Applying Level Design to Dialogue in Subsurface Circular

this is gonna be brilliant for all of us my name is Mike and this is my incredibly long titled it's it's it's yeah it's not very good very search engine optimized title so I'm here today talk to you about something a bit weird I notice the level design track I'm gonna be talking about dialogue systems but I hope that it's kind of an interesting take on dialogue systems using level design lenses maybe there's some stuff in here as well that might help with communication with writers or taking your level design skill set and applying in different place in the game it's an interesting case study hopefully so a bigger tree who are my slide I'm Mike Bethel I think I already said that I might do a couple more times I'm an indie developer if you if you've heard of me it's probably because of Thomas was alone which is a pretentious rectangle platforming game overrated in my opinion but thankfully I don't write the reviews volume was the follow-up

which is a self game and then subsurface circular is the one that just came out out of interest in the room anyone in there actually played subsurface circular how cool a couple of you also have excellent okay if you could just like explain to the people around you what the hell it is throughout the talk also the talk I'd be great but you know even though I'm known for these games I am a level designer that's that's kind of my background that's that's where I'm from I worked as a level designer on a bunch of games 3d platformers 2d brawlers I worked as a graphic designer a concept designer I've done most jobs at some point if there was someone who was willing to pay my bills I'd make a video game for them I did the full level design on Thomas was alone I oversaw the level design on volume had a really talented team of guys on that and then subsurface circular which is the game we're gonna be talking about today I was the sole level design on which was kind of cool but also practical because it's a very small game so the game subsurface

circular this game it exists because we had a gap the polite politically good version of this is we found ourselves with an exciting six month gap in our schedule thanks our colleagues in the publishing world um somewhere for you um and we have this we have this gap and we we had to use it for something so Rd made sense as something to do I've just realized by the way I didn't tell any of you to turn off your phones to fill in your evaluation forms or to sit in the middle of the room which is a thing apparent I don't know if that's to make it look like there's more of you in the audience below but it's there so yeah it was a way of it was a bit of time we had in order to do some R and D there was a real problem that I foresaw in our games which was that they were very story LEDs that were known for being story led people like the characters and the worlds we built but the story was just kind of something that happened to you while you played the game you know you did a platformer or you did a bit of

stealth exploration and Andy Serkis told you you story over the video and that I figured that would work for maybe two games maybe three games and then people were gonna realize I'm kind of a hack and I kind of wanted to move beyond now and do something more interactive and more interesting the trick of course would be to keep it small we had well we've wasted a month just thinking of all the stuff I just said so we're now down to about five months and we need to make something that can be made in that time with the money we have which isn't an infinite resource we have like quite a small budget we can put in this I'm actually convinced the people I work with to go for this so we have to get this game maze we decide on subsurface circular which we stealth launched it's a narrative game it's a text adventure game about a detective who's a robot and I'm not going to tell you anything else may show you the trailer because we literally stealth launched it so the audience didn't know anything more about this game than the trailers this a good way of introducing it I might talk a little bit while it's going on but

please pay attention to how the gameplay works it's kind of a dialogue system that's what we're going to be talking about throughout the whole of this talk so keep an eye on that but let me play this trailer for you quickly [Music] a base [Music]

[Music] and that's the game with amazing bass apparently and I was a great experience um so you don't see any level design there brought to a great start um so first of all you know please do bear with me we'll get to I promise the key thing here is that why you have used some level design approaches in the way that we approach dialog systems so you've got a lot of things that you saw kind of being played with there the core gameplay is built around these lists of options that come up your standard kind of everything from Mass Effect to horizon to any Western RPG you've played dialog options you can throw into conversation in order to move things forward to make choices we we design

dialogue around linear paths so that standard thing of branching you off giving you some options coming back to a hub that you've seen in a lot of games where you'll kind of be able to investigate a subject or whatever we tried not to do that though because we had something that was far more interesting and actually opened up our opportunity to do level design which was these focus points so in the bottom there you can see I've actually unlocked one on that screenshot and I've got a bank of them in inventory down here focus points are topics or subjects that you can interject into conversation either to answer a question to ask a question you can use themes and subjects you've picked up on to have a conversation you can carry them with you you can lose them you can gain them and once we added that to the game we had something interesting going on but we had a problem we want to make a to our dialogue tree game and you just saw it

it's pretty straightforward you know it's mainly just clicking on these options and we knew we didn't have an art budget we didn't have much time or money and we knew that the writing would hopefully be quite good because that's something that we're known for but we also were a little bit worried they will be boring it would be something that didn't really attach with an audience that the beads kind of just a long slog there's a real concern there and how did we fix that using existing because it kind of relied on that skills we already had on the team to actually solve that problem we like I said we couldn't spend much money we can bring in too many other people and finally with interactive fiction there's a niche audience there's a specific audience who plays a lot of interactive fiction who have a good time with those games but we wanted to reach beyond now our previous games had found kind of not mainstream audiences but broader audiences so we knew it was important that we went back to those players and gave them something that they would hopefully enjoy and that

they wouldn't be put off by because they'd not played a game like this before what would we do well we came to a solution this isn't my level design this is from half-life it's very good just looks cool and it's a great level as well I realized I was a level designer so I realized that actually there were these kind of skills that I already had in me this is a key turning point in the movie adaptation of this slideshow that we'll be using I realize the powers within me all along it's like the arrogant thing to say in front of her in poor people I realized that actually a lot of the kind of the instincts I had as a level designer would apply to storytelling I realized first of all that I came up with a story that explained why the protagonist was asking a lot of questions I'd be onto something detective fiction immediately jumped out and there's a reason that so much detective fiction is about well building your protagonist is looking for answers looking for information there's very few professions where you can walk into a room and just start asking people

how their day's going and not get kicked out detectives are a great way of doing that realizing that kind of thing would help realizing I could have puzzles and challenges as a result of that immediately I sighed seeing game play rather than just a chat in a video game and I realized that there were so many links between good writing and good design causality predictability of outcomes goal-setting the kind of things that make good levels that make us feel as players that the game is treating us fairly are also sort of rules of writing there in all the writing books as well there's a lot of storytelling level design overlap and this was a night I'm going to actually hold in a slide while you take he got it awesome let's carry on I have to rush later because of you I'm gonna hold you responsible um so that's all very nice that's a nice thing to say and to kind of point out but but how do we actually practically do that how do we apply a level design to conversation well first of all is

those focus points which remain the coolest idea that we came up with for the game focus points are inventory they're an object you can collect and with that single choice suddenly you have level design you can collect them you can lose them and that can be jarring that can be kind of a moment of fear of what you've had some stuff and then the games taken away that's something to use very carefully you can combine them in that classic adventure game sense where you take object a and object B put them together and get something else that feels like deduction that feels like working something out that's a cool thing that a detective would do and can give us some gameplay opportunities you can open conversation doors with them when you do we do this a lot in subsurface argue Li a little bit too much but the idea of you know a character who needs direction to a specific building you can go go and go get that information bring it back and give it that's a door that's a key in a door that the information is the key the person who needs it is a door suddenly you got quests design you can do stuff with them and of course we can do

exploration and world building we can we can have focus points that unlock interesting doors over here to a bit of exposition we can have focus points that are in themselves a rewarding outcome of exploration that you can kind of find a weird conversation track and get some value from that again all level design stuff all stuff that you would use and think about if you were build trying to build compelling levels but there's more objectives as I said we've got quest giving that's easy we also do aesthetic objectives so we can say hey you should go over or it would be cool if you worked out this and then ten minutes later just give you a click on objective saying you worked out this know game design involved there but it feels nice we can also do clever or stuff where we're actually tracking your actions and and how many interactions you've had that kind of thing locking in you know your progress towards a task which again there builds up that sense of progress so pretory progression and level multiple characters you saw there two

characters just talking in one-on-one conversation that's how subsurface is but because every train carriage has multiple characters in it you're constantly moving between different one-on-one conversations which become rooms and become separate spaces that give the player a sense of traversal because you might be talking to this character and then you might realize you need to go over there to talk to that character and then you come back with that information to that character players talk about this in verbs like go over there come back they are a robot sat on a train there is no movement or traversal taking place but by having just different characters you can have one-on-one conversations with we create the sense of traversal of movement and that's a incredibly powerful and useful signposting we didn't really do our dialogue flows in a way that kind of makes it hard for it to get lost as a player but we did again find an opportunity there to use that storytelling we have a literal Chekhov's gun in the game a gun is introduced at the start and in a good story if you introduce a gun in the first scene you

need to make sure someone's shot it by the end we absolutely hold true to that that storytelling analogy and we also allow for experimental play we have characters in the world who serve no story purpose whatsoever but you can have fun conversations with my favorite is the robot who's into Hamilton and you can kind of sing songs with that's quite fun he's going to Hamilton but you want him to be so you sing at him and he ignores you it's a great moment which has actually no bearing on the game story whatsoever but it's still something like a sense screenshots of almost every day because people find it and enjoy it and again that's the sort of stuff that regular dialogue systems don't do because they're not thinking it through as a level design and that's exciting to me no you're gonna recognize this slide applying level design to conversation so technically what are some some interesting parts of that process well first of all making the full cast robotic was super useful realizing that we could kind of cover up any flaws in our writing by having characters who are

robots was so useful characters can talk a bit stilted they can have sudden emotional shift we don't have too much of that in subsurface except for one big puzzle which we talked about but anywhere where our robots behave in a non human-like way we have a canonical reason why that's the case it's super useful and there's no shame in having those kind of narrative and world based excuses for the shortcomings of the of the experience you're creating um and of course crucially we have this I didn't know you mean audience moves embarrassing I do name drop you here hey mo very talented coder who came in and built this really nice fast node based system this is how we build a level 4 subsurface circular is with these really cool very very zoomed out dialogue node systems way more visibility than the tools most people use for this kind of work we have a lot less features than they do but we basically stripped out or just didn't bother to put it in the

first place features that weren't useful in getting us writing quickly so let's talk about that process how do you do this how do you design dialog in this way well first of all you do what a writer does you pull out some post-it notes or a record board and you work out your act structure and all of that kind of story stuff that you do for any kind of writing where you work out the big beats of the narrative how that game world is going to flow but ultimately you're not thinking about interaction you're thinking about story progression the next step is where you come into the interactive points so we would go to a flow chart so that flow chart then ends up similar to this on the right here it's kind of cropped off but you can see blue is focus points red is objectives and you can see there that we're kind of thinking through the process of different conversations each conversation is numbered that's how I'm breaking it up and thinking it through but this is the trajectory in just one level how we're moving between different characters and talking to them about different subjects it's all very

structured it needed to be because we have so much writing on the next step so the next step was an initial draft of the script so we write it like a movie so just a very linear two characters get talking super useful we can work out tone voice characterization we can do all of the good writer stuff where you where you really arrived a character that the audience is going to care about without having to worry too much about the logic and the game design II bits which we then did next in the node editor where we would then copy and paste that linear draft in and you remember from the previous slide the branching I would then add all of that branching and add all that variety to it it's interesting in kind of future experiments we're taking with this tech we actually cut out the linear script staged all together because I actually think that forces me or or pushes me towards writing very linearly when I should be thinking in that branching way from day one that was a confidence thing and kind of a learning process for me so the the

initial draft step is now not how we do this makes it harder but the it comes out better the other thing that points out that's really interesting from a level design point of view there's no blocking stage involved in anything I just described it's you just write and you've got logical gameplay from day one there's no white boxing because there's no art pass it's just writing so you're just trying to your redrafting essentially in the same way as you would with any kind of piece of writing ten maybe fifteen times but you're just working into the same script which means it's fast and it means there's no dependencies or art in the game you saw in the trailer we've got really nice art but it's kind of devoid in our production pipeline from the level design it's something that kind of exists separately and that's really useful that means we don't we're not held up by they're not held up by us we can just kind of I can just be writing essentially from day one and I'm producing work that goes into the final game I wanted to give a quick example of how this works so sequence five spoilers

but yeah sequence five is the most popular level in the game I think it's a useful one to use to kind of showcase how this thinking works it's very hard when you're just looking at the stream of text just to see what the level design is so I did this quick little diagram I literally did it yesterday saying like the slide and the last diagram was bad so the sequence starts with you entering the room at the top there by that red key you have a very simple conversation with a side character the red he represents a specific piece of information about the situation's going on in the game and they try and keep it spoiler free you then have to other characters get into the train carriage those those those two rooms underneath the room with the key in those two characters you have a bit of flavor time with you can kind of lie to them you can be honest it doesn't really have a massive impact on the story going forward from that point but it's there and it's a nice bit of kind of framing for what's about to come next then we

get into the meat and potatoes of this which is those two characters are emotionally linked so making one of those characters happy or sad or angry also makes the other character happy or sad or angry which opens up different conversational paths with that second character and as I put it up there and because everyone always reads the bullet point the second it goes up on the screen you're ahead of me which is that's every 90s FPS water level raising or lowering puzzle that was a really great opportunity to use something very specific from these old games I liked in a dialogue situation and make it feel fresh so you're manipulating the emotions that's opening doors you can see on the right kind of a kind of a clumsy depiction of that of different rooms with different keys and you're kind of finding new focus points and new information by going down different channels and then right at the end that long one pointing off to the right there you use that little piece of information you learn from the first side character right at the start of the scene which

feels very detective Lee to kind of remember that there was a brick by the entrance as you came in and that's that breaks the case and you realize what's going on that unlocks the end of the level which you then move into so it's a progression through a dungeon but it's also good detective fiction writing hopefully it's it's all of that logic I'm talking about all of those shared principles in the worlds of writing good genre fiction and hopefully designing good levels tied together and then you die right spoilers and you don't die you saw a day so where they did not fit because this this is sounding very clever so far it's all I've gone wrong some ways right and it absolutely did um first of all conversation flows are making a cul-de-sac or a blockage or a wall or a dead end in a conversation doesn't really work for us or it we had we had trouble with it it didn't feel fun it didn't feel rewarding it felt like the game had broken you know you didn't

want to hear the same line of dialogue repeating over and over again because the character wouldn't let you past that means that the game is a bit more on Rails than you would normally do with a traditional level design it feels a little bit more structured it's forcing you in the right direction at all times that's a limitation of this model similarly as a result of that I relied a little bit too much on arbitrary puzzles anyone who's played the game through you know immediately what I'm talking about there's a couple of puzzles in there there are riddles where you'll be on a really interesting detective case and then a character will go well there are two knights and one of them can only tell the truth and one of them only lie it's not that one but it's it's that kind of stuff and it trips people up and irritates people and I'm forever reading forum posts about how awful that particular puzzle is and they're right they're all absolutely right it's a limitation because making something as linear as we did the detective metaphor sometimes didn't work in every situation

and that definitely kind of locked us in to some different paths and finally because speaking of different polls because we were focusing so much on making good gameplay and good design that felt good to work through we did let down the audience on those yawn or expectation which is branching narratives a lot of interactive fiction you can be kind of you can choose different paths you can choose different actions which take you in different directions our game is actually pretty linear you know the story doesn't there are different endings but it's all very very straightforward because we were focusing on making the design and the dungeons funny because dungeons tend to only have one exit so we kind of that was another limitation of the design approach that kind of it wasn't it wasn't terrible but it was definitely something that kind of disappointed people about the game and also it's worth pointing out with any talk how specific this is this worked because um we would have text-based we lean very heavily on the ambiguities of the written word we absolutely don't

have to record vo we I would have been a nightmare and to get all the different vo in that would track different choices you've made and still sound appropriate would have been terrible we leaned very heavily on the limitations of our presentation there's lots of reasons this wouldn't necessarily work in everything this is the boring slide reception it reviewed really well a couple of people thought that there was no game design right it's not very interesting slide but yeah it went down really well it was it was well received which is great so where can we take this next whip we've said publicly we're playing with this idea because it was it did resonate and we think there's more opportunities there so a few of those ideas multiple characters in conversation at once our game is about one-on-one conversations subsurface circular what happens if that's a foam in Aaron Sorkin's style five people in a corridor talking over each other is that really annoying to the player or does that feel kinetic and energetic and can

we can we play with those blur those lines of like where where where conversation ends with one character and starts with another that could be interesting pairing decision-making with more audio-visual output as I said we kept the art and the design kind of separate throughout the process can we do more can we have music that reacts to what you're doing can we have visuals they react to what you're doing we get more animation in there there's lots of interesting places we can hook stuff audio visually onto these outcomes visualization narrative space making that diagram I realized how interesting it might be to a player to have that kind of awareness of the conversation they're having it's an interesting one to play with because it might be that that's too much information and actually makes the game feel kind of arbitrary or overly mechanical but there's also a possibility that tracking that information giving it to the player and saying to the player this is how you're moving through this dialogue possibility space even if we show it to them after they've completed the level say could be interesting that one's weird I don't know we'll get to that maybe some time

and allowing for more traditional branching around puzzles making it that we actually give the if' players what they want and let them have big story outcomes of their actions that's really just down to focus and time on my part writing more stuff not coming to GDC and just staying in my room writing stuff and then finally of course because this is a GDC talk procedural generation randomization spawning that we had some randomization that was really interesting I think the only thing that survived into subsurface is that the listener characters have different names each time you play it the original version was much more randomized and varied and as a result terrible which is why when we went much more linear down the road but I do think there is stuff there is there is quote-unquote filler dialogue there are conversations that could happen that don't need to be the the core dialogue

of the game the equivalent of getting we've talked about extras earlier they could have a gate extras to throw in a line of dialogue to establish a scene why couldn't that be handled by something that's just throwing in some random options or built systemically so it's reacting to what the players doing or what the world's doing there are opportunities there which we can explore and a final slide so if anyone has any questions get up I think I may have time for one potential for level design other fields I want to I want to broaden this out because I do think there's an opportunity here I hope to take level design principles like the ones I've talked about and apply them in other areas of game development because you're probably not all working on dialogue based pretentious robot detective novels so kind of we can probably broaden it a bit more we already see navigation and exploration built into progressive system into progression systems I like dying shadow of war there's some interesting branching the starting go long feels like a level feels like moving through a space which is interesting of course question mission systems we're already seeing great

innovation in in this area probably there's room for more I really don't like I'm a big triple-a fan that's most of what I play because I spend all day making indie games I kind of want to relax with a with a great open-world triple-a game and it's weird to me that the map isn't used more that we don't find more opportunities to do level design and game design at the map screen level because those games are about these maps world's shortly there's some stuff I keep hearing the mic sorry surely there's some stuff that will kind that we can kind of do with that well that screen as well and kind of either tell interesting stories on that screen or allow progression or movement on that screen that's interesting and I wanted to point out specifically horizon I loved horizon for a lot of reasons but I would put the enemy design in horizon up with a lot of the stuff I'm talking about here those bosses all feel like levels they're just levels that happened to be trying to kill me over and over again and and that's cool as I'm playing those levels it's not just finding the sensitive spots there's a causality and a progression to those

attacks which feels really good as a player it feels like something I can learn and get better at and I can master and that feels like that's a great opportunity but that game takes advantage of cool I've managed to do this with I think two minutes to spare is that right yes I'm going a thumbs-up so probably time for one question thank you very much for your time I really appreciate one question yes hello Oh remember to do your evaluation things as well hello hey in the middle of some circus circular there's one conversation with a character that brings up its half joke half floor where they start reciting the dialogue from Thomas was alone yes where does that I mean like the quickest level design lens is that it's like putting an old version of a game into a new version like Wolfenstein does how do you think something like that could be built on using the philosophies you just talked about in the last 30 minutes that's really interesting yeah it's a joke I mean that's that's the main reason it's there it's kind of though so you yeah

there's a in the world there's a priest and during the writing process when I was thinking okay well what's this priest a worid like give him a specific human religion is like oh well Thomas was alone he's about the emergence of gods let's make him a believer in Thomas was alone and then he recites Thomas was alone to you if you ask him to and he will stop if you tell him to and he'll eventually stop because I got bored of copying and pasting all of Thomas was alone dialogue eventually goes that's enough um yeah I think I think it's an easter egg right now it literally is the Wolfenstein thing of just hiding a Wolfenstein level in Wolfenstein but yeah I think the idea of returning to stuff of having impact using players knowledge of previous games in that current circumstance having a situation where you have a more meaningful thing so there's one of the things that's in there for like the hardcore Thomas was alone fans is one of the names you can give your character of the game is Claire who's a very important character that Thomas was alone fanbase and if you play as that character as Claire and then there's kind of this soft implication that maybe you're related to

that character from Thomas and that kind of fits and tracks narrative Lea so I think there is that kind of deeper way of doing in terms of like level design that's interesting there's probably other more exciting ways of doing that as well I'm also bringing data across and having that kind of Mass Effect style game to gain continuity would be interesting I think I'm probably out of time this as I am I am I'm very excited to tell you about in 20 minutes from now a brilliant talk that I've made a mental note of called an architectural approach to level design creating an art theory for game worlds and so can you I'm pretty sure I read that wrong I'm but it genuinely I was chatting to him last night it's really cool so dudu stick around and watch that they'll be really neat I think there's play minute break now if anyone wants to chat I'm gonna be around here and I'd love to talk to you about video games and stuff thanks a lot of your time you