All Choice No Consequence: Efficiently Branching Narrative

[Music] [Applause] hey guys thanks for coming my past life was as a conference organizer I like Tom so these organized presentations are a little new to me but thanks so much for coming to my talk on all choice no consequence how to efficiently branch your games narrative you are probably sitting in the audience because you have realized like so much of us that interactive narrative is super in right now we are seeing it on the top grossing charts of the iOS store in a lot of interactive story games like the game I work for episode interactive as well as some of Telltale's hit titles ankle and that new what does a little space traveler one had input on my slide we're also seeing it in adventure games adventure games used to be very linear but we're starting to see dialogue branches happening where you can start to own the character a little bit more and customize how they respond to prompts things like broken age and Kentucky route zero or some example of those and you're even seeing it in triple-a titles fallout 4 Mass Effect

and shadow of Mordor got a lot of buzz for how much agency they gave their players and how much they allowed them to customize their narratives but there's a giant question of is it worth it liam is giving a talk tomorrow I've learned you should check it out it's on branching narrative he'll have a lot of data to back up what I'm about to say so you should go see it but in general when you think about it you're trying to write hundreds of different storylines with thousands of different character interactions millions of different lines of dialogue and if you're trying to do it that way you're actually wrong that is the wrong approach to writing interactive fiction it'll get you really lost in your script that you really muddied and it'll probably get you to miss all of your budgets and all of your deadlines so my hope is to teach you how to design your choices smartly so we do know and I agree and the data shows that having choice matters in your game it improves your retention it makes your game more fun and it makes your players happier those choices most importantly have to feel impactful to the players they have to feel like they make a difference the data shows that having

choices that are actually impactful to your storyline not really a big deal and tends to be a waste of really valuable time and money when your game is being developed so I'm hoping to help you design your choices a little more smart so why am i standing here who am i why does GGC want me giving this talk so I'm cast Phillips I'm a creative manager at episode interactive that is a platform for mobile interactive animated stories we empower our players to create these stories so we have over thirteen thousand stories live on our app we have over three and a half million weekly active users over 1.5 billion episodes have been played and we are regularly a top grossing iOS app mostly what this means is that we have a lot of data on what branching is on what choices work on what choices don't on how to do that retention and we've made a lot of stories internally some and I hope to share with you guys some tips and tricks we've learned along the way for example here's a choice example I have a really long narrative it won't change that much but I have set some information in it

that you may or may not be interested in so I'm presenting with you a choice on how you'd like to see the information and what is most important to you it won't drastically change your story but it'll change how the presentation flows a little bit so a quick show of hands you can learn more about episode in our data you can learn more about how I execute branches or you can have me avoid engaging with you show of hands who is most interested in episode in our data just a few great who is most interested in how to execute on these branches it's good I didn't like the data anyway who wants me to stop asking you questions great I'm gonna keep asking questions I don't have that many don't worry so I'm gonna skip these slides okay we'll come back to them if there's time you can ask questions so I break ranching our stories into four very distinct parts that barely ever cross there are the choices there is the dialogue there is the story and there are the branches I do separate branches and branches from just choices quick show of hands another classic choice example I am the

NPC I'm asking you the player character your opinion it's not going to change how I respond but it allows you to have likely friends or enemies with me one for choices two for dialogue three for story four four branches what is most important to the success of your interactive fiction game show of hands one for choice two for dialogue three for a story for four branches there's a pretty good mix so I'm actually kind of surprised there's a pretty good mix because I think there's a right hand sir and I think the right answer is story so I never said three that's what I think the right answer is that's what our data suggests that I'll show later so always start with your story that is the first step to creating your the narrative of your game it is the most important part it will define how players are reacting this is not a story talk so I have one quick slide on it go to some great story talks given by somebody else most importantly your story needs to be impactful it needs to be meaningful it needs to have a great theme this is not a time to be distracting yourself with branches and

choices they will just muddy your process every time that we start discussing branches in our outline phase or our story room we get lost we lose where our act breaks are and our beats start to get really really muddied this is a phase to just create a really great outline an outline should be read by strangers and they feel engaged they feel interested they can follow it but they may still have a few questions which is a great place for your outline to be in when you move to branches which are definitely the most fun so something to keep in mind with branches a lot of data Liam will show you some of this tomorrow shows that your players are not replaying your game not often you should not design for replays you should design for their very first experience to be fun we've also noticed in our data on episode that branching doesn't actually actually affect replayability all that much I don't have specific numbers but here's a nice little graph if we take the pink one that's a story called the Ember effect that is about our average replayability

the Ember effect has no branches at all has some little tiny choices we compare it to finding mr. right finding mr. right is a story we produced that is 15 episodes long it's about 150 minutes of gameplay very easy to replay it has four major storylines running through it that you can interact with it has 12 different endings it has hundreds if not thousands of choices in it we advertise all of this upfront and it is replayed slightly above average take a great story super secret Cedar Hill is an example of that a lot of our recent originals are examples where we brought into a story room we really workshop the story it has no branching whatsoever and it's a little above massive branching if you look at tangled love that is our most replayed story it also has no branching until the very end where a single choice gives you four different endings what it does do really well it is a number of small choices they're all about relationship building and just about feeling like I am responding to the characters around me and they are reacting in very small ways to me and we think that that is leading to a lot of

its replayability so on that note branch is still really fun still really cool we do put them in our game how first of all what is a major branch just so we know the difference between a good branch and a bad branch so a major branch and it's probably a change in many scenes or characters due to the choice of those players made usually it's going to be a unique way to reach the same goal again you have those goals on your outline those beats through it it's gonna be different ways that you get to them it's probably strong enough that it is memorable and you can reference it periodically through the story and the player is not left scratching their head like when did I make that choice what is that about and as a reminder it is not a completely disconnected storyline you always want to bring these back to your major story some examples out in the industry so you can stay aware of it in demi lovato which was the game I worked on and that I creatively led who you date is a pretty major branch it will show you different scenes your dates will be different how that character reacts to you will change the main story is going to be the same who you save in episode 2 of The Walking Dead is a great example of this it'll change all of your

character interactions with that character in the next scenes but in the end doesn't change the story and then an angle sorcery for example where you actually go on the map will change the scenes that you see but the basic goals will stay the same so how do you find branches that's obviously what you're here for helping you find them really really quickly one of the major ones that we look at is our story room disagreements if you guys don't have story rooms I suggest you get them but if you still aren't gonna have story rooms it's when you're ever discussing the outline with someone and there's a pretty big disagreement about how something goes what happens with us is this story late at a story lead or the writer takes point they make a decision and they move on because now is not the time for branches but they put a little note in the margin at a branch here an example of this is when we were writing our Mean Girls story with paramount the love interest mica we had disagreement in a story room whether you should kiss them or not if you kiss him too early it felt like the chase went away I already won the dating game I don't need to pursue but also if I kiss him up the stakes of the

relationships it makes it more serious we move forward with not kissing him but we went back later added a kiss changed a number of scenes after that but like any rom-com you end up having some big fight over some big disagreement and the kisses irrelevant uh so look for serving disagreements to again that outline has key beats on it they're probably each giving you a piece of information and they're progressing the story in an interesting way I hope see if you can reorder those there was a great example of this in Telltale's the wolf among us where you could choose to go to Prince Charming's house first or mr. Toad's house first they set up very clear consequences right up front which is an important thing I'll touch on later to say that if you went to one of these places first you would miss out on something happening at the other one but in the end you'll go to both you'll get the same key story informations but you'll feel like you have changed one of those characters lives just a little bit so your art line is maintained but you have a nice little branch for the players felt like they could customize it and finally looking at that outline look at each major goal that you've set

up in the outline and figure out how to answer the how question that is between goal a and goal B or conflict a and conflict B that's why you keep that outline a little bit loose an example of this and one of our stories on episode my brother's best friend you must have a fight with your parents it is part of the story it also is must be about your eating disorder which is it is a story about an eating disorder how you have that fight and what triggers it is up to the players and the choices that they make so we see it with a couple of choices we have a few big branches on exactly what triggers this fight but the fight happens no matter what so this was a great moment where we could just kind of adjust the how to create more player agency we have found that generally getting one branch in as soon as possible is important we have one within 12 lines of dialogue in demi lovato because this shows your players that their choices are going to matter with everything they do it's going to drastically change the story even if it doesn't but it plants that seed in their head we then put a major branch in roughly every 20 to 30 minutes of

gameplay that seems to be about industry norm when I look at Mass Effect and telltale games I don't have great data to tell you that that's right but it kind of feels good for us that's about every two to three episodes and in the telltale games if you play it you'll notice there's 1 to 2 per episode as a reminder this is the branch stage it is not the choice stage which in my mind are very distinct things branches are the things that you must outline before you write them do not get bogged down in your choices at this moment it's again just gonna get you lost in the weeds you don't even have your dialogue yet you're not positive how a scene is gonna flow don't worry about choices right now you've just got an outline and you've got some great branches so you outline those branches you make sure they work they stick to your core story you get your writer back on it and you write a great script because now you're ready for some scripts again it's not a story talk it's a branching talk so just one slide some things to keep in mind when you're doing dialogue in games make sure you have very unique character voices I should be able to read a line of

dialogue and know exactly who said it make sure each line of dialogue has a very succinct and clear reason to be there especially on mobile attention spans are very short make sure you have set up very clear consequences and goals with each line of dialogue I've noticed in gaming that sometimes we need to be a little bit more on the nose what we're trying to get our players to read and make sure you're obviously discussing regularly with your design team how you write a script for a triple a first-person shooter is gonna be very different than how you write a script for an adventure game so finally the fun part choices my favorite a quick bit of data here this is one of our stories that was fine so we were willing to kind of rip it apart and play with it we tested a version for very first time players that had no choices in it whatsoever big surprise retention was down this is a retention chart for the story so no choice is bad the other two lines however are us putting in 10 choices that we worked kind of hard on and 20 choices that we did in the same amount of time so just kind of got in choices wherever we could see them and make them fit you'll notice immediately the retention doesn't really change I don't

have a sweet spot for you for exactly how many choices you need for us we found that about a choice per page of dialogue or about a choice per minute two minute and a half of interactivity seems to feel fun in playtests but the main takeaway here is to make a few great choices not a hundred mediocre ones so where can you find those choices really really quickly so you get that game out the door number one for me a really huge cheat I do a ctrl F through my entire script of the question mark every question mark in your script is probably an npc character asking your character a question that is a choice I then look at the line of dialogue I've given that and I think of two to three other great lines of dialogue that could be there instead two really easy ones any place that you can change artwork allow your players to design that artwork we have them design outfits in our game we have them design avatar creators we even have them design boyfriends/girlfriends best friends we're having them start designing cars they want to be driving

in the background anything that just allows them to change art but not affect your story and three a little not predictably unavoidable consequences unavoidable consequences 10 did not be fun it's where the game seems to be punishing you for maybe not being in control of a situation but you have a story so negative things have to happen we found that burying this in choices is a great kind of response to it for example in the deme game there's a moment where your sister has to get angry at you on television the point of the game is to balance Fame and family and love and health so you were so focused on Fame for so long that your family fell to the wayside obviously players were upset when they got to this because they're like yo my I've never had a chance to actually interact with my sister so it's not really fair that she got mad at me you guys didn't make that an option so we went through and we seeded a bunch of scenes that already existed with small questions and choices that allows you to choose your family over that moment and then wrote a couple very small interactions that were pretty minimal just to give you those choices if you

ever didn't choose family in that moment your sister could now reference it when she was on the television show and if you always chose family now your friends around you could back you up and we had some interesting character conflict suddenly the player distaste at the scene pretty much run away but on that note it isn't important that any choice you add feels like it matters so here's some really quick ways to test and make sure your choice feels meaningful first of all make sure you're keeping track of character scores always add a positive anytime you have a negative and then if you're gonna reference that score later which I suggest you do just change a single line of dialogue so usually I think Engels actually really great with this you'll notice that when they start a new conversation with a character or if it's been a while since you're interacted with them you'll notice it'll have a line of dialogue like he turns to you with a grimace and sneers as he says and then they'll have a separate one that's like he looks at you grinning and replies and all the rest of it is going to be identical but you're not gonna read a new tone into it and it's gonna feel like he's responding to the choices you've made I always react immediately I

apparently didn't turn my calendar notifications off that's super professional I always react to it immediately so essentially telltale does the so-and-so will remember this I like to be a little more direct have a player another NPC immediately reacts to the choice with something very unique to the choice and then move on seriously like one to three lines totally fine make sure again you set up those consequences upfront a choice is much more interesting if when I'm looking at it I feel like both of those things are different and both of those things I will gain something and lose something examples of this or if you can create any moment where someone has split allegiances if there are multiple events that you could be attending or if you have conflicting goals at that moment and finally make sure all of your options have very equal weight one is not more or less interesting than another examples do not use yes/no and maytee if your choice says yes/no and maybe it's a terrible choice it usually should have three options if you only have two it probably means you had a great line of dialogue there you thought of a kind of half-assed one and then you

moved on force yourself think of a couple of options and if you can't it's probably not a good choice I also personally like to avoid right and wrong our players at least on episode don't seem to enjoy when they are wrong they feel like the game made them wrong that's up to you feel out your players but I like to just try to make them all fun so here's a really common choice we see in our game your crush is talking with your revengeful ex-boyfriend do you want to eavesdrop show of hands who wants to eat stop who does not want to eavesdrop it's roughly our breakdown about 85% of people pick yes we think it's because eavesdropping feels like it could be bad that's why people think it's a good choice but really you just want information and you want to move the game forward so we've changed up here we've given the options equal weight you could text your ex asking for details but into the conversation or cause a scene down the hall quick show of hands who texts their ex no they missing me this isn't a great choice who butts into the conversation and who causes a scene down the hall

okay it's a little better though I won't make you pick on this one you can also establish clear consequences up front this is a little on the nose but your crush is talking to your revengeful ex-boyfriend but your class is about to start if you flunk if you relate to English once more she'll flunk you what do you do example that I've set up clear consequences these choices each have a problem oh my gosh c'mon run out of time three quick bad choices that you want to avoid false choices these are choices where I make a choice and my character immediately negates it the world can negate it it can put consequences on you that make your choice unable to be executed on but if I say I want to keep the journal and there are I wanted to return the journal to someone and then my players my character starts reading it and is like this is really juicy I'm gonna keep it obviously a bad choice player must character must reflect player misleading choices I had a really bad habit of these in that Demi moment when your sister called one of our options to respond to her with was I deserve this our players thought it

meant I deserve you getting angry at me and I'm sorry but when they select it if the character said I deserve my fame and you need to get out of my face obviously that led to some player discomfort and unhappiness and we had to go in and make that choice a little more clear so just have outside people reading your choices and make sure they're very understandable and finally vague choices I haven't gotten too far and fallout 4 but I've heard that every now and then they have a problem with this these are choices if you're actually not sure what it means you read it and it says something like disagree and you're like disagree with the person the idea be angry be not angry I'm not sure what is gonna happen if I tap this so I'm not gonna tap it so again make sure you're kind of on the nose with your options make it very clear to your players what they're getting into so my key takeaways 30 minutes to talk who knows what you actually took from it if you take nothing else here are the five things I hope you keep in mind do not add branches to your story until it is a great story do not add choices until you have a great script every choice should have a very clear meaning very clear goals

and very clear consequences make sure you have written immediate reactions and never negate a player's agency I don't really have time for questions but if people line up or show me if they want questions I can always go to that writer follow-up reader room thing that's down the hall we are hiring for people that love interactive fiction so there's our hire link if you want you can also email me there's my email address thank you for listening we talked for three I have more minutes I have more minutes oh that's great my thing told me it took 30 minutes I must have been running well I got a race through stuff so if anyone has questions I can talk you get those mics here and there as a quick reminder please fill out the for the little of the survey they send you I really want to know how I do two mics grab a mic I can talk about our process I can dive over run questions hey how's it going you skipped over a bunch of data slides I did skip over to data slides oh no I actually ended up working them in okay so you saw them essentially we see that no choices bad

tons of choices good tons of choices not all so good there's a sweet step in there and that people tend to not replay your gamely and we'll have more data on that but what actually makes them replay the most is a great story thank you alright so you suggest that you should make a great story first then and find branches for it does this risk having some scenario where the player thinks oh there's one correct story and that a bunch of branches that lead to wrong endings and they're somehow less valid than the one true story and like how would you get around that sure we actually had a problem with that in one of our stories specifically when we added premium choices choices where players could pay to get kind of a cool side story it made them feel like that was the right story generally how we've worked around it is we actually make sure we do follow that kind of diamond structure so if they go online and they look things up it feels like it's they're all seeing roughly the same experience we also do a lot of play

testing in-house and we actually will ask our players to pick different choices at times so especially internally we'll be like hey you go play choosing a B a a B and then tell us how you feel about the story it is a lot of gut checks we generally haven't though aside from when we make paid options we haven't generally encountered that issue I think it's because we do it before we move into scripting so it's still a little flexible enough that if we like a branch more we're still mushy enough with our story to be like well that one's so good can we make that one better so we do it a little early enough that we can still futz with it that kind of helps any other questions you had a hand up I I totally can that's a totally valid question question hello what's the best way to prevent FOMO for your

players man that's a good question we have a lot of community engagement I found that Instagram has been a really great tool for us to help our players prevent FOMO we'll also in our account will like put up little secret endings and be like did you know how to get to this then if they didn't get to it they want to but also they get to see it I haven't noticed it being we do make replaying an option so we do with some of our especially branchy stories like demi gets a lot of replays I think also because a lot of fans yeah that's kind of I think really your social media community is one of your best options to prevent a little bit of FOMO but I also don't mind if there's a little bit of phone look something you did your job well because they want to they want to read a good story yes do you have any data regarding how arbitrary morality systems affect Interactive narratives not great data we haven't done a lot with morality systems in the deme game we did points so that was where we balanced your fame your

fame love and happiness friendship something like that it's not quite morality it's a little similar we found that at least for the for our stories they don't actually improve anything at all any of our retention in any of our data they don't hurt it either so our current data has been we don't use them unless it really helps the story and it helps the story it doesn't hurt to put it in but we haven't seen it Brassica ly improve anything either question hello do you feel that part of the problem with replay value is that there are sites like YouTube where people can play through it once and then they'll go okay there's like 11 other endings but I'm just gonna go look up the endings and not play through it I don't know I actually feel like YouTube is a response to the problem but now I'm not talking with that I'm just talking personally I think it's that I don't want to go invest usually a replay I already know isn't going to be so different that it was worth the 20 or 40 or 60 hours of my time just I haven't seen any games that promote being that

different so I don't want to go replay a bunch of stuff I've already seen to see five things I didn't see I'd rather go to youtube and you like yo what happens if I go to Prince Charming's house instead and then just watch that scene so my hunch is it's the investment it takes I'm actually gonna go I'm totally promoting other speaker I'm gonna try and go to the life is strange talk because I'm a it was a really interesting mechanic they used where you could just rewind in the moment and then watch what would have taken happened on your other branch and I'm hoping they talk about that and I'm curious to see how that affected their story it seemed like you might have a strict scope there so do you have adults or kids can you say the question again so your target audience who are actually going reading your stories or playing who's our target audience right now we're predominantly women ages 13 to 25 and we're just kind of slowly expanding that vertical as we look at other stories yes do want to help if to a mic but can I get your

question it's okay it's all good and I'll help over here I feel like there's a real lack of data in the industry about how players interact with story and I think that your data is incredibly valuable and that's why people are interested in it so is there do you have any more data outside the context of this talk that is publicly available it is a great question and when I get back I will see if I can make some publicly available because we have a ton of data that we look at what influences the choices people make again like seeing that yes/no and maybe actually does generate bad response rates so I will aim to make more available for sure if you can't make the data itself available I would love to have more information on how you collect it as sure yeah yeah Drona have up to a mic okay great yes hi I was sort of curious about the replayability as well like personally for me there's a lot of games I don't ever want to replay but I love talking with other people about different different things that happened

because we made different choices like I me and my boyfriend will play games explicitly setting out to make and different choices and then either watch each other play or just talk about like completely wildly different scenarios do you see that in your data like watching forums or something we do yeah so asking like do people share their information from their replay that's or from their replay from their experiences that sort of stuff playing with each other that's actually a big I'm glad you're asking something I didn't really talk about it's a big reason why even though we don't see branching really affecting replayability for us we still think branching feels right and it feels like a good thing to do because what we see is our players I'm mostly looking at our instagrams and our forum which is where most of our players hang out they are so excited to share when they have experienced a different scene in the deme story we let you pick the gender of who you date how you want to identify who you want them to be and they have a huge like time talking about oh well but if this character is a woman do they act different do they see how does your scene go so that's shown us that having

at least some branching and some feeling that I have customized my story that people seem to enjoy that and we definitely see that our stories with more branching get more online engagement so that for sure is true our single narrative stories get almost no online engagement whatsoever thank you yeah thank you so basically during your speech you mentioned that having choices allows the player to personalize their experience but they have to feel you know impactful instead of being instead of being impactful for fear of you know not like just you know potentially wrecking the story then you also mention how a story can serve as a great like a great base for you know a malleable base for you putting choices as well as you know branching paths and so on so I would like to know how do you like maintain a balance between choices and a concrete story because you know obviously you want to make sure that the choices like

are like it's quality over quantity so I'm just curious yeah so I think that it's a great question so talking about how we balance the story with the choices and the branches the biggest thing we do is we always have that outline that we did at the very start open and if we feel like what we're writing is about to make us go back to an outline phase but is that big a change that we have to go reassess the outline well actually as a whole team say like pause for a second is this choice worth it is this branch worth it do we love this choice enough that we are willing to go backwards in that little step of story then branches then script then choice and sometimes the answer is yes sometimes like with the deme example I showed with your sister we did go back and realign some stuff because we felt it was important but generally we always say if it's gonna force us to go back a step we we won't do it we'll move we'll find a different choice alright thank you yeah of course ok that's my last one ok I'm gonna go into the wrap-up room it's 302 - it's

just around the corner apparently so I'll talk to you guys there thanks so much [Applause]