Designing Great Interactive Narratives on Mobile

Thank you very much. Welcome to designing great interactive narrative on mobile with these brilliant people. Ironically, I do need to ask you first of all to turn off the sound on your mobile phones and just make sure that we're not interrupting them in their flow. Questions, we'll have a little bit of time at the end, but first of all, I'm going to ask them to introduce themselves and to brag about a bit of work that they're really proud of. Starting with Cass. You said you're going to ask that question and I totally didn't prepare. Hey guys, I'm Cass. I'm a director of story at Episode. For the people that don't know, that's an interactive narrative platform where we both create interactive stories for free-to-play mobile games, but we also open our platform for writers to create their own content. Um I think I'm actually probably the most proud of is that we are an open platform and I joined the team right when that was being discussed and kind of help figure out how to make it open and how to make sure that everything that we created was something that we could put

live to anyone who wanted to play with it. So, I'm relatively proud to have worked on something that isn't closed. It's open to anyone who wants to make games and I know personally about a dozen women around the world who now make a full-time living making games on Episode, which is cool. Pretty proud of that. Awesome. Hi guys, I'm Marisa. I work for Big Fish Games in a small studio called Three Minute Games and I manage the Lifeline brand. So, I think the thing that I'm most proud of is the fact that Lifeline has been a jumping off platform for several authors. We started with a very small number and we've now expanded and so similar to what Cass was saying is, you know, it's really nice to be able to help people who have an idea and have the capabilities, have the tools and the platform to be able to get out there and do that. So, that's what I'm excited about. Hi, I'm Jon Ingold. I'm the narrative director of Inkle and one of the two co-founders of it. I guess the thing

we're most proud of is the fact that 6 years ago we started a company to make interactive fiction and we're still doing it successfully with even more people than we originally started with. But artistically I'm most proud of probably writing the Sorcery series which I was the sole writer on apart from a little bit of help from a guy called Graham Robertson on part four. But I also co-wrote a lot of 80 Days and was the narrative director on that which is the one that everyone's heard of. One thing we had a discussion about when we were planning for this talk is what we actually mean by interactive narrative because there's so many different ways that it can be used in gaming. We actually came up with stories where players get to make an active decision about what happens next but that's still a really wide field. So starting with Jon at the end, could you just explain what it means and how you use it in your game specifically? So like an interactive narrative for me has got to be more than the sum

of its parts. It's not enough to be something which has interaction within it. I've seen the phrase used to describe stories with videos in and I don't see that as fitting under the mandate of interactive narrative because it's not good enough. And I've seen interactive games where you do get to make little choices but the narrative is so under the control of the author, it's so within that authorial scope that as a player I don't actually feel like I'm really there for any great reason and that to me fails as well. So I think when we're trying to make interactive narrative, what we're really trying to do is make a playable story which has a huge amount of player freedom within it. And so I tend to be looking for stories that allow the player to make discoveries and to have a sense of discovery and a sense of ownership over what they discover within that story. That couples with a sense of responsibility. So, ideally a player playing one of our games is usually thinking, "What have I done?" and worrying that they might have got it

wrong. That slight sense of stress is incredibly important to me. I think my job as a game designer is the same as my job as a writer, which is to manage tension in the audience. So, for me, interactive narrative is a way to generate tension directly in the head of an audience based on the worry that what they've done is not the right thing to have done and that the consequences of what they've done are going to be things that they will regret later. Every writer is a very gentle tease or a very gentle torturer, and interactive narrative is a way to achieve that. Uh Maurice? Uh yeah, I think, you know, the keyword is the active part of the definition. Um you know, reading used to be something that was more of a passive activity, and then uh you had choose-your-own-adventure books come on the scene, and then all of a sudden you were a part of the action. Um and I definitely think that uh with Lifeline, we kind of went we took something that was familiar to everybody, a text message, a

conversation with your friend, and uh we ended up taking that and making a story out of just having a conversation. And your active participation in that is through messaging that protagonist and convincing them to either go this way or to do that thing. Um hopefully not killing them, but um you know, that does put a little punch to it. Um and we're kind of expanding that now, which is really interesting to kind of see because now we have stories where you are the main character in the story. Um there's several ways that you can kind of do that, but it's just giving the players making them players and not readers, and that's really um I think a big part of it. Yeah, I think an interesting thing when I think about interactive to something that John mentioned is how much an interactive do they need to be able to control the ending of the story or control the direction it goes in. I don't actually have an answer versus feel like they are interacting in the experience that they're having. Um I

think about things like Sleep No More, the interactive theater production in New York. And like is that interactive fiction? Um the VR uh a game that recently came out because they don't call it a game, Impossible Hours. Is that interactive fiction? Um how much do I feel like I am in control of what's happening and interacting with what's going on? Especially on mobile, I think we have a generation of new players right now who their life is defined by Snapchat and their life is defined by Instagram and their life is defined by really owning their persona and being the person that they want to be. They're less into following celebrities, they're more into being the celebrity. And so there's something really exciting about how games can allow people to do that and how interactive fiction especially can allow people to do that. And so thinking about as you guys both said with like taking action in it, I don't know in this room yet if we need to create full freedom, but we definitely need to Interactive fiction is creating a space where like I feel like I am in control in places I may not be in my actual life. I can try things I may be afraid to try in the real world. I can explore different outcomes and see the kind of

persona that I want to be and having a lot of agency in my experience um is I think what just makes interactive fiction very specific and very unique. And how do you kind of reach that point in your studios? What are your writers rooms set ups like? You know, what's what's the situation with writers and designers? Like John, I know you kind of do a bit of everything, but if you could all just tell me, you know, for the audience who may be haven't had a chance to work in that kind of scenario yet, just how you set it up as part of the studio. Well, shall I go first? Um for us it's been very much a process of scaling up over the last six years. Our first project, the writers room was just me and I was both writing it and designing the way that the writing would be done. So, all of the content that we generated at Inkle is done using our Ink scripting language, which is an open-source thing now. But, that was originally a very badly hacked-together Pearl script that I made at some point in the weekend in order to try and generate output that Joe, my co-founder, could get running in an app. And it was

a real piece of sticky tape and string programming. I shouldn't be allowed to program anything, really, but there was no one else to do it, so I did it. Um One of the joys of the company, though, has been the ability to expand that process out and to bring in new writers. So, we worked with Meg Jayanth on 80 Days, and she did a phenomenal job and really supercharged that game concept from something that we thought could be good to something that was genuinely sort of brilliant. And that was that was a real pleasure to be able to enable. But, in order to do that, we had to compartmentalize the problem. Interactive Interactive narrative is very complicated and very open and can go in 100 different directions in a different styles. So, when we approached 80 Days, we were able to do it because we'd just made a game called Sorcery 2, which had a full city that you could explore and kind of backtrack in and meet people and have episodic adventures within. And I remember saying to Meg at the time, um she said, "But, isn't the world quite big?" And I said, "Oh, we've managed a city. How much bigger can the world possibly be?" Um It turned out it

was quite a lot bigger, but uh it gave us a structure uh literally a format that we could write into. Like, this is a city. This is how you start a city. This is how you end a city. This is how you cause a change to happen within the player's statistics, whatever. And similarly for journeys, they had a slightly more complicated structure, but we could give her that as a template and say, "You don't need to worry about the technical stuff unless you feel like it. If you just want to write, you can just write. Here's the format. It will work. If you want to do something more technical" and she did um "then go This is how you can research that and produce more complex content." And we did the same thing again on Sorcery 4, where I hired Graham as I said he was a junior writer who'd never written any professional content before at all, but he was incredibly good at learning the patterns that Sorcery used which were very very weird and very ad hoc structures. Um, we're currently working on a game called Heaven's Vault which will eventually end up on mobile and is uh somewhat more ambitious interactive narrative again. And one of my biggest regrets on that project is that the way

that we author it is so incredibly complicated and has taken so many iterations to get right that I haven't been able to bring in any other writers cuz I keep changing my mind on how to write it. Which is to say I think the writers' room for Heaven's Vault 2 will be a phenomenally brilliant place that I'm really looking forward to getting to, but we have to get through the first version first. So from us it's it's really quite technical actually and it's really not very political. Um, mostly once we have a writer we just we just tell them to get on with it and be brilliant and edit it when it's not. Cass Mariesa, how is it for you guys? What's the kind of setup in your studios? Uh, pretty similar. Uh, it started very small for us as well. Uh, the original Lifeline was made by one author, uh, one game designer who also doubled as a producer, one artist and one programmer. And so it was just four people with a singular vision kind of sitting down and making that happen. Um, and then we started growing immediately after the success of that first game and now we added a few more authors and then the producers started working on our style guide. We have an

awesome narrative design team and then really internally we're just there to support the narratives and the authorship that goes on externally outside of our company. Uh, so we have the rule set that we write and uh we're able to take care of the technical stuff. Um, we'll chime in every now and again and it's often in regards to making it more of a game and pacing and things of that nature, but when it comes to the content we just give you kind of the platform or the tools, we give you the canvas and you make the painting, so to speak. Yeah, it's interesting for an episode I think we took a lot. It's a little bit different. We took a lot from the TV world. Um, a lot of our lead writers are are from uh, TV background. Um, we start before we go into a project, we ask a couple key questions. One of those is, uh, is this a world our players want to play in? So, when we're reading pitches, we're thinking about there are some pitches that if they're a TV show, they sound great. Uh, but I want to ask, especially on mobile, especially in free-to-play, do my players want to play in this world? Um,

a second question is, can we is the act of adding agency, uh, what makes it special? Uh, essentially, we don't have HBO's budget. We can't invest whatever they're doing, a hundred million dollars in an episode. Uh, so, what we do have is this ability to have interactivity. So, we will ask this question of like, hey, even though we don't have HBO's production budget, does interactivity make this feel great? Uh, the answer to both those questions obviously has to be yes. Um, at that moment we do do usually the lead, uh, creator, the showrunner, will start developing out an outline and a rough pitch, usually with a product manager to make sure that scope feels kind of appropriate. When we have those two things down, we'll move into a room. Uh, usually our rooms are about a week long, and they're focused very much on getting the core beats of the story down, um, and asking key questions of like, what are the key choices that we want people to be able to make in the story, and where are the moments that this is really going to matter? We aren't thinking too much about small branches at that moment. Um, usually in that room, there's the showrunner, uh, and

then there's a it's like supporting cast, usually a writer, and then someone who supports the showrunner's weaknesses. So, our showrunners can be people like me who's a little more game design background, but not narrative linear storytelling, in which case my co-person in the room would be someone with more of a linear TV background. Uh, if we have one of our more linear TV people show running it, I might come into the room to support. Um, and our rooms run for about a week. At the end of them, the hope is to get a very rough outline. Um, that said, usually we'll then dive deep on a vertical slice and do a single episode and just see how it's performing to understand if we want to invest more. And for people in the audience who might be kind of aspiring writers or looking to get into this kind of type of game work, what are some of the key skills or the things that people can be developing now that you're going to be looking for when they come knocking on your door for a job? Cass, if we start with you. I'm starting it. Should Marissa start it? You can start it then. Um, I'm looking for you writing now, especially with tools like Inkle with

Episode. It's so easy to go and make a thing. Like if anyone in this room is a writer and hasn't finished a thing, you can send one of us. Go finish it. It's not It's really not hard to write. Um, so the number one thing is just be writing. Um, be writing things that are interactive, that I make great choices. Um, think about how the choices feel. I want to see I'm actually more impressed if you write something short and like simple and easy to digest, but where every single beat feels like you really thought it out. You were like, I want them to feel this way because of this choice. I've thought about how big the choice space is, how much variety and diversity it includes. Um, so that's my biggest thing is like create works, create short works, create works where it feels like every beat is really highly crafted. Um, for Episode specifically, uh, because this can be a mildly controversial thing, I love the idea of freemium. I think freemium has done some things poorly in the past, but I'm so excited for how it can let people get

into the game, how we can think about how to empower tons of people to be able to engage in a medium that used to feel very, very niche. So if you're going to apply for Episode, you probably need to enjoy freemium. Don't worry, we will get to that discussion. I'm excited about it. Uh, I know Marissa has a lot to say on this, so I'm going to make John go first and then Okay, perfect. Um, yeah, we I mean, we don't receive very many pitches from writers or or rather we don't read very many pitches from writers. We get quite a few, but we tend to shut them down quite quickly because we're not in a position to offer that employment and I don't want to waste people's time. But the stuff that I have seen, I'd actually I think I'd echo a lot of what Cass said that firstly, you've got to finish stuff. I don't care about how good your ideas are if you can't finish something. Finishing is the key skill to being a writer cuz actually your first thing is going to be rubbish even if you're very very talented. Your fourth thing is going to be worth reading, but you won't get there if you keep working on your first thing. So, if that's who you are, then you're a hobbyist and you're not a professional.

And that's a horrible thing to say, but it's true and I know it's true because that's I'm 36 and in my 20s I did not have a successful writing job and that's why, right? Um Once you finish something and I think something short is a good idea if you want to be sending it to people who are busy and like don't have much time to get into your world your characters. We're not going to be very interested in reading a talking S fantasy world with a million people in it. Actually, what I'd like to see if I ever see a pitch is two people having a convincing conversation about a single topic because that's incredibly hard to write interactively. It's actually quite easy to write linearly. And when we see that kind of pitch, often what we see is a linear story with some arbitrary choices thrown in that don't make any difference, which is a fail. But it's a really clear, clean, easy to digest fail. So, I appreciate that when people send that to me cuz I can read it and go, "Yep, no, definitely failed. Won't give you a job. Thank you very much. That was a great interaction from my point of view." Not from yours. But uh it is a challenge which if you accept and win, then I think that can be

really convincing. Um So, when we hired Meg, uh I read one of her independent pieces of interactive writing. I think she has only done one and I read it and it very cleverly used the constraints of the system that it was written in. It's uh written in StoryNexus, which was built by Failbetter Games, who made Sunless Sea and Fallen London, which is uh their friends, um but it is not the most elegant platform to write for, shall we say. It is somewhat difficult to tame into the structure that you want to apply. And what she managed to do with her piece called Samsara was build something which very cleverly exploited the weaknesses of StoryNexus to make something which was simple, effective, but really easy to understand. Also, it was beautifully written, and that was why we hired her. That's why we gave her a writing sample. The writing sample we gave her was we said, "Go and take this thing called Inkle Writer," which was like a proto web version of Ink, which doesn't let you do anything apart from choices, and write us a short

scene. And she managed to use her words so well that reading that scene was a pleasure and full of delight. The pacing was all wrong, the lengths of the paragraphs was all wrong, but it had some jokes in it. It had some style to it. It had some voice to it. And that was enough to convince me that she could take on like what proved to be the most significant project that we'd done with absolutely no other proof that she could deliver something, or that she was going to be good at research, or any of these things, apart from the fact that I knew her and liked her. Um and similarly with Graham, when we hired Graham, he I met him on a writing course, actually, but he was producing a piece of work which was technically very intricate, and that was kind of his focus. But the writing was solid. But the way that it used the writing interactively was really interesting. And you don't often see that from new up-and-coming writers. a sense of command of the craft, of the technical craft. I'm quite a technical writer, so I really respected that. And I'm really glad we gave him the chance that we did on Sorcery 4. Um So, yeah, I think that's probably it. It It It's probably about pitching to the studio correctly, though. Inkle is

always going to be a slightly technical place, um because of the mindsets of Joe and I, um who founded it. We like doing cunning things with narrative. So, if you're pitching to us, we want to see some cunning things, but we're also very soulful people. So, we like human beings in our in our stories. And I think you have to find out who you're pitching to and research that company. Yeah, that's great advice. Um I would say the first thing you should do is go out and get something that enables you to write interactive fiction. Um grab the Inkle open source platform. Uh go to Episode and make something there or grab Twine. Um Twine is an open source free uh platform that a lot of users use and that jumps right off into my next point, which is find a community of people who are also doing it. Get to know people around you who are working in interactive fiction. Um one thing we learned very early on is that there's a bit of a barrier to entry for the the normal writer. Um not to say that in like a grouping way, but just somebody

who's used to writing a book or a short story or that format uh may not have a good time writing interactive fiction. There's a new rule set and so you have to be aware of that. And so just getting in there and as both of my fellow panelists have said, start writing something. Um so uh definitely be aware of also the fact that you're going to have to plan quite a bit if you want to write something good. You're going to have to make flowcharts. You're going to have to do a story map. You're going to have to do decision trees. You're going to have to keep track of multiple variables um and multiple endings often. Uh so definitely stay organized as best as you can. And if you don't have a way to do that yet, figure it out. And so that's a good another step as well. Um I definitely think you have to have a willingness to iterate. Uh it's something where you're not going to get it right the first time out the gate. I guarantee it. Um and having the humility to accept that

we're we're all have room for growth is definitely a great quality for somebody who's going to be a good writer, especially of interactive fiction. Um I think uh we're we're pretty similar in that it doesn't hurt to have a technical mind or to understand the technical side of how these games are built. Uh maybe go grab some and see if you can uh take them apart, you know, work backwards and figure out why things are happening the way they are and why they're working. Um and then make yourself the user. Uh think about it as a player and definitely you know, if you would rather Would you rather read a lot of exposition or would you rather learn that by doing and answering questions and being active in the story? You know, you can learn a lot when you stop and think about it as a player. So, play your stuff often. You are your own best play tester. Or get it in front of other people. That's the great thing about a Twine community is that, you know, you can put that stuff out there

and you can get feedback on it almost instantaneously. Um we've worked with an awesome resource, Emily Short. She has a great blog. Some of you are probably familiar with her in this room. Uh go check it out because she will hook you up with some of the tools that you need to do this and she'll also give you some of that sense of community. And then send it to episode. Send it to us. Send it to Inkle and, you know, we'll work with you and we'll give you feedback. We're not going to just leave you guys hanging. So, we'll let you know what is working, what may not be working and, you know, we can hopefully help you guys move to that next level. Something I realized is to jump in cuz it's also a We're talking about mobile very specifically. I think if you're looking at mobile very specifically, you should also be thinking and I know we chatted earlier so you guys are all on the same page about pace. Uh biggest problem I get in pitches is pace. A mobile is fast. You've got 5 seconds. So, how are you getting me hooked in seconds? A great exercise that I actually ask people about in my interviews, if you're ever in an interview with me, have a prepped answer, is how are you going to convert

something that was a TV show onto a mobile phone? If your answer is just like, "Oh, I'm going to cut some things down." That's wrong. So, think about that. You've got this tiny screen. What are you focusing on? What's important to the character? If you think you're going to tell the war scenes from Lord of the Rings on a mobile phone, I'm going to argue with you that you are wrong. You're probably not. So, how are you going to tell those scenes? What do they feel like on mobile? So, when you're thinking very specifically with our title on mobile, think about your pace and think about that device that you're building for and challenge yourself to create Take something that was on TV or something that was a movie and think about how you actively have to change that to make it feel like it's right for mobile. That'll give you a good set of things to work with. Yeah. That's definitely, you know, we want to we wanted to move onto the mobile part. So, I mean, you brought up some of some of the great kind of challenges that all mobile games have, which is pacing, the amount of time a player is going to spend, all the other sort of things that they could be doing on their mobile phone at that time. So, how do you guys change the way that you tell your stories or adapt your narratives so that

they do fit that kind of mobile world? And what are some of the things that maybe people haven't thought of when it comes to making great narrative for mobile? And who wants to go first? I'll I'll jump in cuz I was going to jump in on exactly that point anyway. Um I think one thing that people often don't realize is how incredibly tight the word limits are on mobile. Um I remember talking to Jonathan Myers, who was the I guess the the showrunner on the Game of Thrones mobile app, which was about 5 years old now, I think. And he said that his quests were built out of three beats. The first one was The first beat of the story was allowed I think this is right. I think it was 20 words. The second beat was allowed 15 words. And the final beat, if you got through it, was allowed 25. And that was the entire delivery system for the narrative. And he said every single one of his writers said, "This is stupid. We can't do this." And his reply would be, "Yeah. Yeah, you can." And it was very successful and it was very popular. Because you just have to find the rhythm and you have to find the kind of words and the kind of language that that fits that because that's your job as a writer

is is to write to spec and that's not really any different than writing to for the theater or writing for the screen which is completely different than writing for the theater even though it's still people talking. Um and I think that applies to all of our, you know, all of our products even though they're completely different shapes. Like a lot of my time on 80 Days was spent taking beautiful long paragraphs of prose that Meg had written and chopping them in three. Um because she tended to enjoy writing a little bit too much. And so I'd have to put them behind a choice and paste it out because the pacing is the most important part of that experience. And I think that really ties into that question of what the user could otherwise be doing on their phone. If you're trying to get someone to read something on a phone, you have you are competing directly with Twitter. Now the thing about Twitter is you can read everything on Twitter by accident. Now it's all awful and you don't want to read any of it, but that just is why you keep scrolling and looking in the desperate hope of finding something good. So it's actually not that bad to be better than Twitter. Everything I write is better than anything you read on Twitter with a very small percentage

error, right? That's statistically that's basically true. But I have to make sure that you actually read what I write. So if I'm writing things which are shorter than things on Twitter, then I'm probably going to win that argument. But then they introduced videos and images and that's a bit of a problem. So suddenly you have to upscale and and make sure that you're attractive and visual as well, whatever. But that sense that you are you are writing words in a hurricane of information to people who do read. Everybody reads all the time. We read a tremendous amount. The idea that we cannot read is ludicrous. It's utterly wrong. But people don't read much. They read a couple of words and then they move on and you have to be able to get people in a couple of words which is yeah, it's it's pretty hard. Well, and it's funny because Twitter's actually kind of a good tool um because if you put everything that you write into Twitter, does it fit or does it go over your character count? Also, would it be engaging? Would people actually want to interact with what you just said? That's actually a pretty good

litmus test for what you're doing when you're writing an interactive fiction. Um, also, you know, think about what people are doing when they're playing on the mobile devices. They're often doing it in interspersed throughout their day where, you know, they've got a few moments and then they can kind of sit down and they can uh do something different and get their mind off of the rigmarole of daily life. Um, we've done surveys and Google actually did their own survey um and shared with us uh that our findings were the same, which is a lot of people play apps that involve interactive fiction before bed. It's the prime time for that. And it's when you want to wind down. It's when you want to, you know, have a few moments to yourself, get a cup of tea or get a cup of, you know, whatever might help you get to bed a cup of warm milk and, you know, you just want to let go of everything that happened during the day. That's going to be a different story than if you want to amp somebody up and you want to make them feel, you

know, really intense. Uh so, definitely think about the application of where they're playing and how they're playing. Um, and also the thing about mobile is that immersion can be more difficult if you're playing things in large or small chunks rather than a large swath where you sit down and play the whole thing. Uh so, you know, it's one of those things where if you can do things to make the player suck them in, uh you don't know when they're going to come into your games, so you have to be thinking about that at any every point along the way. And so, you should be writing something that should could always pull them in and make them immersed. Um, one really good trick is to ask their name at the beginning of your game and then just like when you're actively listening, keep repeating it back to them. Hey, player name, how do you feel today? I'm going to respond to you directly. I'm immediately sucked in and I feel like it's my personal experience rather than an experience that some random Joe on the street might be having as well. Something that we've started doing a little related to the active listening,

we'll look at the first 50 lines in a story that we're about to put out and we'll literally just take one line and show it to a random person on our team and we'll say, "Is this interesting? Do you want to keep reading?" And they have no context at all. They have no idea what the story's about, who it is, why they're talking to who they're talking to. This idea being that a player may leave at any moment and then come back at the next moment and they should have a line on screen that makes them lean in. They may have even forgotten everything that happened before because, oh my gosh, how many things have you read online today that you like can't remember in this room right now. And so we want to make sure that that line tells a story by itself. We'd love to do this with every line in our stories. That's thousands. So we at least focus in that on those first like 50 to 100, we are showing them by themselves to people and just making sure that they all tell a story, they all ask a question and they all make me lean in and want to come back. Um so that's kind of just a major kind of thing with mobile to be thinking about is uh how engaged and how you get those people back. Um I think your point on when

they're playing is important to recognize with mobile. Um a premium versus a freemium out there playing for different reasons, when they're playing it, why they're playing it. Just make sure you know your audience really well, kind of own who your audience is. If you think your audience is everyone who likes interactive fiction, maybe that worked 20 years ago when we were a small niche community, it doesn't anymore. So think about who very specifically are you writing for and then don't worry about everybody else. Get your story out to that person and know who they are and know how to reach them and then kind of grow up from there. And how do you guys kind of deal with, cuz I know you know, they're some very different products, but you know, giving people the catharsis of an ending but then trying to make sure they still come back at some point. John, and it's different for you because your games have you know sort of specific endings. Um so yeah, how do you guys that are sort of dealing with episodic make sure that people are getting that satisfaction but then have a reason to keep going as well? My short answer is we don't. Uh we are we are episodic content. Uh we do want

to make sure, if you guys ever watched Lost, one of my criticisms of Lost is it made me feel like I asked more questions than I got answered. So we are thinking about in the crafting of every episode we think about what's my goal this episode, what are my stakes around that goal, and have I accomplished it by the end based on choices I've made throughout the episode. And so we ask those three questions with every episode we put out so that at the end of the episode you hopefully have a feeling of like, "Cool, I learned a thing. My choices changed something." Um but we also then like hyper focus on that cliffhanger and make sure you have a reason to want to come back. We do think about things seasonally. We generally do 12 to 15 episode seasons. We write a season expecting there not to be a sequel. Uh we don't do a lot of sequels. So we do write being like, "Cool, you're going to have some crazy ending. Maybe you've got six crazy endings. Maybe different characters feel differently about you." And if we have to write a sequel, that'll be a problem for another day because we know that if you got this far, we want you to feel great. That said, we've looked at our data. Microsoft did a thing about data. Most of your players are actually not going to finish your story. Uh so now your

goal is just to make them feel really great while they're playing your story and then hopefully at that moment that they're about to leave, get them into one of your other stories because they're just not going to finish. The percentage of people that finish our games is really sadly low. If you actually want those stats, I can probably send them to you privately. I wasn't allowed to project them. Uh but yeah, so just pretend that it's always a great ending and then get them into something else. Yeah, I think that point about people not finishing is really important actually and that's something that we see a lot in general across all video games. People don't finish them but it doesn't mean that people are unhappy. Most of the games that you will tell your friends, "Oh, I really love this game." That will be a game that you kind of mean to finish, but you haven't quite got back to yet. And you And with every passing day, you forget how it works, and you found something else, and you drift off. Which is kind of the same as reading books, actually. Certainly as a kid, I used to have a huge stack of books which were half-read, which I like, and I'm still reading now, but I haven't picked up in about 25 years, and I've no idea what they're

about. Um I mean, our games are very different than the freemium rolling season model, obviously. Uh but we still think about this stuff a lot. Um particularly at the end of 80 Days, we deliberately wanted to make a game that was replayable. So, at the very, very end, the first the last line of the of the uh of the story is pretty much Fogg saying, "Right, let's go again." Then the app resets. It puts you in London straight away. It flashes at you, and it asks you to just tap that London button, so that you've already started your second journey before you get a chance to close the app down. That's a very deliberate piece of fast flow. There isn't an option that says, "Do you want to start another game?" It just does that straight away. That said, we didn't expect anyone to actually replay it. What we thought people would do would be to finish 80 Days, restart their next story, see that they could restart the next story, see that the opening of the story was slightly more efficient than it had been the first time round because it was responding to the fact that this was their second journey, say, "Huh, that's really neat. This game is replayable." And then put it away and never play it

again. Because that's a great place to leave a player, not with the catharsis of a happy satisfied ending, not coming out and whooping and punching the air, but saying, "I'm in the middle of an interesting journey that I'm never going to go back to." That's kind of the best way to leave a player, just as it is for all other video games. Like, my favorite game in the world is Shadow of the Colossus. I am still in the middle of that game. I've been in the middle of it four times now. And I love it. It's great. And that is the happiest place. I don't necessarily need to see the ending of it at all. That said, for Sorcery, which was four connected games, the first three parts, we really needed to get people through to the end if we could because we wanted them to buy the sequel. So that was a really interesting challenge. The first game was very quick and pushed you forward. We got a lot of complaints that it was too short. The second game we made very long um to fight those complaints. A lot of people didn't finish it and that was really a problem even though we did put a lot of trapdoors in that said pretty much, "Are you sick of playing this game? Here's an ending so that you can play part three in a year's time." But a lot of people said, "No, that would be that would be cheating." And so they didn't do it which is a bit of a shame.

And then part four was an ending and that was a real pleasure because we just made it brutally difficult because we could because if you actually care, well, you're going to stick with it. And if you don't care, I don't really care where you stop playing Sorcery 4 at all. It doesn't matter to me in the slightest. Um perhaps that's why Sorcery 4 didn't sell as well as the others. I don't know. But but I think that's okay because probably when it came out we sold a lot of copies of Sorcery 1 and that's just how it goes. Yeah, um we're kind of in an interesting phase right now where Lifeline is uh historically been a premium product uh where you paid up front to get the whole game and uh we could kind of relax and not worry so much if you left the app, but we were running into the same thing that Inkle uh ran into which is how do you get those people back? Where are they and how do you communicate with them when you have a sequel because, you know, it takes time to develop these and so uh not having them around and not having an open line of communication to them is very difficult. Um so that decision kind of

was a really big catalyst for us to move into the world of freemium. Uh we're still learning quite a bit, but what we're really excited about is uh that we do get the chance to bring them back regularly and give them these small snippets of a story and so you might find a chapter that you like. You might find a story that doesn't really resonate with you. Um what we do know is that players are very, very focused on a specific genre. Um, so you want to have a nice kind of smattering of different genres available. Otherwise, uh, you know, players aren't going to have anything to do, essentially. Um, but you know, replayability can definitely keep them in a specific story that they like a lot. And, you know, everybody will kind of find their favorite and they might come back to it time and time again. It's like a security blanket. Uh, so we try to to make something that, uh, might resonate, even if it resonates

with a small group of people, then it's done its job. Um, we also, you know, kind of make it matter a little bit by putting some dead ends in there. Uh, you know, a lot of people come up to me and tell me how many times they've killed Taylor in the original Lifeline games. Um, you know, and it's kind of a fun little stat and a way to interact with it that's personal to you. It's your own personal journey. Um, so you know, we're just trying to take what we knew worked for a larger scale game and we're trying to derive it down into a smaller scale and, um, those story bumps I mentioned earlier are a huge, uh, tool that you can use to make sure that each one of your chapters is kind of hitting those points that you want it to. Um, and then we kind of do, uh, a cliffhanger bottleneck at the end of each of our chapters to to just give a little bit of a, uh, don't you want to come back next time and see what happens next? So, it doesn't hurt us if our players do play all the way to the end. We definitely wouldn't complain, I think, either on the freemium or the premium side, but, um, you know,

just try and have content that they can have choices in multiple genres that they can choose from if they don't resonate with something you're writing. Yeah, Cass, I know you sort of mentioned earlier that, you know, you like how accessible freemium makes things and I didn't know if you could talk a bit more about that and just how you guys sort of make the most of that area that you're working in. Yeah, um, I think freemium it obviously, again, I know especially in this audience it has like its little claws you have to be careful of. Um, but I've loved with freemium just the audience that we're able to reach. Um, I my 13-year-old niece now loves interactive fiction. She would never have loved interactive fiction if there weren't freemium games on the market. She wouldn't have known how to pick up a Rem Pi game. She wouldn't have known how to download something from the Steam store. Just cuz she didn't Her peers weren't in those areas. She didn't People weren't engaging that. That wasn't the niche she was in in school. So, something I've loved about freemium is the accessibility that it gives this industry. Um, it also does make a lot of money, which allows us to pay a lot of

writers and allows us to get a lot of great people support for the writing they're doing. We welcome writers who are working on side projects. That's awesome. Um, and so just the ability to keep feeding this industry, to keep exploring it, to keep understanding how we do it. I also think freemium right now is literally Freemium storytelling on mobile is at level one. Um, essentially it started taking off four years ago when Episode launched, and that was just V1. I'm excited to see what the next version is. I don't think it's necessarily exactly how it looks right now. Um, so this idea of like that you can reach a whole new audience with freemium, um, this idea that they can play kind of no handcuffs on. Uh, they can just come in and dabble and see what it's like. Um, and how successful it's taking off and how big it's making this industry, um, makes me pretty excited. Um, the major thing you do have to think about that I think a lot of us have probably gotten wrong. I'll own that we have it wrong occasionally as well. Is that freemium means you really have to make them want to pay for it. Uh, because they don't have to. This isn't

something where they're spending $10 and then giving you that $10 to essentially go along on this journey with you. They'll leave whenever they want to. Um, I think a lot of games uh, make that mistake where they're like, "Cool, we assume that you're enjoying this. Pay us $10. Pay us $10. Pay us $10 now. You need $10 to pass this thing. And so it's balancing that line of making sure that they are loving your story enough to want to pay for it and they don't feel bad if they don't pay for it. They still have a really great experience while you're allowing them to essentially have an even greater experience through paying. Um and that's a really tough line that I'm also just excited to see more people start bending and playing with and understanding. How can I essentially cuz all of us essentially are well not all of us, some of you are indie which is great. I love that you have the ability to release your games entirely for free, but many of us are in some way asking players for money. Be it money up front or money while playing. And so just continuing to explore how we do that in a way that feels good, that leaves players feeling satisfied, that leaves them really happy with our experiences. Um that's I guess

why I'm excited about freemium and I would love to see more interactive fiction people kind of dabbling in that space. Yeah. Jonathan, has that changed your mind? Are you No. Um It's okay. I'm Two sides of a coin. Yeah, I mean yeah, they're they're very much your games. They're Thank you. They're very much different I love your games, too. Um they're very much different camps, but I I mean the complaints that a premium developer has against freemium game design, you know, they're fairly straightforward, they're fairly obvious, they're not controversial. You are designing with the pay point in mind the whole time. It obviously limits the kind of experiences you can create, not in a you know, drastic way necessarily, but well I don't mean not necessarily in a good way or a bad way, but rather necessarily in a drastic way. Like there are certain games you just can't make in freemium because you can't get the monetization right, so you just don't make them. Well, okay, so it's a slightly limited space in that respect. Um I think the thing that I

the thing that I love about the premium market is also the thing that makes me incredibly jealous of the premium market, though. To run a freemium system, you need a lot of people paying a lot of attention to the monetization all the time. You need to be thinking about how to get your game in front of users all the time. It is a service industry, so you need to be providing an active service the whole time. The general story of indies who try freemium is that they fail utterly because they don't realize that they need to be doing this. They assume that they can release a game for free and the users will just find them, which of course they don't, and they get completely demolished by the industrial scale freemium developers who have the time, the effort, the people, and the resources to divert all of the attention towards their own products and keep people there. Remember, freemium is a system that relies on capturing people, which means they're not floating around in the marketplace for anyone else to collect. So, as an indie developer, freemium is essentially closed to us, and I don't mind that particularly, but I am jealous of the amount of money that it makes and the amount of writers that it allows you

to support and the amount of production value that it allows you to support. That would be a wonderful thing, but I know that it's it's a bit of a it's a bit of a poisoned chalice, or at least it's a it's a nice looking flower with a huge root system below it, right? Um And anyway, what we do is we create particular things that thrive on their uniqueness. The reason I think that 80 Days did well is partly, look, it's a great game, but also there is absolutely nothing There still isn't which is an 80 Days uh clone. No one has created an 80 Days competition. There is no other game like 80 Days. If you want to play a game about traveling around the world, you've got one. And when we release Heaven's Vault, there will be one game like Heaven's Vault. And there is sort of a few games that are like Sorcery, and in a sense I think that's why Sorcery didn't do quite as well is that people look at it and go, "Oh, I've played that before." And the reality is actually you really haven't. There is no game like Sorcery particularly either, um but it's more

subtle why it's different. And I think what I love about premium is that you can produce completely unique games with beginning, middle, and end. They're like nothing else and then go away and make another one and so long as you don't employ too many people or too too long to do it that's perfectly financially viable and it lets us do all the experimentation we want. It just means that we're a bit lonely cuz there's only eight of us in a room and like it would be lovely if I had a writer's room of 20 people but as far as I see that I see that as a problem with the audience like you guys need to just be more interested in interested in interactive fiction. We're doing the best we can where are you? So I would like to thrust all of that responsibility onto you lot and take none of it myself and that's my strategy for dealing with it. there's something fun too about like freemium can help that cuz it's like I love that I can now send my 13 year old niece to Inkle games and be like look now you know what this is go play it cool. Right and like maybe what we need to do is we need to start advertising in your games. Bored of this think it's repetitive come and play an Inkle game. Or we can do the flip like if this is a little too hard for you or you're

getting a little lost we're here to entertain you at night like play our policy. it is it is a terrible shame that we don't get the audience draw that a freemium product can have you know like I did a talk at a high school in Cambridge the other week and they've had a copy of 80 Days in their library for 3 weeks and I started off saying you know okay so show of hands if you've played 80 Days not a single hand went up but one 10 year old said it costs 5 pounds so I didn't play it and I said it's in the library and they said oh and like I can't even get them to play the game when it is free because it was in another room. And so the amount of friction there is really quite high and these were kids who were interested you know they're in the coding club or whatever so I would love to get more people playing the games but somehow I don't think going free is the solution for us for that. I would like to argue the point though that it is a it's a lot about timing the reason that our original Lifeline was successful had a lot to do with the fact

that we saw that Apple Watch was launching and we were you know, we saw that we had a story that basically fit that format. It was small, very bite-sized. It was a conversation. It was something you could play on the go and so we converted it and as a result we did get featuring from Apple because we were on one of their products that they were really excited about. I would say that you know, Inkle came along in what I would say the heyday of the App Store. There were a lot less devs out there, a lot less noise and so it allowed some really great products because you know, Inkle is you know, I love Sorcery. I'm a huge fan and the fact that it was in the right time where it could be seen and it could be featured from Apple because their editorial team would see it. That was huge and that probably is a big part of the success. Now we've kind of shifted over to this free-to-play side of things but I kind of want to issue you know, a liferaft to all of you guys out there

who might be authors or interested in this is the fact that you know, now it's not a like it's it's okay to work with a publisher. It's okay to work with somebody who can do all of the stuff that you might not have the resources for. Freemium and free-to-play both do take large development teams. They take a lot of upfront work and they do take deep pockets and so if we can think about that and if you know, you think you've got a story that fits Episode or Lifeline or another platform that's out there cuz we're not the only ones either, just get it in front of them and and kind of bite the bullet because once you get it out there first, once you're a published author, then you know, you can say I've done it once, I've learned some lessons and maybe even you made some good connections and that that will definitely help you out at the end of the day. Cool. Well, I wanted to leave uh 10 minutes for questions, so we'll probably wrap up there. So, if you've got

anything to ask the panel at all, please use the microphones. Uh what their favorite color is, where they can uh where you can get in touch with them to send those pictures that you probably already started working on, anything like that, please just come up. Um if not, I'll make them talk about all sorts of terrible things. Don't be shy. Uh so, I've got a question. This is sort of a general question. Uh so, where I come from, there's uh there are like TV writers and you know, TV writers work with TV uh production groups uh in uh you know, or or theater writers with theater production groups. But, there are no uh established uh rules or ideas or concepts about how video game writers or narrative writers can work with, you know, video game companies or studios. And how do you suppose that maybe, you know, how do we improve that in our own country in in in our own industry about that?

I mean, so the question was about how um how to improve the kind of the access of video game writers to video game what you can describe is that uh writers can pitch to you and you can you know, work with them uh project by project. But, in uh where I come from, there uh I come from Taiwan, basically. But, you know, a lot of uh video games are made there, you know, they don't have this relationship with a group of writers or the writing industry, you know, just kind of I think um video game writing has always been quite difficult to get into because there hasn't been much space. Um and when space is limited, generally speaking, the the walls and the doors are very closed and the companies work with the people that they like. They don't They're not interested in seeing anyone else. They don't want to make opportunities because they haven't got any. I think actually, to be fair, the work that you guys are doing in producing spaces that writers can come in and just do the writing. And also, Choice of Games who are doing a lot of interactive fiction on mobile that's

more premium, but still very much a published. And that's incredible work, and it's in creating great opportunities for writers out there and building a genre, and it's really important and really successful. But I don't think it's anything that a writer can do. It doesn't matter how good a writer is if there is no space for them. If you're a great playwright, but there are no theaters, there's nothing you can do about that. You have to wait for someone to come along and and prize open that opportunity for you. Um And I feel that quite strongly because for myself, I wrote a lot of interactive fiction when I was in my 20s and in my teens. And in the end, the only way I could get any successful career out of it was to invent an entire company with my friend here um in order to publish myself, which I'm still resent the fact that no one just gave me a job cuz I didn't want to have to do anything. Um So, if we can pay that forward to anyone, that's that's lovely, but it it won't make up for my um resentment of that. So, I I feel it. Yeah, I feel you. Thank you very much. Uh

take one from the right-hand side. Hi, uh Julius Harper from The Walt Disney Company. Um had a question about an earlier part of the conversation where you guys were talking about um new writers kind of breaking into the space. And you specifically highlighted, you know, um always be writing and putting out pieces of writing that have what you described as meaningful choices as opposed to kind of the arbitrary choice. I just wanted to kind of dive into that a little bit more and ask um I guess for you three, what were, you know, the most meaningful choices that you've had to make within an interactive story? I always, let's see. I This is a cop-out answer. It's not the most meaningful choice, but the one that I use a lot in interviews cuz I think it's interesting is Telltale, uh, in The Wolf Among Us had an interesting choice where you could ask Snow White to keep the information she had secret or, uh, be okay with her sharing it with the sheriff. Uh, this is an interesting example

because it's actually not meaningful at all, but this is why I think it's interesting. She will tell the sheriff no matter what because that is her character. She is a good person. Uh, but they wrote the entire rest of the season like uh, changing your relationship with Snow White and how much you trusted her and how much she trusted you based on the choice you made in that moment. Which I thought was really smart because I'm thinking about, again, as a, all of us are thinking about scope. And like you can't always make every single thing in the world go in a million different branches, but to watch a company find a way to say like, "Look, we really had to write a story where the sheriff found this out. We We had to We couldn't get this story out without creating massive branching where he didn't. But we can write a thing that feels really, really meaningful. The second that was actually pretty impactful was, uh, mild spoilers for Life is Strange, the suicide moment. Um, it continues to stick with me after having done it and I continue to like shake up a little bit when I get there. Um, that's one where actually did change the story and it changed the story and it's really They They planted all these seeds for it and they built the whole episode around getting to that choice.

Um, which is just an incredibly powerful way to treat one choice really, really sacredly. Um, they did a really nice job of that. Yeah, for me, uh, the types of choices that really resonate are kind of on that D&D scale of lawful good, lawful neutral, uh, chaotic, uh, all that. Uh, and so like Mass Effect, um, is not a mobile game, but it's it's definitely a good system and, you know, you kind of see that in also some of the Telltale games as well. I really like the fact that I can see my my interactions changing based on do they does the story perceive me to be evil, good, or neutral? And, um, it's really great that you can get this nice spectrum of kind of the differences in a story and the nuances can change so much to change your experience. Yeah, I I think I would echo what both of you said actually, especially what Cass said that um I'm have no interest in this concept of meaningful choices that you hear bandied around a lot because to me it speaks to

the the computer programmer in our players who wants to be in charge and wants to be in control and wants to operate the levers that run the trains and wants to understand how many branches there were in the game and what percentage of people went which way and I don't care about any of that. That is all so wrong-headed. That actually what matters is that they have an interesting choice because otherwise they are going to do something else with their time and you can't fault them for it. And when you are in a story and you are asking what is interesting, the answer is always the same. It is characters and human beings. That's all we actually care about. So so long as my choice allows me to empathize with a character in this game or affect the character in this game. If I can be kind to someone or I can be snarky to someone, I will enjoy that choice and be interested and if that person responds to me in a believable and passionate and humane way, I will fall in love with them just a little bit. And if you do that to a person three times in a row, they will remember your game forever and there's no meaning to any of that. And almost all the good choices in 80 Days don't make the damndest bit of

difference to anything because it's really just whether you're kind to Fogg about the fact that he's a bit of a dimwit or whether you're annoyed with him. But those are fascinating choices because we like that character because we like human beings and somehow when we start to program things, everyone forgets about the human beings in the room apart from the writers which is why writers need to be working in video games because they stick their little hands up and say, "Hang on, we're people." The computer is just an interface to one person to talk to another. I find this really bizarre and I get really passionate about this because everybody talks to everybody on phones, right? You know a telephone. When you talk to a telephone, it's a little metal box that pretends to have the voice of your wife. You are not actually talking to your wife. You are talking to a plastic box that is simulating your wife. But, that isn't how you think about it. Because you're talking to a human. So, why in a computer game do we talk to the binary choices and the bits of code? Why are we not talking to the pretend human? I don't know what's wrong with us, but there's something wrong with us and we need to fix it. So, people. Thank you.

Thank you. Um I just wanted to ask uh how do you tackle branching narratives? Like, do you start from a linear point of view and then break off from that and then go back to the main thing? Do you have uh like for multiple endings? Like, I know some of the Telltale games uh they have multiple endings. How do you go about tackling that? Yeah, I think we all kind of use different methods for this, but um for Lifeline specifically, we definitely have the one main path. Um and historically, that's kind of how we've always done it. Uh and then we branch off of that main path, but we want to make sure that we give a variety of endings uh that are possible. And so, uh then that one main path becomes three main, you know, there's a large branch off of that and then a sec uh third large branch off of that main tree. Um and then basically, when we're moving over to episodic, we kind of chunk that up into pieces of a tree. Um so, you

know, having three endings tends to work really well for us because uh you can have what we call the good, the better, and the best ending. Um the good ending might have some negative connotations to it. It might have some uh some outcomes that maybe, you know, you weren't uh expecting, but at least it fulfills the story. Um but then you can also one up it and continue to to build on that for for different experiences. We essentially do an emotion map that's linear. We track a linear emotional experience of the player, but then we brainstorm what are different things that each emotional moment that could get them into that emotional arc. So, most of our players will emotionally follow the same line, that's our goal, but we'll try and pitch like, well, why might they be really excited at that moment? Maybe this, maybe that, maybe the other thing, and then we'll draw the lines between those things. The best story is one where we can actually do this with the lines. That gets really hard and I don't promise that we do that very often. That doesn't really cool, by the way.

Um I I don't know how to answer that question. It's really really really complicated and it totally depends on the context of what you're doing. Um I think in general, the only glib answer I can give is you have to play test and ask yourself at any given moment, am I being offered opportunities that make sense? Am I being offered opportunities that are all interesting? And is there something glaringly obvious that I should be allowed to do here that I'm not being allowed to do? Um which doesn't mean you should give the player complete freedom, but it does mean that you should think really carefully about are you trying to maximize the number of times when the player goes, "Yeah, that's exactly what I wanted to do and I can do it and see what happens." Cuz if they're predicting the choices, then it starts to feel like a mechanical game rather than an arbitrary one and that's that's the that's the sweet stuff. That And then you just cope with that. And the branching for me is very much a tool for coping with giving the player freedom, not a thing to achieve in its own right. I don't really care how many endings there are. I care about are the moments satisfactory? Um but I'm quite jealous

of you guys for having like more clearly defined answers and patterns cuz that's quite cool. I mean that's coming from having to make a bazillion of them. Yeah. When you have to work with multiple people, you got to give them, yeah, the the rules. I'm afraid I'm sorry. I'm afraid we're going to have to wrap it up because that is the end and we will get kicked out. Um there will be these guys I think will probably hang out in the wrap out room for a little bit if you do have stuff you want to ask them. So, sorry if we didn't get to your question, but they'll be there. Actually, I have something to say. Sorry. You spoke about Disruptor Beam's writing team. I would like to speak on behalf of that team as a member of the team that worked on Game of Thrones. It's unfair to characterize all of us as being somehow not capable of writing for mobile. We did an excellent job and we shipped the game with Jonathan Jonathan Myers did not. I would like to let all of you know that we shipped a wonderful game and that every member of that team is amazing. We are diverse and we are fantastic writers. So, please don't take away from

this panel that that writing team was in any way not capable because we absolutely were and I appreciate that you wanted to give an example, but we are not a good example of that. So, I apologize, but that needed to be said. Thank you very much. No, I really appreciate the correction. It's just an anecdote that I heard. I don't know the details of it. I didn't mean to upset anybody.