Ally and finally in chapter six uh the stakes could be no higher the font no bigger does Jay escape to Canada at the expense of another person's life or does he surrender to save his own soul so those are the questions behind the story tree and there's of course a lot of ways to cut out a branch that

answers them in this path here uh Jay's journey is like mostly one of safety and loyalty you could say he's staying loyal to his family he's loyal to his friend but in a final twist he uh he actually kills an innocent person to gain his freedom and so the answer to his theme question could be said to be something like you might escape a toxic family but the toxicity lives on inside you whereas in this version totally different path his journey is a lot more turbulent along the way he abandons his family he deceives his friend but in the end he makes a very Noble choice and the answer to the theme question becomes that real freedom is about personal integrity and of course there's other paths too it's not always black or white but you always get the experience of exploring a theme and deciding how that character resolves how that Arc will will will go for you and again mck would probably say that characters have one right ending because it's intrinsic to what their flaw is like who they are

must determine how they resolve and again maybe he's right but for us it's more interesting to let players explore that and uh figure out what it means to have that flaw and decide for themselves how it resolves and whether it resolves okay on to principle number three agency and consequence so we talked about major inflection points and how you can manage choices so that you keep an overall dramatic structure but in any given scene there's still always this push and pull between story and design it's kind of like the the inherent conflict of these games story wants to tell a good tale design wants every choice to matter sometimes we have to find a balance uh somehow somehow we have to find a balance now not every choice can be world shaking sometimes it's going to be more about probing the different sides of a character or adding flavor to an interesting moment but at least once per scene in this game we wanted a piece of meaningful impactful agency that would really matter and we called these in our game Crossroads

choices in real life when you reach a Crossroads your choices have Ripple effects sometimes those are short-term sometimes they're long-term in episode two uh for instance chapter 2 Vince has that key decision I mentioned about which hostage gets sent out of the motel to safety he's got his wife his father his daughter they're all inside they all for different reasons need to get out and depending on previous choices the game presents the two best options for who that could be it's a binary kind of determined by other things that have come before it and that choice has consequences consequences that are immediate consequences that are delayed you could say and then consequences that are quite long term so immediately after the choice there's three different scenes that play out depending on who Vince is escorting outside for the hostage exchange for instance if it's his wife then the act of saying farewell forces them to kind of face this issue they've had in their marriage and they either kind of decide they're going to work on it and try to heal it or that they're going to

dissolve it and that this is probably a kind of good good buy for them then there's uh delayed consequences consequences where the Ripple effects are felt in later scenes or even into the next episode say so if Michelle was shot and not rescued in that scene she actually spoiler dies at the beginning of the next episode whether that's a painful death or peaceful death is still variable depending on Agency on the on the player's part and if Zoe also wasn't rescued meaning if Jim was the one who was sent out then Zoe witnesses that and it's hugely traumatizing for her and then in our game there's actually these kind of longer term consequences uh for example 14 years later our story kind of spans quite a long period of time Michelle if she lived can be married or divorced and Zoe who is now 20 she has either lost Vince or she's lost Michelle or she's lost both of them or she's lost neither of them a lot of different states for her and Jim to the the father he has his own set of uh immediate delayed and

long-term consequences uh so it all kind of like ripples out and it it all of it in this case links back to that one choice from chapter 2 now the key to all this is that even as you acrw different levels of consequence you still want to keep things interesting by layering on new Crossroad choices even as your consequences build up this is Vanessa uh she's that friend that Jay makes during his escape to the border and a lot of how his story plays out toward the end depends on how his Crossroad choices kind of intersect with her fate this is not the most exciting visual aid you'll ever see but it's super useful we do a lot of these it's like a 2 by two story Matrix um it shows how two earlier sets of choices combine into a later scene so along the top it's this moment at the end of chapter 5 where uh Vanessa either stays with Jay for the duration of his story or she's going to go her own way on player choice and down the left hand column there it's a moment from the start of the next

episode when Jay either Bluffs his way past a police road block or he kind of fails to Bluff and he ends up being essentially chased by the cops uh on his journey North toward the Border toward Glacier National Park in fact and uh and the one there with the blue this one is subdivided Again by another slightly uh like minor variable so there's really five states going into his the Final Act of his story in that episode which is cool it's cool have five states but that's um that's still all consequence we we still need to we still need to have agency so each of those five ranches has its own Crossroad choice in the game which further subdivides into a total of 10 outcomes which is the light blue boxes there so even though not every choice can matter you know you have to have a Cho you just can't make a game where every choice matters it's not going to probably be affordable and you you know run into problems but even though that's the case if you keep on introducing important choices into your consequences that you're building up you get a sort of layering effect where the

choices constantly feel like they matter and players feel ownership over the story which is really the goal all right principle number four a story and B story so we wanted from the beginning with this game to do something a little different with points of view and nonlinear storytelling almost all TV shows uh and films use some kind of ab or ABC structure with usually um like one main story intercut with one or more Side Stories for instance in Better Call Saul it's definitely Jimmy McGill as the main character but almost every episode we spend a good chunk with Mike and his dealings with the cartel it's a structure of that show House of the Dragon uses an ensemble uh the wire cut back and forth between the cops and the criminals and I put lost up here even though it's old because uh their AB structure was usually the same character at different points in time kind of jumping back and forward and uh which is

kind of close to what we did in this game our idea was that every episode would have an a story and a b story where the B story takes place at some point in the past and affects the future as seen in the a story now sometimes that b story would be an hour in the past sometimes a few days sometimes months and then in that one episode it's 14 years what's cool about that is it's you know it's much more epic and responsive and you get it sense of scope out of the story The Challenge is the logic uh because we see parts of the future before we get to parts of the past so we can't for instance conditionally kill a character that we know is going to turn up later we have to know what we can affect and when we can affect it so let's look at how a story tree can Shape Up factoring in everything we've talked about so far including this time Dynamic so okay chapter six starts in 2012 in the future as it were uh with Zoe who was a kid at the motel and now

she's a 20-year-old woman and we know she's tormented by her past we set that up in the episode and she's paranoid about a mysterious something that uh we don't yet understand in the present day she's got she's got some problem and uh like we said earlier she has multiple substates depending on things that happened earlier whether her parents are alive or dead and so on but essentially she's a young woman dealing with years of buried trauma so we tell a bit of that story and then we cut back to 1998 and now we're with Jay again and it's late in his story he's on the Run he's trying to get to Canada it's that scene from the the blue story Matrix and this is basically just a visual version of that without the fifth case uh 2 by two Matrix he's got those two main variables in play he's either pursued by the cops or not uh and he's either with Vanessa or she or he's alone now coming back to 2012 again at the end of a subplot between Zoe and her grandfather we discover that Zoe has been receiving letters from Jay and she's been hiding them in a box up on a

shelf and we see the letter and the letter is worded in such a way that we know Jay must survive his story to be able to send it but not whether he'll Escape or get caught we can't reveal that yet because the player hasn't determined it yet so back in 98 we have the climactic scene of Jay approaching the Canadian border over the mountains and again that part of the scene is uh really modular there were four ways up the Mountain there are three or four totally different kind of climactic scenes based on different variables there's multiple outcomes for what happens to Vanessa and ultimately it all funnels into this one key variable for J which is does he get caught or does he jump to Freedom so now back in 2012 this is where that's all finally going to come together and all pays off we learn that the reason Zoe has been struggling in recent days is because she's been debating whether to go see J face to face and for the final scene they have

this long faded encounter uh one-on-one meeting together but the nature of it is radically different depending on what happened in the previous scene from 1998 if Jay escaped to Canada Zoe's visiting him at his hidden cabin in the Canadian wilderness the central question of the scene is does she agree with his feeling that he didn't deserve his freedom now players decide that and it leads to multiple endings for Jay and Zoe they can reconcile or she can finally turn him into the authorities and so on and so forth but if Jay was captured then the 2012 scene is very is very different Zoe is visiting him on death row in Arizona prior to his execution and the final question now is in light of everything that's happened will she be the friend he needs and be there for him on the day of his death players again decide that which leads to further endings for Jay either redeeming him condemning him and so

on and that's uh that's about our maximum branching complexity by the way um so there's two major branches times two variables each with a Crossroads Choice leads to roughly eight to 10 outcomes it sounds like the same structure from the other scene we talked about that's because that's a it's kind of a natural limit for us we find that if we get much more subdivided than that what you've got is complexity for the sake of complexity players don't feel it it's kind of not worth doing it so that's to typically where we cap it and part of why that's true is because of principle number five which is No Game overs or bad branches that any branch we make any story We Tell we're committed to making it feel like that's the best branch you could have gotten again this is like a a Prestige TV experience you want all playthroughs to feel like a great piece of content now not all games take that approach in uh in like The Walking Dead the zombies can get you you die and that makes sense for that IP right or in hidden agenda from super massive it's

possible to finish that game without ever solving the mystery and again that's kind of by Design or in some of the Netflix shows including ones I've worked on you can just pick the wrong path and fail and it tells you you have to rewind and try again or else you turn off your TV those are your options uh but our model was Prestige TV and there's no Prestige show where this happens so for us the show always goes on if you fail a qte or you make a terrible choice there will be a consequence but that consequence doesn't affect the format of your experience it just changes the story so early in the game we're more uh forgiving about what that means the most damage you can do in episode one for instance is uh get a sheriff's deputy killed when he uh swings by for a soda make it sound like it's not a big deal but po poor guy right uh but once we get to episode two choices start leaving a more permanent mark on the game and from their forward major characters can die in almost every episode and when that happens the story

has to adapt partly we do that with an ensemble cast like I talked about like allowing the PO POV character to swap over uh partly it's just how we structure the episode when we allow consequences to happen but it's uh it's not trickery we don't write a dead character out of the story the fact of their Death Becomes a defining theme for the survivors and the people who love them and that story just kind of adapts from there now not a uh not every uh major event is life or death either by the way especially in a game like this um again maybe in The Walking Dead But at a couple points in the middle of the game it's possible for Jay to get arrested and his journey doesn't end there that wouldn't have felt good it' just feel like a bad branch and uh we also didn't want to tell a story from inside the prison system for three episodes we could have but it wasn't the story we wanted to tell so we needed a way to adapt the story to be responsive to what happened without tying our hands creatively um

and we knew Jay would have to escape custody so we didn't like Focus the agency on that it's not about like what clever way do you get out of the office because ultimately it wouldn't have mattered he always escapes so instead it's about what happens during that arrest and there's this conditional scene that plays out where he's being interrogated by an FBI agent pretending to be on his side played by the wonderful Brian Bell and whether players figure out that he's kind of playing in when he's not on their side determines whether Jay sort of confesses on tape uh let's watch it my son's a linebacker got himself a full ride to ASU do you like football not really well he does he's out there pursuing his dreams that's what I want for you too son but here's the problem forensics has you at the sheriff's house house Witnesses have you at the motel to get a

deal a way out you need to give up something the da doesn't already know there's only one thing big enough and that's who made you do what you did that night see we had a lot of bodies inside that Motel four police officers dead at the scene another two on life support you weren't just a witness you were part of it so tell know me who put you up to [Music] it Tyler he gave the orders I just did what he said make a note suspect has confessed to multiple murders at the desert dream Motel [Music]

and to being an accessory in the murder of Victor gray wait that's not what I you can discuss the final points with a judge you said you said You' help me I am helping you you're going to feel a lot better now what about pursuing my dreams like your son that isn't my son this isn't even my [Music] office yeah so Jay's always going to escape this room but that confession variable gets stored and much later if he's on death row and if he didn't confess in this scene he can't actually get a reprieve so it's a small touch it's just an example of how even a failure in this case the failure of getting arrested in a different scene can be used to tailor The Narrative okay so I started the talk on the idea of trees and branches and left brains and right right brains and a lot of what we've covered so far has been the left brain really the design but the

momentto moment uh quality of any story comes down to the writing which means as a writer you have to know how to take all these branching principles and just sort of completely forget them and flatten yourself down into a single Branch as you write so in terms of our writing process we used all the same tools that a writing team in television would use uh from the beginning we got together in TV style writers rooms we worked out the story on boards and posits with a lot of fidget toys we created a pretty extensive story Bible with characters locations World building Elements which we regularly updated throughout the project we also like working with character Maps this game is about relationships between characters and between families of characters and especially with the ab structure we needed to understand how everyone was connected to each other in fact for all

the branching complexity of the game and it is complex this character map came before any of that before any of the branching I figured out now where it starts to get unique to this format is that we use specialized tools to outline and write in a way that lets us focus on the story while also still paying attention to the considerations of branching structure we looked at a lot of branching dialogue tools before we kind of got into the meat of this but we decided to go with a modified version of Microsoft Word which sort of shocks people especially writers when they hear that but it's actually a really customizable tool it's especially good for collaboration um there are other custom tools out there with varing various strengths and weaknesses I could talk about more afterward in the wrap-up if anyone's interested um I strongly recommend against trying to write in a flowchart tool like artisy or Miro or Arc weave those are great tools um but they're not so great for writing but it's ultimately up to what works for your team and for you and then it's just about writing

Pages we um I think our final script was about 1,200 pages long um writing them and trying to make them as good as possible and the thing with the writing is it's like it's just this tricky balance where you need to kind of bring in all the skills you have as a screenwriter focusing on character and emotional authenticity and the flow of the scene and write as if there's only one branch the branch that you're in at the moment that you're writing it while at the same time remembering that moments sort of weave in and out of each other in a very nonlinear and tricky way in this format and that there's things like feeders and choice responses and moments where the dialogue dovetails back to Mainline which um do have special status within the screenplay and they have to be written with the tree in mind which is why it's really a cross-brain exercise bringing it back to this image some writers work with a separate narrative designers some studios are set up for writers to work with a separate narrative designer and they communicate back and forth a lot they have to work very closely together uh otherwise you just have to get very good at moving back and forth across your own Corpus colossum and kind of

doing both uh but in either case this is where I'd say the two sides of the process really Collide it's all about this weirdly Zen idea of having to remember the tree and forget the tree at the same time and then even when we think we're done we're definitely not done we went through multiple rounds of you are feedback on this game and sometimes they radically change the story too for a long time Vanessa always came with Jay uh at the end of uh into chapter 6 in one of three different emotional states but we got feedback that some people wanted to leave her behind in chapter 5 for her own sake so we got into the truth of that like it was it was a good note and uh we came up with a pretty last minute storyline for what happens if Jay is approaching the Border by himself and without the cops on the TA on his tail because prior to that that was the source of the drama so we had to kind of figure out something else which is how we end up up at this character of the park ranger that Jay meets who's like sort of like a much

older version of himself like a reflection of who he could become if he goes the right way in his in his journey um I'll just play you one last snippet here so we can see it y I've seen a lot of crazy things up here forest fires Avalanches but I always wondered is it really necessary that we carry these but we are border patrol in the rare event some criminal makes a run for it we need to be prepared look you seem like a nice kid but we got a stolen car down at the trail head which state PD says belongs to an 18-year-old who shot up a motel in Arizona and was last seen headed north now you got no water bottle no

headlamp and I sure didn't see a campside further down the trail so what's the deal here Michael please let me keep hiking oh son I can't do that I've got a responsib ability can't you just help me look it's no kind of Life running from the law you'll be living with that shadow over you forever let me take you down the hill I've never once fired this thing and I sure don't want to start now so I'm going to let it hang there but out of curiosity who would have surrendered nice and run

interesting so yeah that was a scene born out of necessity but in the end it gave us a really nice piece of character-based Storytelling so let's get back to why all of this matters why any of it matters uh so branching narrative games they let us tell these like fractalized multiversal stories that are both emotionally deep and approachable where players have a major role in shaping the journey this is one of the Insight screens from our game which sort of collates a player's choices and play style into a personality assessment I show it because these games can also like reveal something about players in a way that linear TV can't do they're a kind of mirror they show us what we value and how we respond under pressure and how we differ from other people in that regard I mentioned multiplayer player um at interior night we also we do believe these experiences can be shared and a

big part of the game was seeing how people respond to these problems as a group you can actually play with up to eight people locally and there's a network mode too this is an area where the design team really pushed the medium and tried to figure out how we could offer something brand new and different for players now another reason why this all matters is what the future of content looks like we've seen explosions of original Prestige shows across the streaming services I mean we've seen the streaming services themselves explode too of course and uh those same streamers are now getting more and more involved in funding and distributing games it's all kind of converging and pretty much every game IP is now considered a possible trans media property from almost the second it comes into being which all points to a future where really good stories told in unusual ways will have an audience and like I said branching stories aren't just a niche or a moment they're another type of entertainment and that factors into the publishing equation so there's a lot of opportunity

out there uh if we take the medium seriously and let it really be about that creative bar which has been our our take on it so as designers we do that by learning to see the tree the Multiverse by being everything everywhere all at once uh while as writers we have to be completely in the moment and in the truth of the characters because that's where great story comes from and that's what ultimately makes your audience care so so thank you very much uh I think we have time so let's open it up to [Applause] questions hey I have like a million questions but I'll try to just pick one uh on a practical level when you have so many different states and so many different scenes how do you keep the entire team engaged with this Multiverse where as like the writer can have the Multiverse living in their head but the

rest of the team they're they're building individual scenes so like how do you make sure that everyone is aimed at the right vision for a given scene amongst you know 14 other options yeah uh so I'm going to repeat the questions for the camera the question is how do you kind of keep the whole team kind of in the vision of the of the branching game because it's quite complex and it's true that as writers we we we have more of that in our head like as designers um I'd say that for us a big part of that is that we have a pretty small team um we intentionally keep it small because we we don't want to be big entity where this can happen and it's like people don't know what's going on in this path or they didn't know that that was just a an option so you know I think everyone is is fully invested in the story we so we we work in word but then we also use Arsy so there's a there's a visual representation of the game for uh the design and production teams and we also do things like table reads we you know we we continually work

with the team on it so um the short answer I think is that we do it by doing it like it has to happen everyone needs to be in the loop and uh if someone doesn't know what's going on they're going to get on slack and ask a question or talk to their director or something and uh kind of make sure they have that that knowledge great great talk thank you thank you uh hello uh thank you for amazing talk uh I'm super interested because you mentioned that you wouldn't recommend using RDC as a tool for writing right and uh we actually did that on a game called game deck which also involved uh a lot of branching narrative and we also weren't happy with it so I would be super interested to to learn a little bit more about your writing pipeline because you mentioned that you uh approach writing as a normal screenplay writing right so how does that pipeline of wrri writing and then using RDC work AIO company Yeah It's Tricky I mean the I it's first

worth saying that um we we developed our format having previously worked in proprietary branching tools like we all came from different companies that that did this type of thing so there was there was already some some internal knowledge on like what we would need to do in a in a Microsoft Word format like it it could be very complicated otherwise so we we figured out how to organize it in word and then it's a it's it's definitely a pain point for us getting into arsty and especially with with revision and iteration because those tools don't speak that well together you know if we make a change there needs to be this kind of manual update process and it's something we've been looking at in the studio on how to how to improve but the uh the bottom line for us is on the creative side on that like being in a branch in the only branch that matters in the moment like we just can't you can't ask a a screenwriter to you know create really good scene in a flowchart because by definition you know you you got to click

over here and then you got to find the right thing and it's like you know there there's just something to go down a page like you discovered that I think uh is intuitive for writers so the short answer is it's hard and it's something that we're you know we're also exploring tools and trying to figure out how we want to improve that but um you know having people there to navigate that bridge was just a big piece of that for us and it leted us kind of get the creative would love us that someday interesting okay not taken hello uh thank you for the excellent talk uh I'm curious for people who are looking to do smaller maybe solo branching narratives um or like just who wouldn't be working in a team uh how would you recommend like estimating the scope that you can feasibly accomplish and kind of following on the last question um uh what what software would you recommend when you're not writing across a team I assume proprietary

software is easier to use in that circumstance but I'm not actually sure something like twine yeah so uh let me repeat the question I forgot to do that on this one but uh so it's about firstly managing scope on a solo project and I wanted to just ask when you say manage scope do you mean for yourself as a writer or do you mean like the complexity going into production from the script um I'd say just like the the complexity of the actual script like can how much can I like if I'm writing my own branching narrative and it's just me um how do you do a reality check on like this is how much I can feasibly accomplish as one person yeah I mean so on the writing side that's going to come down to how I don't know how prolific you are I guess you know I mean be ambitious I think is a is a good is a good maximum and then also know you know it's like one of those like how do you know you kind of don't know until you try [Music]

it that's not my queue right that just happened I actually joke beforehand like call me off like they do at the Oscars so I thought maybe that was um so yeah you know you kind of just have to I think try it a bit um the the other side of that question which is what can you produce I think is a whole other is a whole other matter and uh it's useful to know what your ratio is like there's there's there's usually a ratio of how much material you've written versus uh like what a what a playthrough is so like these games are often something like two to one or 3 to one in terms of how much gets produced versus how much gets seen by the player there's there's kind of a whole bunch of different ways to look at that but um yeah budget's going to factor into that and uh and time you know if you're doing it on your own time maybe you want to take bite-size chunks and and make sure you can accomplish something versus if you're out to be you know the Brandon Sanders of game writing and you've got 15 volumes in you or something then you know more power to you and then what uh

what sort of software would you recommend for an independent yeah software for um independent you know uh I'm probably not the best person to answer that I know people use twine um you know but are you are you talking cinematic or uh like interactive fiction because it's interactive fiction yeah I mean I think twine is what they use but um there's there's probably other people who know that better because we're very specifically focused on cinematic um so it's it's very much like screenplay style for us but we could chat about it more in the wrap-up area after if you like okay sounds great thank you thank you hey BR great talk uh I got two questions for you as you were in the midst of pre-production production um how often did you play test as a team and have to go back to the story Bible and realize oh we need to refine this or flesh out this detail like how often did your team uh review the review the story as it was developing yeah the well the team is constantly in the game the how often the writing team saw the game I

think that the answer to that is we need to do more of it we were you know there was a there was a lot of exploration and experimentation and figuring out the um you know we have unique art style and understanding how that was going to work in the format it was a long process and so there was there was there was a period where it was like better for the the team to kind of work that out without us being like you're not you know facial expression doesn't you know there's a lot that we could have like been obstructive on um as we got further along we've played it more and I think that um we uh we definitely it's something we've talked about we want to keep increasing that because you there's there's like the it's it's super valuable to always be playing the game um it's just about knowing when you're notes are useful because like there's there's a point at which the cinematics are are just bad like it's just their first pass and everyone knows it and last thing you need is a writer coming in and being like I feel like you're not accomplishing my so you know communication and uh just doing doing it together often I think is the is the answer but I'll have I'll have a better answer about that uh for the next

project and did you notice any sort of uh communication tools or strategies that really helped working between the narrative and the other disciplines on the project um I mean the question is communication strategies between disciplines and uh like nothing in particular just communicate again we're a small team so we're very you know we we don't have a lot of like rules around who can talk to who so we just reach out and especially because a lot of this happened during the pandemic we just got good at you know just shooting a message to each other jumping on a call um but communication always you know a quick call Self things better than uh than 100 slacks if you know what I mean so that's my five minute warning yeah okay so one or two more questions hi I had a question about the crossroads decision points um I know that in the game those decision points require uh player alignment but I'm wondering uh like like what was the rationale behind revealing that those were like major Choice points to the player versus obscuring that it

makes me think of like intale when it's like so and so we'll remember this or until dawn where there's like the little butterfly what do you think is the value of saying this is a big Choice versus not letting the player know when that's occurring yeah it's a good question about um how about why and when you make uh big choices transparent in these games and I think there's a reason that these games all to land on like you're saying different ways of communicating it uh you can obscure it and and that's interesting like there's there's certainly like an Elden ring version of this where it's all hidden and like and I think that would be cool uh but there's I think that people play these games and they're just like they love to like see the tree we get a lot of feedback of like I love seeing the tree and all the different possibilities because it's really what's unique about the format you know so you know you play uh the Netflix stories and you don't see a tree like you don't typically know and like that's fine but um I don't know I

think we just feel that we're we're it's a value ad for people to know that that this is an important moment and it it helps convey that certain moments are going to be impactful and especially in a multiplayer setting it adds Stakes like you just feel in the moment the tension of that and we're all sitting there going like oh God what's going to happen uh and it it's also part of the the maximum that choices should matter like we're we're saying your choices matter and this choice is especially going to matter we're being upfront about that so please take your time and think about it like our timer mechanic actually works differently on Crossroads choices they're typically untimed because we want people to just you know sit and talk to each other and figure out like honestly what's what's the right move here because there's going to be consequences and uh so it's a design decision and uh I I'm definitely interested to see a game that goes the either way with it but was the one we made for this game thank you thank you yes uh do you have time for one more yeah while he's looking at the time go for uh thank you for the fascinating talk uh my question uh naively if you

have a branch every time the players make a choice you end up with your branches doubling each choice so I recognize that you need to recollect them into a limited number of branches such as he's in Canada or he's on death row however funneling players into one of two branches might reduce the feeling of agency and make them feel railroaded how do you prevent combinatorial explosion while at the same time preserving player feelings of agency yeah so the question is how do you prevent combinatorial or exponential branching and keep agency and the I think the the brief answer is like I was talking about like the 10 rule like how we we didn't go past like that level of nuance and it's it's for that reason you know you can't go bigger than that without spending more than you want to spend on these games but if you go less it does feel railroaded so it's a it's a balance honestly like that question you're asking is kind of one of the central questions that we face in

designing these games because like you say you you do want people to feel like their choices are mattering but you can't do a sub choice on a sub choice on a sub choice or you quickly you know you really do have a tree at that point and maybe in the text uh Adventure game of that you can afford to do it if all you're spending is is writing time but when you're shooting and you've got actors and you've got voice and you've got an art team there's got to be production constraints so that balance is a big part of the uh of the process honestly and that's that's kind of the Art and Science of it um and that's a good question by the way I'm happy to talk about that and other topics at the alob I think they're going to kick us out right now but um go forward yeah um hi I just have a like a postmortem question did you use Telemetry to analyze how many players took which path or if there are branches which was maybe taken by really few players to like learn from it to see for the next G maybe this was a bad decision or something yeah good question about Telemetry the answer is yes we we get

Telemetry uh before release there's Like Ur feedback Telemetry so we could see what people were doing in play tests and we did make some tweaks based on that and then after the fact we also get Telemetry we don't we don't like do Post launch um updates or anything we're not changing the balance but we do we do see that stuff and for the next game or yeah it's it's good to know you know it's I think you even if it's just for the the pleasure of being like Oh you know that choice was balanced or whoops everyone chose to run you know whatever it is um but yeah it's it's it's nice to be able to know kind of what people are picking thank you so uh thank you everyone um I'm supposed to remind you to fill out your thingy that you're going to get emailed and uh if you want to talk more there's a little Alco that way and I'm happy to chat with people during [Applause] lunch [Music]