Building Game Mechanics to Elevate Narrative in Oxenfree

[Music] hello everybody my name is Sean krinkle I'm the co-founder of a game studio called night school were down in Los Angeles and we started in 2014 like the middle of 2014 and we've put out two games the first one is a game called oxen free which is a sort of like a supernatural coming-of-age adventure and then we also did a game in the middle of the year last year based on mr. robot the TV show and that's sort of like a paranoid texting thriller somebody likes a game so this is a picture of me and my co-founder Adam Hines who is also my cousin and is also sitting right there and is mortified yes that little sweet potato wrote all of oxen free so when Adam and I were little kids we just always cared about story and cared about games and that was something that

we you know as we started the studio that was really the thing that we thought we could focus in on and make something really special and so for us the story focus games that we make are all about kind of letting players push and pull at narrative in ways that they haven't seen in games before and so today I want to talk about how our team has been approaching that just specifically with with oxen-free so we'll go back to 2014 we were there crammed in a little 600 square foot box in Glendale California and there are obviously no shortage of amazing dev teams who are doing really great storytelling in games and so we knew we would have to do something really different to stand out because again I'm sure after this room is making extraordinary story games so the thing that we started to really come back to over and over again that we were observing was this idea that most games really kind of treat gameplay and story

in these very siloed moments right so you would have a mechanics driven encounter the you move to some storytelling that storytelling is either something that tells you what you're going to do next or is there for emotional impact that you go back to the mechanical to the mechanics driven encounter and so even in the best stuff on the market that that works well but we thought as a small team something that we could try to do is make a game where the mechanics only serve to push the story and so every decision that we made in the game then would focus on that and that was really sort of the foundation for for the studio and for oxen-free so you know in the in the very beginning we only had a really basic idea of what oxen-free was going to end up being you know we had some pretty specific references for what we wanted the feel to be but we didn't know what the story would turn out to be or the mechanics you know I mentioned it before but it was like supernatural elements we thought were really cool coming-of-age we thought was really cool and if you look at all these

different movies and books and shows that are you know referenced up here they all have this really underlying vibe that is frankly pretty well mined territory in movies and other media but you haven't seen a lot of it in games and so we kind of keyed into that and when this could be a really interesting space to play in for a game so oxen freeze basic story came together really quickly we you know it's about this girl named Alex and the game takes place and on an overnight party where Alex and her stepbrother Jonas go off and at right after the first act they end up unwittingly opening this crazy ghostly rift and they then have to kind of uncover the mystery of the island and what they've just unleashed and we also unpack a fair amount of trauma in Alex's life rooted in issues with her her older brother Michael who had passed away so usually and I'm sure a lot of folks in

this room would think maybe like we kind of got ahead of ourselves because even for us as a team you know we'd historically like to find a set of mechanics and then build the game around that set of mechanics and build the narrative to support those mechanics we were a little kind of nervous about that like we we were falling in love with this story and maybe a little bit too early but we because we were loving where the story was headed we decided to kind of keep pushing and let the make it that story drive all of our mechanics purpose our choices so I want to take a step back for a second and talk about the the what versus the why and that's really you know for night school that's a guiding principle of all of the games that we do is having a clear understanding and delineation of the what and the why so what is the player doing and then why is the player doing that because that hopefully there's a meaningful connection between those two things and I'm sure going to butcher this slightly but you know in film the

the what is the plot and that is you know the sequence of events that take place over the course of the film and then the story is the why because it tells us why the characters are on the journey they're on and how that series of events happens in games you know games are primarily a what medium because they're interactive and so the what is typically you know the set of mechanics and encounters and then the why still remains the story so I'm sure this isn't a new concept to anybody in this room but many games treat their what as a toy right you've got like running and jumping or aiming and firing or slinging or Katamari in whatever that is and these are all these really fully developed toys that are fun to interact with at a very primal level because games really excel at the what right like that's so much of the purpose of

why we all love them but then a toy alone no matter how fun it is can get boring kind of quickly if there's no feeling of progression or escalation so that's where games traditionally introduce things like you know challenge or changes to how the toy works or adding new variables to impede your ability than to use that toy so you know in games story is usually just a catalyst than to the real game of what you're doing and so we were finding ourselves in this dilemma of how could we make a story focus game with no overt challenge be mechanically satisfying like what mechanic would best represent the story that we were developing and how could we escalate that over the course of the game and we kept coming back to communication like being that central piece so if Alex's story is why you play oxen-free then communication and how we communicate just as humans it

would become our what so kind of quickly just breaking down like what was what does Alex is why and what does Alex is what in the game so her why before these kids open is crazy hell gate is is basically just like overcoming awkwardness you know the typical kind of teen stuff that you would expect of a senior in high school and allowing you to define her as a character or kind of role play and be yourself at you know as Alex and then after the gate opens up you're forging bonds with friends and your new stepbrother but in a very kind of mortal way instead of the sort of team vs way that happens before the gate opens you're coming to terms with these deep-seated issues regarding your brother's death and you're uncovering the mystery of the islands inhabitants so that you can bring peace to the island but then you know if you break that down into the what it's actually super basic it's essentially just like

exploring and communicating so instead of escalating challenges to what you are doing we would escalate the stakes of why you do it through story so we set a very core rule set for movement navigation communication but we would then tweak elements of the story over and over and over again to sort of escalate it and give that feeling of challenge so every creative decision we made then was intended to smooth out story interactivity and where that ended up putting us was you know we kind of looked at it as three different buckets for our main kind of creative decision-making process exploration which is you know pretty straightforward communication and then the visual design that needs to house those prior decisions so from an exploration front you know how does how can we make exploration more conducive to storytelling so the first decision we made as a movement has to be contiguous through the whole game like we never wanted there to be a

cutscene so there's never a cutscene in the game and it was crucial to us to say we're never going to take control away from the player at any time and always they have the ability to you know have some form of input and move and that was a big key thing that became a massive had a huge ripple ripple effect and big design challenge post from a writing perspective and a design perspective the other piece of explorations that we thought would be you know important for us was to make it more of a big screen kind of Leanback experience and not a point and click game like you can play it that way but we wanted to make sure that the foundation of the game was still something that you could play with with a controller and feel really kind of natural and fluid so more importantly though probably most importantly is really the kind of bucket of communication right so if we're going to make communication the nucleus of this game the act of choosing dialogue for us needed to feel like an ability and that

was a big distinction that we wanted to make up front where dialogue is not a set of menu choices that have right or wrong or good or bad or morally grey or whatever it really needed to feel like an ability and an extension of you and so that meant that you know in the writing process Adam as he was working on it needed to think through a wide array of options that I'll kind of go into in a bit so another kind of quick aside I had never heard of this term a pre-mortem before that you guys might know this term but I did not know it at all and I was looking up how not to freak out before a talk because I knew I'd be up here slightly freaking out which is basically happening and I found this TED talk and this guy was talking about you could stop a stressful moment before happens by doing a pre-mortem and a pre-mortem is it's like a business concept where at the beginning of a project you look at the end goal and the

product that you're going to build and you play out in your head every possible scenario that could go totally wrong like just be super imaginative and think of the worst case of everything and you work oops you work your way backwards then and now you've ideally sort of covered off on a majority of these scenarios and you're prepared for them before they come and it calms you down and that's the type of thing you could apply to yourself in your everyday existence and so what what I thought was really interesting while looking that up just for my own non freaking out reasons was that oxen Stockton freeze writing process was essentially a big pre-mortem because the way Adam approached writing oxen free you know as often as possible the player needed to have dialogue choices that they would naturally want so again it's not about good or bad or light or dark it's just like what would they naturally want to say and so they and and our goal internally even as we were play testing it was to make sure

that you know one of the big things that we did in all of our play tests was go was there ever a moment you were left wanting to say something did you feel like Alex didn't have you know cued up in the chamber a line that you would want to say and that went that we we went back and did a lot of rewrites based on elements of that so Adam then you know had to read players minds basically in advance and that is why the script for this four or five hour game is eighteen hundred pages long sorry Adam so another big thing for us you know when we think about communication as a mechanic and as an ability was to ensure that Alex would never talk unless the player makes her this is something that you know we thought we could put another kind of big stamp on where we would go you know for other games you have these moments where the player character even maybe the player character gets to choose a line but then immediately thereafter the NPC says something and then there's kind of a ping-pong back and forth and you wait for a discussion to end so that

you can then jump in and say something we said no we we want it to be every time she talks it's because you make her talk right so there's never a moment in the game where Alex will say something unless you decide to initiate that and that was really crucial in making it feel more like an ability and less like a set of menu options right so that also had a pretty insane ripple effect in terms of how the game was designed because one now the players can be super just weird and mute and run through it and not say a word and there's an achievement for that so I don't know if anybody ever got that achievement but you can play the game totally silent and then the other thing was that you know like in real life if you've got multiple characters around you and you don't say something the other NPCs have to be able to pick up that conversation and keep keep it moving right so it was it was really our goal to make it feel that fluid where if the player decides to just kind of lay in the cut and not say

anything they can because the other characters will continue talking so and then even you know when it comes down to the supernatural abilities in the game this is something that we started to let get the best of us very early on like we initially were like we got to have a ghost gun or we got to have some sort of spectra three we literally had something called the spectro 3000 for like a week they're so stupid I'm really glad we didn't keep it and we killed that and we killed all these other mechanics that we were starting to think through and prototypes that didn't have to do with communication like that was if that's the core of the game we wanted the way you interact with ghosts to also be rooted in communication and so that's kind of where the radio came from like the the radio in the game is this analog creepy semi familiar but also really weird mechanic that allows Alex to talk to the ghost and also a lot of the ghosts to talk to her and the other

thing that started to feel really special or interesting about that from a player character perspective was that now they were wielding what would be a weapon and something else but they were the only one that could kind of open gates talk to talk to the ghost and not be trapped in the sort of tropes of Alex's the chosen one it's more like she's just got a radio in her pocket so you know all these design ideas that needed to manifest through a simple visual design and every decision that we made on how the game looks and feels was intended to you know serve those design choices that I just walked through so we had early on we decided we wanted a really far back camera to let you see the player character to let you see a few NPCs at once to let you see where you're exploring and kind of searching for different objects of interest and also to encompass all the dialogue bubbles that come up and so that was really something that I think before we even landed on a lot of where the story was

going to go we knew we wanted the camera to be this far back to feel like essentially whenever you're looking at the game it's a shot like a very defined shot yet at the same time we didn't want it to be locked in you know very scripted cameras and another thing that we sort of came upon pretty early in the prototyping phase was our talk bubbles and how those talk bubbles function kept going back to like if in other games you are wielding a sword or a gun or whatever and these are these things that let you interact with the world how can we make dialogue feel that way and those talk bubbles are positioned the way that they are because we didn't want players to have to look up or down or look at sort of subtitles that are on the lower left upper corner or whatever we wanted them to feel is connected to Alex as possible so that while you're playing and deciding what to say your eye is not moving around the screen your eyes looking at the character firmly the whole time and if you decide to look away that's only because you're exploring it's it's more of a choice for the player rather than having to kind of

dart around so we really wanted those talk levels to be again like an extension of Alex oh so another so another kind of result of that then became now we have these talk bubbles we've got these characters we've got this really zoomed camera well how fast should she be moving around because early on we had her just sprinting and jumping on stuff and she's having these tearjerker conversations about her dead brother and that felt super weird and kind of mixed up and then we're like well should there be a run button and they were like oh what is a run button have to do in this game and we we tried I don't even know we spent months on these things that now feel to us we kind of forget them but we spent months trying to sort this out and where we ended up landing was whenever alex is talking she slows to either kind of a jog or almost like a pretty brisk walk and then when she's not talking she speeds up and she can navigate that way and we hopefully that was something that's invisible to players but it also let them cover ground when that would be

the interaction that they'd want to do but observe and talk and not be you know having these crazy conversations while running through a forest so you know a lot of these these early decisions then ended up starting to push back where that a certain point the mechanics and visual choices that we made did push back on the story and there I'll give you just a couple of examples but yeah this is a little bit further into the development of the game we started to go there's some key moments in the game that now that these mechanics are truly solidified let's tweak bits of the story for it so the first one which is has been I don't know sort of controversial even in our own team is this very deliberately paced first act so the first act of the game about 3045 minutes is you're walking and talking and hanging out with people there's no ghost there's no crazy over-the-top supernatural stuff happening it is

essentially a microcosm of people's like typical senior year in high school so you've got things like you know you're you've got you've got these heightened versions of you're meeting somebody that you really want to impress but there's other people there who know some dirt about you or you know that your friend has this massive crush so are you going to choose to help them or just like totally expose them and make them embarrassed and so you know for us when the reason why we made this decision was that we wanted people to get really familiar with Alex as a character and the movement and the core relationships with these friends before the ghost hits the fan because then when said hits the fan it just feels way crazier and more over-the-top because you're really familiar with the character and sort of the systems at play in the game and then this one I'll try it it's not too spoilery actually won't be spoilery I'll speak in code the the conclusion of the game became the sum of all of our

communication mechanics so there's a point where like after alpha actually after beta I don't know it was bad we were we were late in the game and we were trying to sort out the conclusion and we had these elaborate puzzles and we had we were like again kind of ham fisting new mechanics and at the end and we went this just doesn't fit it like even intellectually where people should be at the end of this game should be more about Alex's and their emotional journey and they shouldn't be learning how to like fill water and things and move blocks around and do all these things that have nothing to do with it and so we ended up going okay with the mechanics that they've already learned let's let them either jettison these ghostly creatures back to the strange place from where they came as like a single sort of organism or you can kind of negotiate and treat them as individuals and bring elements of them out with by peaceful means but it's all done through the radio and things that you learned earlier in the game not

through introducing new mechanics so all these decisions came together to make a game that our team is super proud of I mean we're beyond grateful to have this community of players now who have connected with Alex both inside but also outside of the game like it totally blows us away every time we see any of this stuff and we you know I think we feel that we're pretty sure that the community is connected with her because they can feel that when we were making it we were always more worried about why Alex would do something why she would make a decision why she would put herself in harm's way as opposed to anything else like that was the most important thing that was the guiding principle for the whole game and we feel like it's really sort of paid off and making something pretty special this slide makes me laugh but I'm looking at it this is I'm you guys are probably seen this kind of classic quote from Pixar founder and Disney CCO John Lasseter where he talks about kind of the

interplay between art and technology right and so for for those guys the art challenges the technology and then the technology inspires the art and for us we've kind of like morphed and mutated that kind of basic idea where for us we want to continue to approach game-making through this lens of story inspiring our mechanics but then we will build mechanics that empower players to tell their own stories so I hope this talk is giving you some interesting idea to explore as well and thank [Applause] we have Q&A time I don't know how long I've been up here sweet how do we do that I can't see just hurdle questions there we go house okay my name is oh

they're the most important click adventure game designer developer indie I'm very interested in learning about the like the prototyping playtesting early stages because this game when I played it select the the voice acting and all that was a very strong part and I'm curious how did you do that before like in early stages of the development so it was pretty funny we would record scratch audio in our bathroom at the office and we would come up with these really just ridiculous small scenarios none of which made it into the game and Adam would write these scripts that would be like okay here is a challenge to overcome and here's a lot of branching options and let's test out basically all those systems that I was just talking through and so we we did that for a while like we did not do any casting or any of the real you know solid solidified writing until we had gone through that prototyping phase but early on Bryant who's also here who is

our lead engineer was working on a tool that was intended to be a very visual simple design tool that ideally any designer or writer has not hyper-technical can get into and use it's a visual kind of node based things so that you could even play something out without dropping it into a full scene we to be perfectly honest it all came in way too hot like we were halfway through the game and the like or some of the core tools are still getting built the story was changing for a long time so I'd like to say that we in the first three months had this like yes here it is moment but we were at alpha still like crapping our pants so it was but yeah I mean for us we were kind of doing two or three things at once there's a lot of art tests happening that we're not taking into account a lot of the dialogue and there were a lot of like script tests happening based on the tools that the bryant was building and then we were just let people play and that was pretty much it thank you sure alright um since most games kind of take control away from the player lock

the camera etc to force the player to view the story did you guys have issues with playtesters walking away from conversations and missing out on parts of the story or ordered the delivery of certain voice lines that kind of took away from their experience all the time like yeah the early the earliest versions of the game we wanted to let you go anywhere at any time and never better be able to backtrack or wherever you want have a lot of conversations be location agnostic and we ended up having to kind of hone that in and I think for our next stuff we'd still like to find ways to improve more of that and let important conversations sort of happen anywhere but yeah the biggest challenges were like how long should a scene be how long should a chunk of dialogue be because if a character is moving if a player is moving too quickly from one Waypoint to another they're going to trigger the next conversation too early or are they going run along and then there's just a

long dead stretch of space or are they going to go backwards and not be able to talk about anything and so it is all credit goes to Adam and his maniacal writing process for finding ways to fill in and kind of shave off the edges of that but there was never like a magic bullet for it it was just a lot of play testing and finding where people went and how to guide them and how long scene should be okay thank you sure so awesome game the the timing I think is like really crucial to the like the dialogue mechanics in oxen-free like how long the options damn screen or how long the conversation pauses while the system is waiting to see if the character is going to reply or was there any science that went into choosing those numbers or you guys sort of feel it out and watch play tester that was another just duct tape and a prayer thing it we early on we did want a science and a consistent thing for it and it's something that you know responds wise to the game some people

really love exactly how timed and other people are kind of pissed off about it but ultimately most of those lines and how the interrupts work sometimes you cut somebody off right in the middle of the line sometimes you they say their whole line was all just hand tweaked basically because it's like maybe a line has some really crucial information that you know an NPC might be saying something that you need to hear so we're going to let that whole line play but if it's more just a feel thing as often as possible we wanted you to just cut people off no matter what so that would be the like perfect world version but like half the lines are not that way because they're just for subjective reasons quick follow-up question did you ever measure that like cutting off other characters and did that ever feed back into the relationships between the characters not the cutting off no but thank you we're talking that idea please do thank you did you systemically deal with interrupting conversations or where they custom every time when Alex chose to speak or not it sorry can you say it

again so other characters are speaking Alex respond in the middle cuts people off yes do you have to systemic Lee deal with then resuming or how to deal with all that a lot yes so again crazy writer Adam down there there are there's we as often as possible we'd like the character the NPC's or Alex to be able to pick up the conversation so if we if you cut somebody off in the middle of any line we don't want it to just like awkwardly jump back into the conversation so we there's a lot of lines in the game hundreds of lines where they'll be like okay back to what we were talking about or you know things like that so yes there's definitely a system for for all of that in place thank you thank you hi my name is Molly I'm an artist so I have a lot of like art questions for you but I'll keep it to just a mechanics question the radio idea is really interesting to me and

that mechanic is like fascinating how did you guys come up with that like what inspired it so early on it actually became like an offshoot of another idea early on we want to have a tape recorder and a tape recorder we're going to let you record a bunch of stuff in the world and run around that and then the Brian still wants it and he's bummed out that it's not in the game and it got totally crazy and we went no like look what are the elements that we really liked about it and back to that communication thing we thought you know what is it what is something that's familiar and radio is familiar and what is it it's creepy so we thought about you know radios in Silent Hill were a really big piece of that that feeling of the static and that feeling of like I'm getting a very guttural piece of feedback from the game but it's also not like direct you don't know what it means all the time and so we thought it could be this really kind of cool coded thing so for us early on the radio we kind of looked at it as aesthetically like the the Silent Hill radio and then mechanically we wanted to

be like the ocarina in ocarina of time where you can you know have sequences of things that you can plug in like a puzzle or tunes or things like that and so it kind of became both of those essentially we wanted it to be some big piece was that we wanted players to have some form of like analog expression while they're playing and you know instead of just choosing dialogue choices so being able to bust that radio out whenever you want and pick up little secrets and listen to other stations just felt pretty cool so it's kind of all those things but it was it took a long time to get to it thank you I was just told I'm so sorry sir I was just told that was the last question but I'll talk to you out there okay thank you guys so much [Applause] you