Advanced Environmental Storytelling in Spider: Rite of the Shrouded Moon

[Music] hey everybody I recently added videos to this PowerPoint so definitely tempting fate today so I'm ready start we're good yes yes okay cool thanks everybody for coming through advance environmental storytelling in spider right of the shrouded moon please silence your cell phones please fill out the survey at the end that you'll get an email so my name is Randy Smith and I've been working on games that are not per se story games where the focus tends to be on gameplay instead so gameplay designers one of the hats I wear but I liked putting the story into these games anyway and often times I did this with environmental storytelling so let's start with the story of spider the secret of Bryce Manor aka spider one in this game you play a spider who proceeds from one room to the next of an abandoned mansion leaving the place covered in cobwebs the props in the environment convey who once lived here and what happened to them

because you're a spider you can get into every little looking cranny and have a better perspective on the story than any one of its human players and it's a story of domestic drama in mystery there's a love triangle and sibling rivalry and betrayal and a suicide and a kooky grandpa character who hid the family fortune from beyond the grave using a puzzle so let's locate spider in the space of all possible stories there are absolutely no words text or dialogue other games of this quality include another world and ICO and 30 flights of loving this is actually an exaggeration as we'll see the story is extremely nonlinear and what I mean by that is that the storyteller doesn't know what information is going to be presented to the audience nor in what order another game like this is her story there's these like tattered fragments that come at the audience in a way that's not under the author's control environmental storytelling is usually at least somewhat nonlinear unless you're controlling the camera and really forcing the user to stare at and witness and understand each a little piece of story data so the Back to the Future opening title sequence is a wonderful

example of that and lastly it's like what I call a dead story or archeology gameplay there's no living characters present it's can you know the story has concluded before the game actually begins it leads the question what happened this tends have a lonely vibe as is also a pretty common environmental storytelling which comes from the player I believe thinking a lot about people but there's no people present so this is a good time to clarify that when I talk about the story for Spyder I'm specifically talking about the linear narrative of the NPC's I'm not talking about the PCs on-screen emergent narrative or world-building or puzzle design those are also parts of story sorry spider but not this presentation so there's some things I really like about spiders story including the fact that it's asynchronous and not intrusive that means that it'll never interrupt the user like a cinematic would the user can absorb the story while they're engaged in other things like game play it's a by never fixed this is a pull not push story so just go ahead and read the opposite of what that says so what this means that the story's not foisted on to

the player and said the player takes initiative to mine the story out of the game themselves and this leads to a much higher level of investment on the part of the player and those two points together also mean that you can kind of monitor the player becoming interested in the story during play test the player has a sense of ownership over the story and what that means is that the players job is to form their own interpretation of spider story and my goal as the designer is to foster different possible interpretations I like maintain the one true version but that's only to make sure that all the clues land and the story isn't inherently self contradictory and lastly it's a fresh way to tell stories like her story would not be as memorable if you watched all the videos in chronological order and in a similar way for spider story it has like plenty of arc types and like hoary old chestnuts and stuff but it's the other qualities that actually make it unique it's like literally never required that the player follow along at all if you just want to play the gameplay part that's totally valid and it's also told from the point of view of a character who cares nothing about the story like the spider is only motivated

by building webs and eating insects but we happen to know that there's a human player who's sort of like watching over the spider shoulder if who might be drawn in by the human drama they witness but we only give that human the tools to express spider-like behaviors like you can't actually respond to the story and it's is very elusive quality one of the most distinct parts of appreciating spider story and we really pushed this separation as far as we can so that was spider one and then some years later as time to start working on the story for Spyder rate of the shrouded moon aka Spyder - and we wanted this to be a leveling up in all possible ways there wasn't gonna just be one measly old puzzle there's gonna be many puzzles that would add up to this hidden mega puzzle we wanted to do more of that layer separation between the spider and the player like kind of blurring the boundary between the game in real life but mostly I'm gonna be talking about the first two we wanted to be it there to be more characters more intertwined to play threads the way I approach things like designing good characters or drawing inspiration that's it's very similar to how it author story in any other game or other media so I'm not going to cover these things very much instead I'm gonna focus on stuff

specific to environmental storytelling and where I like to start is by brainstorming what I call anchor moments and these are specific story beats visualized as they would appear on screen so they have to have the right tone I'm hoping for some really good emotional strength to come out of them and they need to fit the format by being easily read for information and so I don't necessarily know how these moments are going to fit yet but they seem like they might be right for the game and then I proceed to this the bottom-up process followed by a top-down process using those anchor points so what do I mean the low level is the anchor moments and any other actual on-screen game content but the high level stuff is more like plot lines and themes and characters so basically once there's enough low-level moments the high level structure structure starts to emerge and then you think about that and use that to drive back downwards and it goes back and forth exploring and developing possibilities so for example here we have the anchor moment of a locket that's been thrown down the well so that suggests this is a story about heartbreak and what else might convey that well here's a wedding ring that was

lost in the drain that was sort of derived from this and players report these are both like strong moments for them in spider - this character seemed to be shaping up to be too much of it like a mustache twirling vaudevillian cliche so how can we give him some more dimensions so we can see here that in his private moments he plays the lute while gazing at a portrait of his beloved and I had this cool idea that you're gonna follow some footprints but which character this is or even what plotline it's associated with I'm not sure yet so why do I do low level first it's because even for the most artfully structured work it's the on screen moments that are the content the structure provides the substance and meaning but it's invisible it's kind of a candy versus vegetables thing and I believe that both are important and one of the keys here is being able you know willing to cut the good anchor moments and other amazing ideas that just aren't fitting in so focus on cohesion not kitchen sinking yet being your own editor so I have a technique I call histogram which sounds fancy but really just means counting how many of the planned levels are devoted to which topics so for example I can see how much stage time each character is getting relative to that character's

prominence I also use it for things like themes like making sure we still have enough relatable domestic drama and it's off not all like secret societies and hidden passages so it's kind of like this left brain analysis which helps confirm we're building the right content what can we cut what might we need to add and there's another technique where I sort of gather all the elements of a particular thread and think about how the player would logically connect them into a story which is pretty standard but the opposite direction is a more careful one which would be like listing every inference the player would have to make in order to to draw in order to understand the story and then connecting each of those steps with a specific piece of game content in both cases the goal is sort of proving the story can be understood and this is my best answer so you had to design for nonlinear nonlinear storytelling because you can examine each step and think about when they're going to present themselves to the player but another really good answer is hey play test and refine users will just tell you when they're confused and when they are it's usually the case that one of those steps is either

missing or it's badly conveyed so let's go into the shipping game and take a look four major things to talk about we're going to start with the very beginning of the carriage house which is kind of our training level and here we see a lot of establishing material and symbolism so the first thing that happens is the spider hatches from an egg we actually see the spider go through a full lifecycle from birth to death which was important because the human characters are struggling to achieve immortality and by contrast the spider does achieve it but using natural means and the better to draw such parallels it was also important to me that the spider be born under the symbol of The Seeker Society thrust into the same circumstances as the humans we also see anachronisms like hey there's license plates from cars versus this antique carriage it's meant to establish that this is a modern time and has a strong connection to its past much like Vermont my home state which inspired many parts of the game and you can also find a hidden stash of valuables plus some weird little tinctures in the carriage house this isn't meant to be a reward for exploring but it's also a story hook like who put this here and what were they up to moving on to the entrance-hall the next

level we're gonna spend some time talking about this portrait which internally we call the arrival there's a distressed pregnant young woman who's being taken in by an older couple the women of which is receiving her joyfully but the man standing a little bit apart he seems annoyed we see their names below on a plaque and a man's name is Divi Blackbird and SV Blackbird is the other half of the elderly couple and the pregnant women is LS Bryce LS his arrival in the house is the inciting incident a spider - from which everything else unravels but how do we know that this isn't like a departure like maybe they're showing off their shame the servant girl or something so partially that's conveyed through body language we see SBS gathering embrace and we also added luggage at one point to help convey a sense of arrival like we wanted to her to seem like she's from someplace else so this portrait features numerous connections for the players to draw including this window and this hat we laid it on pretty thick in this first level because we're trying to help players realize what their job is because make no mistake understanding spyder story requires what is

essentially detective work even if the story isn't detective themed and this is partially due to the nonlinear no text format it's just really difficult to read complicated stuff like character motivations and causality so we work really hard to help the players understand by designing clues that are easily read and combined with other clues so coming back to this portrait most look at some more examples this piece of luggage appears in a later level and in that same room with the luggage we find this purse in this necklace so this establishes that the room is Alice's bedroom and nearby in that same level there's this hearing because we know it's her bedroom we can assume this is her earring so that when we see the matching earring in a even later level well you know that LS is the person who was here strapped to this weird experimental bed thing and it so happens that all four pixels of her hearing and the portrait happened to not contradict those earrings now some of you may also draw in the connection between these red shoes the other which shows up at this kidnapping scene that's chloroform on the table above there and together this is supposed to express

that she was kidnapped in the basement and then brought to the experimentation table this idea connections is the most prominent tool and spider tell it spiders storytelling technique so when you see this cane in bowler hat in a later level I want you to know that this is devious place and I want you to process everything in that level with respect to him it's his stuff it's things he was doing portraits provide a rare opportunity because we have a few of them to connect the props to a name and a face and all the humanity and character those convey so I try to bring a lot of use out of each portrait and the entrance-hall also contains candy wrappers which are a calling card they're associated with a particular character you can kind of sprinkle them around wherever you want to establish this character has been there and they're a little bit more effective because you're essentially drawing a connection to that same prop over and over instead of having to notice and track individual unique props like clothes these guys are also interactive and kind of bounce him around a little bit so it calls more attention to them there's other calling cards in the game like the child character if he's been somewhere he tends to leave toys around now this is a whole lot of stuff for

just one level it's one of the first levels of the game but it's not intended to be understood on the first pass and not at all much more like repeat visits and again players don't have to do any of this they can just totally ignore the story moving on to the parlor this is a scene of quiet domestic life for the elderly couple the left side is his the right side is hers that ordering is reflected in the portrait above the hearth in its later preserved in their bedroom in terms of which side of the bed they sleep on so let's go in and examine each character's props 4dv on the Left we can see he's the guy with the candy wrappers we see his books which seem to be about things like engineering and math and along with the screwdriver and his gizmo it's meant to establish him as the inventor of the inventions we're gonna see later in the game and we see that he's drinking not whiskey but maybe that's like kool-aid which along with candy suggests some kind of childishness and over here on the right with SB looks like she's just sewing like a very innocuous housewife there's a reveal about her later but to make it work you have to start by setting up the wrong impression zooming

on that portrait Divi looks like an uptight fuss bucket which combined with the kool-aid and candy and genius levels of inventing inventing that pretty much sums up his character and there's some power dynamics here to Divi is standing up and he almost seems to be holding down seated wife but once the player learns how headstrong and wild his wife is they'll get a second read on this the next time they visit this is more about what Divi wishes were true than what's really true and lastly P fen the guy in the background standing apart the hope was to establish him as a servant but sends servants are normally in family portraits this was confusing for players often a corner we see where a child drew on the walls this is meant to indicate a invasion of the couple's quiet domestic life and in the parlor we find our second hidden stash of treasures and tinctures so let's take a look at this recurring pattern the treasures are supposed to look valuable like somebody is stealing for a little while in our game they just look like normal plates and silverware too much like that so people like I know somebody just want to do the dishes so they hid them so to

solve this we really beefed up their their value appearance and they also made sure the first ones in the carriage house especially look super Treasury the reason their plates and silverware is because these are items a butler would have access to in a later level we can find the mother lode of all these items in the name of this level is Butler's quarters which establishes that there is a butler and players tend to figure out who it is using process of elimination if nothing else and these caches are implemented as secrets and the sense of a formal interaction in the spyder games the way a secret works is they start covered up and then when you figure out where they are and get inside them the cover comes off and you see the message secret found this message helps the player to contextualize the contents even if it doesn't immediately register as something that someone would keep secret in this case we can see that the child's hiding something that he stole the play with he wasn't supposed to take secrets in hiding are very compatible with environmental storytelling so all the characters and spider are designed as people with secrets and objects that they want to hide moving on to the kitchen the first thing you encounter is

this tray food which kind of implies that somebody is serving for caring for someone else and there's some medicine here which implies that the recipient might be sick so medicine versus tinctures these are both recurring props but they're associated as two different story threads we tried to make them visually distinct to signal the correct connotations the medicine supposed to look healthy the tincture is supposed to look nasty and like addiction but the too close it's too easy to draw a spurious connection between them and now we're back here and you might ask yourself if that pepper shaker is supposed to be relevant which is some slides I cut so ignore that but the pepper shaker is relevant then what about this other thing is just a cool prop that we found in real life that's the only reason it's in the game almost every province fighter comes from some photo reference and that's the major reason it's in the game for authentic texture what would be in this kitchen what are cool appropriate objects but this kind of texture can become red herrings in the detective sense spurious data that if you mine it for meeting you can wind up with incorrect conclusions and it's like real data versus noise texture red herrings

is really big topic and spider so one huge misstep I made along these lines is that I had three separate plot threads they all involved coffins and two of them involved replacing the contents of those coffins with rocks but they're totally separate and I didn't mean for you to draw connections so this this is confusing for people short version so this kind of confusion is toxic to the players detective process there's like a tipping point where too much confusion has cascading effects can cause players to - now what you really hope for is that things will land into place early to keep the player invested and also to eliminate some clues taking them off the board leaving fewer for the player to put together but conversely when players are pursuing a spurious connection they're going down a dead-end and eventually they're going to need to recognize that and rewind putting those Clues back on the board it's bad news so in spider we really like texture and we don't want it to be trivial to pick out a story clue so we have a deliberately high rate of noise but one thing I've learned is to stay consistent in that so for example players can come to conclusion like that night thing might

be a clue but not necessarily in this game basically you make an implicit with a contract with the player and you have to stick to it and of course it helps not to go out of your way to create problems one example of the consistency rule is this scene where given the story here there realistically be so many overlapping layers of tracks and footprints that at first I chose not to depict them all but that was inconsistent with my normal way of depicting clues so players read it wrong meaning that they correctly read the incorrect data that I had presented them so after the scene read like this confusing mess before you then it clicked easily for players and this one against all my instincts as an aside these marks right here we're confusing to players they're supposed to be the heel marks from a shoe like heels being dragged but that didn't click until we actually added the shoe and this and many other suggestions were brought to us by play testers moving on to the guest bedroom this is a room shared by two people and adult Ellis Bryce and the pregnant lady she's the pregnant lady and her now born child named T Bryce this room

establishes firmly the outcome of the pregnancy and even though it's a huge mansion they're both like crammed in here they share one bed and that implies their unwanted guests we see a portrait of T Bryce the baby with SB Blackbird he's being given a monkey doll by SB and partially this is symbolic because T Bryce is like a little monkey he's always getting into things he shouldn't but of course the monkeys a connection and it later places T Bryce in this creepy basement and so I had hoped for it to feel like he carried this doll around for years to build a sense of fond relationship with SB but we never see another portrait of him so I couldn't express that I only had one monkey doll prop two places and this is where I had to be and moreover without any portraits it's hard for people to be sure how old the tea Bryce is when the game starts is they still a baby so we added multiplication tables which kind of calibrates that you know he's probably not three years old but he's not an eighteen year old either let's call it like maybe seven to ten which works perfectly there's a lesson here about the importance of being able to visualize a scene correctly in your detective work so before the multiplication tables we had

a lot of trouble with this scene directly above where you find the monkey doll we wanted to imply that he climbed a stack of things to escape a window but in order to visualize that you have to imagine the correct size a kid like large enough to climb the small enough to squeeze through so it really took the scales in this case was these handprints and footprints which again helps with visualization in a dark closet and a guest bedroom is where ls keeps things she no longer needs like tea Bryce's baby stuff since he's grown out of that and there's a trunk where she stashed her broken dreams and artifacts from her former life and memories she doesn't want to think about anymore cramming them way back in the corner it's meant to be heartbreaking so the vault is where we have DVS cane and bowler hat and this is his mancave contains this portrait of a secret society which shows a lot of things it shows the robes they wear where they meet which is a location you can visit in the game and how they establish rank because the ones that are on the Dyess a little bit further up they carry orbs

the triangles in them whereas the ones lower down on the floor carry orbs of squares in them so there is such a thing as rank and here's how you know what rank people are in a different part of the vault there's this safe which has been carelessly pushed aside indicating there's more at stake than just treasure raising the stakes relative to spider one and there's this dartboard which is an unsettled clue that divi dislikes someone with the name of Bryce and so you can see how that might extend to our other Bryce's in this game and on the wall we see papers where someone's trying to puzzle out some secrets of the secret society and the candy wrappers indicate that it's divi doing this this thing right here is a secret sliding wall it's very scooby-doo and then it changes to this which is a robe and an orb from The Seeker Society so players understood that the robe Anor belonged to someone of low rank in the secret society but there's a lot of confusion here and I'd want it to be a cool reveal that Divi was in a secret society but it wasn't like who belonged to or knew about the secret society was an extremely messy topic for players and a

big piece of the confusion was that in my mind the family was just the caretakers of the secret societies estate but for many playtesters they assumed that the family like was the secret society and this was their estate and so of course they knew all the secrets and there are all members and stuff so to solve this problem into signal a sense of mystery right after that we just opened the game with this quote which had been a tagline from our website so there's lots more in the game but I'm gonna focus on just a few most noteworthy moments this scene worked great at conveying that someone was spying on DV and introduced a mystery of who the spy was at a time that worked well for the story many players cite this as one of their favorite moments and it wasn't one of the anchor moments usually those are the ones that work best since they're originally conceived as being visually strong I think this one works because the reveal is exciting because you're just in that room and even though one-way glass is a hard thing to convey the rest of that cubby clearly communicates a furtive operation and of course these photos are a great way to show DV going through a progression over time which is

normally hard to convey an environmental storytelling specifically he's descending into insanity I was really excited to do an actual crime scene but it didn't work that well and it's because it's a nexus of a lot of the things that are hard to get right with environmental storytelling so most people understand that t Bryce escape through the window and that LS was the victim but what's hard is sequencing events building timelines causality it's supposed to be the case that T Bryce was fleeing from D V in a ran to his mother for help and then D V chased them both down at the basement and then she helped her son escape but she got caught instead but that's a whole lot of stuff to try to fit together in the sequence and people have other ideas like well maybe LS was being held prisoner down here and maybe T Bryce came to tried to rescue his mom but he got caught and so one solution was this level subtitle a last stand so the summary about text and spider is that there's text all over the freaking place but it's usually used pretty subtly to provide a little bit more context and orientation I only use it as an actual crutch in a couple

places where player comprehension was really flailing and I don't feel bad about it another problem with the kidnapping scene is it's not the archetype whole kidnapping scene like there's this weird replacement victim concept and there's a lot of scene changes and being a deviation from the expected norm is also true of like the secret society and how they work and the butler being in the family portrait I think art types can be great for helping the player understand but I use them really sparingly because I believe that cliches are lame that's the technical word for it since we're making a list here are some things I've had a hard time depicting with environmental storytelling we've already mentioned like timelines and causality this tends to extend to character motivations like the butler's cache of treasures like why is he hiding them inside the house like is this plan to come back and steal them later or something things that are missing are hard to convey because they are not on screen so this perch is missing a mechanical black bird that's supposed to be there but without seeing the bird players thought it might be like a handle or a lever so we actually had to just like depict the bird on its perch

like very nearby in the same scene and those two points together explain a recurring problem in the spider games these places are always abandoned but unless I literally put the corpse in the game no player has any idea where all the carrot went so for example we saw that T Bryce climbed out that basement window but we don't know for sure if that was his final appearance in the story there's a lot of things I regret about Spyder - I think spider ones hooks we're hokey or spider - takes a little while to get going spider - it's too close - spider one which is part of that problem like they both take place in abandoned mansions and so I had already used my best material in particular to establish that it's an abandoned mansion Viper she was kind of a lot it's really stuffed full of ideas it's a little bit of an overreach I probably fewer ideas with more stage time each would have helped them player comprehension and it takes a really long time to compare clues and in both games like you know if the clues are in separate levels it's you can't just flip back and forth between them but there's one thing I really like so I

want to share with you my favorite moment which is the dramatic conclusion of the game or at least the climax so first of all there's these diagrams in the metagame of a time machine and a weather device and these are actually player tools that you use to change whether it's day or night or rainy or clear in black bird estate and when you're playing the game but then you actually find these as levels in the game so they've actually been invented and you get to play around there and then there's this corpse you find who you can examine really carefully and almost but not quite confirm that this is Divi but it can't be DV because DV is still alive if you've seen him in the window he's up here with the kidnapped LS in the tower so you make your way there but when you arrive they are both gone and you chase DV down the trapdoor to arrive in his laboratory and now we're going to dramatically attempt to play a video in PowerPoint

now we're going to dramatically attempt to get our PowerPoint presentation but it works again so what happened here did DV disintegrates himself or did he actually invent time travel in his quest for eternal life it's designed to be interpreted either way in most players reported being unsure which they most believe and this pertains to the meaning of spider regular shrouded moon which is about mysteries and magic what's real what's not and how you'd even know the difference which is something that I believe is very relevant today there's plenty in the game that plays with this theme there's the fate of ls the quest for immortality and the secret societies masked Nations and what's actually really going on behind their facades which you get to go back and look at and I really like that the players ability to interpret what they see the skill that they've been using throughout the game is so relevant to this meaning and

it comes into play especially at the climax so taking this even one step further soon after the climax as the game is wrapping up you get exposed to increasingly strong hints that the story extends beyond the game and into the real world and the starting point for that is that the seeker society is based on a historical one and you can research them to connect the remaining loose ends in the game and discover the deepest secrets buried in the game and also to learn the connections between the game and the actual out in the physical real world historical mysteries that the game is based on and that's it I got three minutes for questions if anybody has questions and I'll take it in the tape [Applause] go ahead good all right thank you for so much for the talk I always find so much useful knowledge from the talks you do I kind of got a couple of talks of

questions if no one has any more but my first one would be how much we working do you do on the out work so I guess the out style was specifically chosen so you could iterate because he said playtesting is really important so do you do like a broad part of the art work and then kind of clean up on that as you go but then that might also bring too much emphasis on players and have to do the play testing all over again and then how how do you keep track of the connections so say you kind of reference this doll in one of the pictures and you're having down in the basement for example do you have some kind of spreadsheet like okay I've references somewhere else I need to get rid of that if I remove it from the basement like gee keep track of that stuff yep so the answer about process in art style if it was more flexible that would be great it's a little bit costly to change things so that's one of the reasons for more advanced planning it's not impossible and we definitely do have to change things and we hope to change small props not like big parts of the

set or whatever I feel like I had another point for you about that oh yeah one of the problems is that a lot of this stuff is very very nuanced really specific direction and as a tends not to come together until very close to the end and so there's lots of like little tiny details missing that they're actually really important because players focus so much on everything because we're asking them to mine everything for so much data and so it's the play test is actually is hard because of that but you know you can do your best with it you got and the second question was about spreadsheet you know not quite that organized but one thing that's handy is if you know something's like a hero prop and it's actually relevant to meaning if it's got a like the earrings there's only one piece of art and so that you know but just copy picks they are kind of a thing that helps a little bit okay Oh another question in my experience with sort of environmental or pull versus push storytelling it seems like this draw one of the stronger emotions is sort of this human voyeuristic tendency to want to see events or get knowledge they seems like they're not supposed to have does your sort of experience bear that out and does that effect kind of what you sort of keyframe or pick as your sort of main moments that you want

to make sure that you communicate yeah I don't I didn't actually explicitly think about voyeurism when designing either or spider stories but so I also worked on the thief series and it's a big deal there and I think that's because those are living humans that you get to watch and so it's easier to design things that living humans are doing in front of you that are like fun and you feel sneaky when you're watching them or whatever I think it's a little bit harder to build into props but I'm sure that like some of that feaf experience kind of carried over like I didn't explicitly be like you're gonna go through this person's underwear drawer or anything like that but you know if you're looking at for example their failing relationships which is a common theme in spider I think that has a little bit of a voyeuristic sense but it kind of a sad one and now we're out of time so I'll be in the wrap-up room thank you very much [Applause]