Building Games Around Humor: Lessons from The Haunted Island, a Frog Detective Game

[Music] hello everybody it's very nice to see my name is Grace Brooks na I made a game called grace Brooks presents the haunted island a from detective game which I assume all of you have played and loved because it made 17 million dollars really so my talk today is about how to build games around humor and write jokes that aren't super generic so I'm the creative lead of a studio called web club definitely a real company and we're in the process of making another front detective game at the moment sorry let's get started with some disclaimers so let's have a disclaimer I can't make your jokes funny I can give you tools and ideas for how to structure your jokes but I'm not a magician I can't

turn you into comedic genius some people just aren't funny that's fine the other tiny disclaimer with this one is that this whole kit self is kind of full of infer and isn't exactly funny like I'm trying to give you as much information as possible so apologies in advance for the lack of jerks if you were here for a stand-up routine I'm really sorry there's probably like a weird stand-up awesome where but this is a serious talk so no laughing what did I just say okay so I'm gonna give you a bit of an overview of what I'll be talking about today I'll start with an introduction to myself giving some context to this talk and sort of attempting to prove that I know what I'm talking about which is up for debate I'll also be going to interview John you're a suburban and how it's an interesting way to onboard your players and signal that your game doesn't necessarily fit in the traditional mode of your chosen genre after that we'll be

talking about how to write characters from yourself to make them more authentic and how to make that funny without resorting to offensive stereotypes and lastly just some general tips and tricks about how jokes can be structured I kind of 101 of them comedy writing for your video games alrighty sorry a little bit on me my name is grace as we have established I guess my mercy boner in-game would be the haunted island which is IGF nominated please clap nerdy and we're in the process of making the invisible wizard which is the second game in the front detective series sorry I guess mostly I'll be talking about the process of writing the front detective games and giving specific examples from those games it's also worth mentioning that I've made a pretty big selection of small-scale diorama games which have a bit of a mix of environmental and physical humor and comedy writings and I learned a lot from those games about how to do visual comedy using an animation

and environmental pacing yep so a little bit more background which a lot a lot of people know I did do stand-up comedy for two years before I got into games I was living in a small town so like the comedy scene wasn't huge but I was getting booked I guess a couple of times a month and my comedy style wasn't like a traditional sort of comedy it was absurd and deadpan kind of like my sense of humor but what I learnt doing that is that those jokes and that style of comedy is just as funny as traditionally structured jokes so I'll be referencing my experience with stand up a little bit as well I put a background on the haunted island for those of you who don't know it will hear it maybe even about five months with my team so me

Thomas Baker who did the programming and tools and Dan my job in the game was to do the assets and the narrative from the dialog so Dan was a was the composer and I basically gave him the pitch of like hey I want to make Pro but it's a frog can you do music for that and he was like hell yeah that's my impression of Dan sorry the focus of the haunted island was the dialogue and the humor and every interaction that we had in that game had to have some sort of purpose behind it and the biggest purpose of that was just to make people laugh because I feel very strongly about games that are just silly and therefore making you feel good because there's a lot of horribleness in the world the game actually did pretty well considering that it was a very low-budget game made in five months like the whole team was just me and Tom basically I did all the marketing and stuff so the the reception was really positive from both the players and the

critics I'll be going into a little bit of why I think that is a bit later I will mention however that some people were pretty confused by it because it's not really a traditional game in any sense it's maybe more traditional than my previous games but yeah it's not it's not what you expect when you hear detective game that response didn't really matter too much to me because there's like a myriad of games out there for every type of person and I don't think that's that many games like the haunted island so it's fine I'll also be showing you just to give you some background on the style of game and the turn that I was using for the for the game I'll show you the intro sequence so let's have a look [Music]

[Applause] [Music] okay so that kinda Segway it's kind of nicely into the first topic which is genre subversion so let's get started

sorry I guess beginning with this you should really think about how most John Roos that are commonly used for games they have a lot of cultural baggage and it can be good and bad but when you find a genre that you want to subvert with the right amount and effort and work into subverting it you can create something amazing and honors unexpected so as an example for from prop detective I took a genre that has a lot of existing expectations so detective games often have moody noir tones like grizzly bodies and chase sequences and like cigarettes and all that and not all of that appeals to me personally personally as a developer and I wasn't really seeing the genre subverted in any of the games that I was playing in the way that I would do it so I kind of found an avenue there that hadn't really been explored to its fullest extent and for me it's almost always funny to have a genre that fits the setting of your game but not the tone and for me that was

like an island with a kind of fake mystery on it everything about the setting had to be translatable to Noir but I also knew that the tone was gonna be very light-hearted and gentle and beginning this process can actually be pretty weird but it's best to start for it by finding your inspirations in the genre that you're looking at whether that's games or movies or TV shows so get a feel of the genre so that you know what you're working with I played a bunch of la noir when I was first getting into games and it was one of those first games where I could see the potential for humor in the genre which kind of doesn't sound exactly what you think of when you think of la noir but there's like this bit in that game where the character will pick up clues and just kind of like wiggle it around in their hands and to me that's like a really funny and that was a like an inspiration for so in the in front detective there's a magnifying glass that you can just pick up and put to your face and it doesn't actually do anything it just what's the

image but it's just part of that role-playing thing and it's super goofy cuz everyone knows that you're not playing from detective to actually be the front detective but it's just an additional role-playing thing and what I found is that even though it's entirely useless a bunch of people who are using it just to be like yes is this a clue and literally nothing is clear and so when you're doing your honor a specific research you've got to find what makes that genre what it is so those elements that you find that you decide okay this is what this genre is those are the elements that you'll keep and use in your game and for me the most recognizable part of the detective genre is the music and the camera angles so I wanted to take those elements as they were and put them in the game so every talk sequence in the haunted island has camera angles that are copied from TV shows I had to do like a bunch of research into like countless cinematography I just don't care about singin at Agra free but I wanted it to be like as close to that genre as I

could and that kind of amps up the comedy because it's like taking taking the visuals of it super seriously even though it's not a very serious game and another element of the detective genre that I liked was that a lot of detective shows are episodic so with a new mystery every episode think poor I think um Columbo Sherlock all those so for that I gave the game a theme song at the start and a teaser for the next episode at the end spoilers and basically this step is all about making sure that your audience knows what your subvert so the players need to recognize what the genre should be so that they know when you're playing with it so this is where it gets a little bit tricky yeah it is a bit harder to do but when you start to actually subvert the genre that's when it starts become funny the best way that I found to do this is to decide which parts of the genre that you don't like so in relation to the haunted

Island one of my biggest pet peeves of the genre is when detectives don't care about their jobs or like super rude but they're amazing itself in cases like I just want the main character and everything to be super lovely sorry in the game the detective is like super loves being a detective but isn't necessarily awesome at it so the technically friendly to everyone and apologetic when they when they're suspicious of someone and so already with that you have a few more you have a more pleasant character but there's that silliness there and how the detective interacts with the suspects and maybe more prominent change was that I made it so that nothing dramatic ever happens in the game so doesn't know like murder or grand conspiracies yet but I want to have the story to have an air of mystery without anything sinister actually happening I also liked the idea of nobody in the island being particularly helpful or like every sort of

interaction not really meaning anything apart from just like I need a magnet if you've got one so when you subvert genre make sure that the elements that you serve aren't the essential elements because if I think I had you know if I had sacrificed the music or the cinematography the genre wouldn't be recognizable anymore so it's going back to that step in making sure that the genre you have is being represented properly even if it's not being represented fully one thing that I want to bring forward into the development of the invisible wizard is managing expectations a little bit better so I presented the haunted island as a detective game even though like it is a little bit tongue-in-cheek but the problem was there wasn't actually any detective work and in traditional detective work so people that were picking up the Haunted Island to be a detective what kind of disappointed it didn't like that doesn't bother me too much but it was cited in some negative reviews which as we know it can impact the success of

your game so with the next game I'm planning to add more of those traditional Invesco invest good investigative yeah elements of detective games into the sequel to appease that crowd a little bit more I think this was like a pretty big lesson for me and while I wouldn't normally care too much I think actually leaning into that a little bit more will improve their games the other thing is like if you really don't want to include these certain mechanics that are in other games of yours onra you can forego them but you have to make sure that you signal it in your store page or in your trailers so that the people that aren't into it will stay away or don't because I'm not good dad all right so I'm gonna move on to how I write my characters which is probably the thing that I thought the most about while doing this because I hadn't actually written a game fully before so it was like how do I make collect thirteen people that are not just me every time cuz I yeah I find

it almost impossible to get myself into the headspace of someone that isn't me or someone that is really far removed from my own lived experience and I struggled with this a lot because I would 3d model characters and try to develop their personality from their appearance and it wasn't working because all my characters are just like smiling at him so it wasn't like a whole bunch of personality just in their visuals so what I did is I developed a system for writing unique and believable characters to help with this so when you're writing characters especially characters that are funny it's really good to draw from what you know because otherwise you can fall into the trap of making fun of people and traits otherwise it can lean into more offensive stuff so if you're writing comedy characters that aren't of your demographic you need to consult with people from that server the graphic don't make assumptions about how people are because that can turn into stereotyped and offensive characters especially when you're writing comedy so

if you really want to make a game with a diverse cast especially a comedy game leave some room in your budget for hiring consultants and that kind of goes for any narrative game but I feel like it is quite important for comedy because comedy can offend like pretty easily yeah so going into the more specifics of how to write those believable characters I find the best way is to base them on myself so for the haunted Island I took a look I took a look at the part of my selves the part of myself that skims sorry the parts of my personality that stem from mental illness and I thought about how to translate those traits onto a character so writing from what you know is always going to be the most productive way to make characters feel real so for example for parts of my personality that I'm anxious I'm impatient I can be pretty shy and I can also be quite stubborn and they're not nice treats and they're not attractive treats but you can write from them and

when I've written down a bunch of personality traits I assign them each to a character and then I give each character something that they want or something that they like and I'll go into detail in this and more in the next slides but I think giving them a goal gives them a purpose so for example you could have like a super rude character that really wants a boiled egg and then there's like a character there that's a character and once you have a trait and a purpose or something that the character once you can challenge your character and that's where the dialogue comes in so in the games I use the detective that's a kind of straight man but not like a literal straight man just like a comedy straight man yeah the detective relies on logic to solve these problems so none of the characters in my game are particularly logical so writing a dialogue between an odd character and a stable character creates some tension and it can be really funny as long as it comes from your own lived experience as we have gone over don't write characters who are

mentally ill unless you have experienced that or you have hired a consultant don't be messy I will not tell you again so I'll go into specifics about the characters that I wrote and I'll start with Martin because Martin has probably the most dialogue in the game and Martin is a really anxious character who just thought like really really wants to feel safe so what I did with Martin is I looked at what Martin was experiencing and I embodied that character while I was writing him and I tried to figure out what I would do in his situation so Martin's afraid of a ghost and what I would do in that situation is I would like and Google it I'd be like is there a ghost and then every every positive piece of information that lined up to what I was thing I'd be like yeah there is a ghost so in the game Martin has all these ghost books and he goes through and reads and he's like yeah I haven't seen a ghost yet so they must be a ghost because that's exactly what I would do

yes so I have we call it illness anxiety disorder a hypochondriac but every time I find a rare illness I go on Google and I'm like yeah I have a headache yeah that's Martin and when I embody a character I have to think about how to challenge those sorts as well so the detective once again is acting as this straight man that comes in and challenges and sex each thought that the character has has and that creates that tension and that dialogue and that character could fight back it could dig deeper could get offended or it could start to agree with the detective and all of those paths are really interesting and could be quite funny going on to lo mo is very shy I'm not this the most shy person but I can be quiet socially anxious and go into my shell so with Mara I picked an animation that really represents their closed off and shy nature so mo is kind of like

looking down not really like looking at the detective in the eye I think mo is the character most in the game that embodies the idea of physical comedy because it's pretty funny when you've talked to mo and they just immediately close themselves off even though they were just happily standing there and comedians use body language quite often to change the mood of a set and physical comedy can absolutely set the tone of a character without any dialogue so you're immediately going into this idea of how this character is going to be and Marie was also good to write because I sort of became a matchmaker for Marie if you haven't played the game but it has a little bit of a crush on one of the other characters so your job is just to go and like see what dance style that character likes the best and come back and tell me and then my practices the dance it's very good I'm a genius but when you write a character that wants that make a little bit embarrassing or a little bit

vulnerable writing the dialogue can be super fun and actually enjoyable to do in that black comedy kind of writes itself alright so let's get into some tips and tricks these are sort of general bits of advice that don't really neatly fit in to the other topics the first one I'll go into is pacing because often people that are new to writing comedy or new to doing comedy really struggle with pay pacing because they don't give their audience time to breathe after each joke and your players need to laugh and it is quite difficult to get right so we weren't using voice acting in our game it's all text-based so I was reliant on the text box timings to get the depth of jokes across and one trick that I learned was just to use ellipses to put beats into your writing often when let's players are doing it you can see it really clearly if people are streaming the game because they're reading out the dialogue and you can see where they're pausing to laugh or pausing to let a joke settle in and it's

also when people are reading they're doing the same thing so good stand-ups kind of do that as well so after they pause after making a joke to be like hey this is a joke you should totally laugh now and it can also be good for adding awkwardness or sort of like ending a non sequitur but here I have to use ellipses you can manufacture this pacing with text box animations or character facial expressions or even camera angles I think an example of a game that does this really well is breath of the wild because when you're talking to people they aren't speaking to you but there's all these different character animations that really sell that comedy yeah and you can use these techniques to change the pace as well so look at games that you find funny and you can just copy their pacing if you're feeling unsure the other big advice I'd give with pacing is if you're struggling with it just take a break and leave the dialog for awhile I do this pretty often when I'm writing because I'm never sure whether a joke is actually landing because I've been looking at it for too long so leave the dialog for a while and

maybe come back an hour later and play the game and then you'll read it with a new like with a set of fresh eyes and see whether you know the pacing is off or actually the jerk is totally fine and you were just like in your head too much [Music] structure okay so when making short games I'm of the opinion that you should try to stick to one style of humor if you can just one that works for you because when you're doing games adding a whole bunch of different styles of humor can be a little bit confusing because the player might not know whether so whether this is a joke or whether this is like just dialogue and what I did was with my sense of humor like I made sure to signal it during the marketing and during the promo work and the people that weren't into that style of humor could stay away because they can see it they can see it outlined before they they buy the game and I think part of the reason that frog detective was successful was because I spent a lot of time signalling the humor in the marketing and the trailers so be very

clear about what you're doing and for bigger games you can have a mix of different humor styles I could talk about that is Zach Johnson's Judy so you talk about West's of loathing because they obviously made a very big game and they could kind of jam pack jokes into it oh yeah so another good tip is structuring jokes that fit with your game style I don't know if game style is a thing but we'll just go with it so my game is exploration also my structured jokes that could have a payoff regardless of the order that that the player sees it in so for example there is a little note on the nerdist bulbs on the Nerdist board in the haunted island that says where are my sunglasses please give them back and then you can find a tiny picture of me with sunglasses on because I have stolen and that joke is probably only funny to me but it's fine and I guess yeah more linear games can play with

structure a lot more freely so I think of not in the woods I think that's a great example of jokes having a payoff much later on because it is a larger game you can pace out those jokes but with smaller games like you do want to kind of make it more punchy and you don't need callbacks as much I think and so my last tip and trick is play testing I'm really sorry so everyone's favorite part of development is playtesting so yeah the one thing that I learned from watching really really terrible comedians is that a lot of people don't test their jokes out before they go onstage so treat your dialogue like you're an actually good stand-up comedian and make sure that you workshop it test it out with your players and making you know making things that are funny takes work and not every joke cool and and that's absolutely fine with the Haunted Island

I had to go back a lot and change a lot of jokes because not every joke works on every person but I wanted to have as high as success rate as possible so I was trying to get jokes in there that were more universally funny which can be a little bit difficult one tip I'd give you with playtesting is that some people are really uncomfortable being very cool when they're playing comedy games so they don't really want to laugh out loud so when you're playtesting try and sit in a position where you can gauge this facial expression because I've had silent play chests where the purse I can't see their face and they're just playing the game for an hour and then they're like that was good thank you and I've no idea if they actually liked it but at the same time I've had silent play chests where the person I can see their face and they're smiling or they're quietly giggling and you know that that's good so if you're a first play tester doesn't get a joke that's absolutely fine just try it on another person and if there's still no reaction

try and restructure that joke or change the pacing of it and then try it on another person if it's still not working just scrap it because it's it's not worth - it's not worth it to disrupt that flow Wow yeah once again really sorry about this picture it like it's supposed to be Seinfeld so that Seinfeld doesn't have a really iconic body so it just looks like a weird anyway alright it's well done highlight of GDC thanks for coming oh yeah you can oh you've got to go up to the microphones to ask questions that is something that I forgot to mention

I'll go first hello so you were talking about I guess the length of game something I'm noticing with my game right now is that people are just hammering through dialogue a lot do you have any tips on how to engage people with the dialogue when you have a narrative heavy game I think that is tricky and I think we struggled with a little bit especially with younger players who don't want to go through a bunch of like kind of jokes that are too old for them something that I've been thinking about with this next game is actually to have two different dialogue options so one for people that don't really like reading and just want all the facts with a little bit of joke or one dialogue option for everyone that just wants to like go through the game completely so signaling that at the side of the game it is like extra work because you basically have to go through and redo the scripts twice but I think for people

that don't like reading games like why you make playing a narrative game if it was very strange um but yeah some people don't like reading and I don't know if I can save those people it was fine yeah hey um this is gonna come across as kind of a cell phone but good I think a lot of us feel at least I think I hope it's more than just me that sometimes humor is kind of an intrinsic thing and you're funny or you're not or your level of humor is set and for a lot of other things like drawing it's like okay you practice you get better so would you say that you can practice humor and jokes and get better at it and what are some ways to think about doing that if you think that that's a good thing to do yeah I think like some of it is intrinsic but there's also this thing of like some people are quite funny but they don't have the confidence to be funny so just own everything you say even if it's not even funny like the stuff I say isn't funny but if he pulls long enough people get uncomfortable when they laugh awesome thank you uh-huh so did the talk was

super interesting and provided that there's a lot of creative direction in building the humor of a game what good do you in the in the situation you had to grow and for instance look for writers to follow your creative direction like how you could it's two parts like first look for the best way of finding people that you think can fit into that kind of creative direction in humor and what like piece of advice good you giving in in the sense of guiding them in in a way of getting them closer to your humor kind of humor yeah it's difficult because I guess I've written the whole game myself but I think if basically in any situation where you are working with a narrative consultant or someone that's doing the dialogue you should just ask them to do a sample like make sure that they what they know like have like they know how to write things

that are funny yeah I guess I I don't know if I can answer that question fully because it is it is just me sometimes you can just tell if you're talking to someone with a your sense of humor is the same as theirs say that's yeah can you think hi you mentioned that when writing a lot of your believable characters you focus on aspects of yourself that could be considered negative traits I was just wondering how you avoid falling on to particularly self deprecation and jokes of that sort yeah yeah it is it can be difficult I think there's there's a delicate balance between making a character who is a really negative part of yourself but I think the biggest thing for me is like having a character who is talking to them be gentle and be kind so it's never like haha you believe that you have a weird disorder haha it's like oh like you know this doesn't make

any sense but when with the detective I'm sort of lunging that character but I'm also doing it in a very kind way to make sure that it's like the whole game is kind of just about making the characters feel okay about themselves so when you have this negative personality traits I think for me it's easier because I know that the character that they're talking to isn't going to be harsh to them about it yeah I guess I'm not a super self-deprecating person either I think it's just like believe in yourself thank you alright so we're about to wrap up so this will be the last question here but we do have a wrap up room if you want to use it later hi on the last topic of testing your dialogue I was just curious so do you only test after it's in the game or are you ever just testing like written lines and if you do do you have like a different approach for that so I write all my dialogue in the game

itself so every time I press play the dialogue will be in there I think the best way that I've found to test it is just to ask Tom who's the programmer and UX designer to just come over and like read at 3:00 and see whether he laughs yeah I think when you're testing it doesn't matter if the game is complete or not just I have enough dialogue in there that it kind of makes sense I think it is harder to do to do tests when you're when you're just looking at a script rather than having like something visual to look at it's kind of harder for your brain to be like oh that's yeah that's funny that's a joke yeah so try and get it in there if you can thank you yes we can go to the wrap-up room which is in 2018 I think if anyone wants to hang out otherwise thank you for coming [Music] [Applause]