Designing System Driven Dialogue in Mafia III

[Music] hello everyone I think we can get started please turn up your phone and let's do it so today I'm going to talk to you about dialogues and systems my name is Remy blushful and I'm a game designer fascinated by the intersection of gameplay systems and narrative with a special interest for dialogue systems we've done some work on system driven dialogue which I hope you will find interesting and this is what I'm going to present you today so I work at a studio called hangar 13 in Novato California about 30 minutes north of San Francisco and on October 7th we release the last year to 2016 we released the game called mafia 3 on PlayStation 4 Xbox one and PC I am from France and I pursued a master's

degree in management and game design in shooting for America France where I graduated in 2012 during my student I might have found an internship in that potato Studios in Singapore at the end of my studies I accepted a position as a junior game designer at took a check in the wonderful city of Prague Czech Republic and a few years later I was transferred to a hangar 13 where I work today so mafia 3 is an open-world game on organized crime set in 1968 in a city called new Bordeaux vision USA inspired by the real city of New Orleans you play the game as Lincoln clay Vietnam veteran who wages war on the local mafia in Asia 3 after being betrayed by betrayed by the mob you have to conquer three districts from the Mafia which enables

you to collaborate with three under busses Vito the main protagonist from the Mafia to here on the leg and two major new characters in the franchise back on top here and kazuma the Lincoln the hero is on the right so after all the younger buses have been unlocked your objective is to conquer six new districts which you can allocate to any of the three and the buses how you divide territory influences the economy the rewards the weapons and the packs that you get but it also has a great impact on the characters reactions the game structure through unique missions and the ending of the game so quick survey here who in the audience I've played mafia three okay so for those who haven't played the game after you've unlocked all three under buses

the structure goes like this first you go after individual rackets run by them all for example the construction rackets in the downtown district after you've conquered a racket you have to call one of your on the buses they will each you they will each give you unique rewards after the call meant from the faction you have chosen populate the rackets which becomes a friendly location for example the Haitian fish affection or run by Kazuma note that this faction change is tempura so the underboss is agree to help you in the short term but a racket is fully under control of a character only if the whole district was conquered and assigned to them we'll come to that shortly there are two racquets body Street you can quell the second racket in downtown the blackmail market and after

the second racket is congruent again you have to call one at the bus you can choose to assign the second racket in the district to the same on the bus although the rewards of thoughts will be less interesting or to choose another one conquering both rackets upper districts unlocks a unique mission in which you can take out the district bus who reports directly to Salma Khan oh the mafia boss in new Bordeaux just after the mission a complex dialogue sequence called sit-down is triggered to permanently assign the district's all characters will try to convince you to give them the new territory and it will have a reaction based on who you choose so there are two possibilities coming in a sit-down first possibility both rackets were secured by the same character or you have splits the district between 200 buses who each secured one racket so the racket

assignments through the telephone call is a sort of promise that you do to the to a character and when you choose another bus to run a district the decision is final and all rackets in the district are reassigned based on your decision so I'm going to show you in game what a sit-down looks like in the situation you're going to see you have conquered downtown and it's the first district that you have taken down downtown is split between two characters you call Vito to hold the first racket and you call cassandra for the second one now pay attention to what is it [ __ ] you look like the cat who ate the canary this is our first step to a breaking mark anima taking over the city I hear what y'all got to say but I decide who gets the turf and in the end my decision is final

well hear this Lincoln you can make any final decisions you wanna make but splitting the action in one of these districts between my men and there's ain't happening this turf comes to me why boys a yo problem Jesus shut off [ __ ] up my guys aren't down there boozing with the neighbors or igniting some kind of race war they're making money for you that's all that matters so forget all this hippie [ __ ] and let's get to work until late to change our mainline I can handle both rockets without reading a lot better um they still got going on right now so because both cassandra and vito hold one racket they each respect the district to be depth rock on the other hand is less aggressive about it so here the decision is still completely open for the player you can still choose any of the other buses so today I'm going to talk specifically about two

main components of the system driven dialogue work that we have performed on McCaffrey first the loyalty system before the dialogue experience we built a relationship system first based on territorial division and I'm going also to talk about dialogue design and specifically how we build a library of dialogues that would reflect the loyalty system in meaningful way before we begin small definition of system driven dialogue so for me system driven divert dialogue reflect the rules and status of a game system conveying expectations relationship consequences and history between characters and all of that is being driven by a set of rules states modifiers possible interactions and choices some examples that use system driven dialogues the civilization games with varying relationships with with each AI rival

the football manager a series where you have to talk motivates and negotiate contracts with your players and the Sims even though they use an abstract language to convey moods and emotions so in games these types of dialogue only reflected by I usually only reflected by a limited amount of lines sometimes with voiceover but usually only with text in mafia 3 we built big lever your voiceover dialogues driven by a complex state of rules and sit-downs is our attempt to explore emotional and game play depth in system driven dialogue so before we start here I won't present you the development timeline and decisions exactly how they happened but rather they're shown easier to digest the reality is a bit more granular than what I present I know I

have some colleagues in the audience please don't call me a liar at least wait until the end of the presentation so my initial mission was to design the relationship system that would drive the logic behind all the choices and the consequences on characters and the game structure I knew few things starting working on the loyalty system there are three on the buses to choose to assign thirteen six seven districts to assign it to in total and two rackets to assign per district so 12 in total the rackets are signs our sign temporarily in the phone call and the final decision for the districts in sit-down sequences takes priority based on the choices performed up to two on the buses can decide to leave the crime operation completely on me leaving you with one and the bus at the end of the game the player can

accomplish side activities for each character to improve the relationship with them and the final result of the loyalty system influences the multiple endings of the game so these were my design constraints from these constraints we set some creative goals for the future we wanted first through design a real system behind these choices not having a say anything scripted or forced or chilly we wanted tension to escalate throughout the game actual consequences on the game structure and the economy on the buses being able to drop out of the operation was good stuff and we wanted dialogue the very dialogue delivery animation poses and facial expression as the primary form the system feedback loop so we didn't want any relationship score bar or text

to drag the experience I wanted players to focus on dealing with egos and the men in personalities and that was for me one of the most challenging goal and then we wanted no dialogue game as in interactive dialogue systems all the interactions with the reality system are based on territory division so racket and district assignments and optionally side activities so keeping everybody happy would mean doing some compromises in terms of the short term rewards that you would be getting each character would have a different set of perks appealing to different kinds of players so these were my pleasure of a single I had also defined goals for the on the buses themselves after all I was designing a simple AI system so I needed the direction to define the basic concepts that would drive their personal

so these concepts are reflected through modifiers the first concepts for the under buses is great they get some points for obtaining a racket they get some points for gaining a district they lose points for losing a racket the second concept is impatience under buses dislike being ignored and when they are not chosen for districts they lose points since there are three characters for each district to assign there are more points to lose and then two again and with these simple balanced escalating tension was achieved so this can be able to come by Maquis making cautious racket and district choices and doing side activities for the for each character and finally a characters

didn't mean to be aware of more things than what we're exposed to so if I call an underboss to secure rackets that won't make the other characters upset they don't even know they haven't been called so these ni concepts are rather simple and natural I don't need a lot of explanation done in game for the player to understand these rules so I knew my modifiers now I needed to define the different states influenced by these modifiers I started with the base states that are purely modifier driven imagine a zero to 100 scale and these days were content neutral and angry so this would be the states of the characters for majority of the time under busses starts neutral then we have what we call overwrite States so these are influenced

by modifiers but can you know the usual logic to by having some specific rules the first overwrite States is ultimatum it's triggered as a sort of last chance to make this right with a character who had enough it was introduced to make sure that the tension escalation was not too extreme and only one character can reach the ultimatum states throughout the whole game when things are really bad with a character the wharf state is triggered things are serious now the underboss quits the operation since hit squads against you in the open world all the faction characters in the city attack you on sight here there's no turning back characters at war unlocking any mission which enables you to kill them and once you've killed an on the bus they are

dead there's the [ __ ] takes about the operation and the receipt the situation returns to a status quo although the bets from this faction are frozen for the rest of the game so with the loyalty system defined on paper we needed a prototype we included mushiya real open structure you're not forced to computer districts you started playing so the game can be finished in numerous ways we included all hideout and racket assignment choices there are consequences on the state of D on the buses and how they would be reflected in the dialogue some balancing capability including the completion of side activities for bonus loyalty points we used twine for the prototyping it was really great because it was it's it's

very easy to use now we needed to collaborate with the writing team were just two designers on the prototype so with the writing team we defined the vision for the scene itself for the sit-down scene itself where and how it takes place so we did selected an old abandoned mansion in the value that you can see this concept then we needed to define how the scene would actually take place we had a prototype with design text but what is it going to actually look like in the final game first Lincoln walks in and is greeted by one character Lincoln makes an introduction announcing the districts at stake or any other big announcement then each character makes a pitch back to back trying to convince the player to give them the district so first character

second and third then it's time for the tracks the player can see the rewards and penalties for each character and they say something each time you highlight them here focus on Vito and his rewards block and cassano after you've selected a character to run the districts Lincoln announces the decision each character reacts back-to-back first reaction second and third reaction and finally ninguna sends everyone home so as a recap you can see the skeleton of a sit down here sometimes we break these roles when we have big special moments like a character going into an ultimatum or world states but this is how it works for the majority of sit down so now we need to define how we would approach

dialog scoping in the prototype we had simple design texts with variables and conditions inside the text so for example I have two racquets and I am content but I didn't know how these variables would translate when we would scope the actual dialogue lines so through the dialogues we needed to convey three pieces of information it was important for the dialogue to first say self the system dialogues needed to convey the loyalty states of the omnibus how many racquets they secured in the district to 1 or 0 and state transitions positive and negative changes in the system so there are interesting examples of actual viable audio design in sports commentaries with announcers talking about game scores and statistics in a smooth and natural way but it's very hard to produce well and here we were

created with narrative and emotional experience not really talking about stats so the resolution was clear we would define individual dialogue assets which would reflect the combination of the loyalty states number of racquets held and any other condition that the on the busses would react on then it would be all about the writing and we would need a lot of individual assets to support the game system but we believed it was the right this direction sorry we would also have to define a broad dialogue library that could survive design iterations and create variety and because we we would have such a big amount of lines thinking and in branches would be unmanageable so when I talk about branches think interest interactive dialogue systems like Mass

Effect or The Walking Dead in these games the dialogue structure branches out and in depending on the choices performed here we would approach the dialogue design with a data base mindset rather than control branches in addition to the royalty states and number of racket secured we needed additional direction for the dialogue sculpting the first direction is that all transitions from one dialogue to the other must sound smooth when played back-to-back and there are many possible permutations all the under buses would talk individually there's no group talk and we would use talking positions for branches so for pitches and reactions if you remember characters don't back-to-back first second and third here whether our characters talk first second

of the other and it builds us to to write the dialogue so characters bounces off of each other and that makes the the dialogue feel more alive branching dialogue as a set of advantages in the writing it definitely feels more natural so after the initial writing path and dialogue swapping we implement we implemented the dialogue in the prototype and see how it felt so now we are going to see how the numbers of hideouts and the loyalty states conveyed through dialogue my guys are working here actually here just like yes I figure you called us in for a reason I also figure you ought to just keep us there F this turf is in our hands sending it anywhere else would be a slap in a [ __ ] face what you need pal is someone who's going to tell you what you need to hear whether you like it or not

and so far you will [ __ ] me ever since we took care of Greco that [ __ ] ends right now so you can see that we can convert a lot through writing dialogue delivery and animation and poses that writing class gave a lot of character to the system for the personalities of bur Cassandra and Vito who you saw the dialogues were serving the system design still really well there was no information loss from the design text however we felt that the roads were too simplistic to create an emotional response from the player past the first couple of sit downs characters felt robotic and although they are royalty state could evolve they felt stupid and unresponsive so at these points we needed to define an update and I was told something that I actually loves to hear as a game designer it was something

like define as many dialogues as you want if you want 500 dialogue lines per character to make your system company just do it aim for quality luckily there was no producer in the room so I could follow that advice blindly so the new goal was quality I had to create a set of more interesting dialogues for the under buses to say on top of the library that we had already defined so here I wondered about complex defying the the system to produce different results after all the loyalty system is an AI system and so having just one global state contains neutral angry ultimatum to reflect the person emotion is quite simplistic it was no wonder my characters failed to create an emotional response but really I kept teaching more

complex solutions first reason is that I can't really think about complex systems I like to keep things in control and in control means simple but the big thing was that actually the system felt right I was actually happy with the outcomes of this of the system if I looked at the numbers the spacing the structure the consequences the tension escalation the system felt right so my resolution was to keep the loyalty system as it was one state per character with the set of states that I had available and then build on the players perception to create agency through an additional sets of statistics for the humble underboss for the under buses to better react on choices and appear

smarter than what they really are [Music] so I started brainstorming about interesting statistics for the under buses and I wanted to make the first and last sit-down feel unique the lines you've heard in the first video are specific to the first sit-down I wanted to explore that notion of greed again and for the end the buses to react and remember when rackets were taken away from them I also went back to the concept of impatience characters would complain that they have in the district yet and how many sit downs they spent without a district assigned and I also wanted to explore more concepts which were not reflected by the game system but which I found interesting jealousy for example on the buses would complain about one of their rival being chosen for districts and if they were the least powerful and the boss in the city I also

wanted to explore cockiness characters would mention that they've gotten the last district and if they are the most powerful on the bus in the city and this doesn't even cover everything that we put in the system there are lots of different reactions we defined based on how cool and interesting events and statistics that we thought so I'm going to show you examples of what the extended dialogue scope brought to the system in that example we are going to see different different pitches from Vito for these dialogues Vito is neutral he holds little holes one racket in the district and then he reacts on an additional set of statistics of the game so pay attention to each dialogue and try to guess what the statistic is each time we all make mistakes and not the

moral take for example us can meet a secure the last district and they're not given it to me your mistake me allowing you to get away with it again that would be mine only action I got right now is River wrong and as exciting as that is I'm ready for more you gotta be working I have this turf already piece of cake to give me the whole thing I'm not one for bitching and moaning never so much used for that said I got the least amount of power in this town and you've given me half the stuff somebody is getting [ __ ] better not be me well Burke ain't sobered up for when you gave him the last piece of the action I already got one of these rackets give them make a chance to try out and send this turf my way no disrespect but giving potato lover over their part of this city is like throwing it away I got half this turf secured for you so if you want this thing we got to make real money send it my way not everyone in this town is his open-minded as I am so spread the Haitians out across this city like giving them that last district is

gonna bring some unwanted attention but me and my boys with this production you put a son we blend in is the truth because Sandra is dangerous hey I'm sorry honey but it's true she's she's looking for a water fight well I'm just trying to run a business I gotta have this turf top and I want the rest you got a plan a reason you working things the way you are and I respect that if the post of my ass on a less district I came in and took care ahead for this one I see no reason I can't handle the whole thing ain't no one at this table running more action for you than me on top of that my guys already got half the rackets in this area locked down just keep the [ __ ] comin my way that's all I'm getting at so there are even actually even more dialogues that Vito could have said we have variations on each statistic and each set of statistic so in total we have about 850 dialogue lines allowed by the system all characters included in

one sit down only about 20 are selected so if you do the math only between two and three percent of the database is used to sit down 250 dialogues per on the bus and 100 about 100 for Lincoln and so we with six sit downs in the game the player is going to only see about 15 percent of the whole database we really tried to reflect the players unique play through and set of choices so the results we were getting from the extended dialogue scope were satisfying and the characters felt more responsive more alive and smarter but really behind the scenes the system was still dead simple but what the characters would say was perceived as deep and complex system

so at this point we had the extended assets ready and we needed to accomplish one more step before the actual final implementation of the full scene it was defining the rules of the dialogue flow and because of the extant dialogue scope we couldn't really use twine anymore to figure out the rules and the tool is not really ready to handle the texture arrays but we still really needed to see clear examples of different sit-down sequences how the sit-down sequences would flow with actual writing and I had the assets ready so it was time to put them together if you take the sit down flow again you can see that there is one character selected for the grid for the greeting but which one other three during the pitch and reaction sequences all characters talk back-to-back but in

which order I didn't want here I didn't want to define an arbitrary order I wanted the dialogue seconds to flow as nicely as possible and that meant defining roles however here I had really no tool to help me figure it out so my solution was simple I would define different scenarios randomly and then select and structure the dialogue assets like puzzle pieces that would create a second's that felt natural engaging that would best reflect to sanai so from my results and because I generated a lot of different scenarios I then analyzed the result I produced to be able to extract dialogue rules that would drive the sequence as a whole so we were ready for the final implementation and see the result in the game so let's go back to our initial example if you remember it's

the first sit down and the district is split between Vito and Cassandra who both have one racket secured until later change your main life I can handle both rockets without any dog patch and they still got going on right now you start dangling territor in front of me and then snatches back this agreement we had in Angola you gotta see all the angles Lincoln we got a long road ahead of us don't make the wrong first step lot what's the word Lincoln the knee veto to run this sir this the kind of [ __ ] that breaks the spirit of folk you do well to keep that in mind about [ __ ] times I always knew you had a good head on your shoulders if I stay here any longer my head cut off pocket explored we're done

for now you're here for me if I need you so here in that sequence Cassandra lost the rackets she was content as she she transitioned to an angry States Vito was content and state content and Burke stayed neutral so being able to finally experience sit-downs in-game we validated we validated some choices and learned few things some play testers actually asked for loyalty meters but it was such a small portion that we felt it was more related to previous games that they played rather than a design flaw so from the dialog performance and animation they were able to figure it out so no need for speed spoon-feeding here one results felt apparent suto the underpasses flip states very quickly and in situations

which appeared unfair that was a really a problem with the prototype but it was very real when confronted with the characters in game and as a general feedback all results of sit down sequences felt like lose-lose situations where if the player chose one and the bus the other two always got upset I had to rethink the loyalty system then so this time I knew that the issue was not only about perception my game system was perceived as unfair and that was a core issue not a superficial one and because I had defined the loyalty concepts clearly for the under buses remember greed and impatience so here you see that grid the grid part is straightforward it's logical everyone can understand it you get money it gets better you lose money

it get worse it's fair it's really the impatience but that people had problem with and make the under buses seem annoying and ungrateful so I introduced a new concept the gap basically it means that another bus would have a penalty only if he or she has been ignored at least two districts in all you can see on the new table that even if the gap is low there's no penalty applied on a district not a sign decision however when the gap is high a very strong penalty is applied so the gap had few advantages in the first District assignment no one would get mad unless they lost our racket and since the first sit-down is the first real contact with the real tea system no tea no automatic drama is a good thing it focused crisis

is much more rather than a constant penalty for not getting a district under buses would stay karma until they had enough and then they would get specific as to why there's a big difference between I wanted the district and I'm upset and it's been twice you've ignored me the system was still able to create escalating tension with the balanced hey-ho with three people in Rome I had the guaranteed crisis at the second district assignment whoever was not picked from the first to decision so before present you with the results of that updated designer I'm going to go back to my initial example so if you remember - the first sit-down Cassandra was angry she lost one rackets after the decision Vito is content he's got the first District Berk is neutral

he states didn't change let's fast-forward to the second district I felt bad for Cassandra and I assign her to rackets and the district to calm huh and we are going to see the sit down for the third district assignments in the game I conquered a district called Berkley meals controlled by a mob boss called Enzo compte there I signed one racket to dark and the other Vito yeah someone feels better that now that I've assigned others on territory but she's not great she's neutral the oak is angry it's been two sit downs and he still hasn't seen any districts coming his way I've been completely ignoring him and Vito his contact he's got the first district and include any rackets no problem here the situation this is the situation I'm going to present you now

and it's really a turning point in the structure I take a goddamn pain torture turns out there's at least once a [ __ ] mikanos crew Enzo Conte backed away clean no one's moving anything to Barclay mills without paying up to us asking my guys to lock down half this turf makes them anxious like they don't know which side is supposed to be cheering for but given us the entire turf sends a clear message doesn't you gonna take care I'm gonna keep this real [ __ ] simple chalky knock me around this city like you are and keeping me from running Rockets it's real unhealthy for you everybody's got their play brother but the truth is that I'm the one you called on to run the last territory it's all that racket [ __ ] aside you know I can hand the day-to-day better than anybody else here make the right choice here and I whip up some fresh bucatini for you share the wealth lichen who is it gonna

be Lincoln go against me here and I suppose I'm just a mom what's up this one's all you Burt Thank You Lonnie I'll do my part here I will get past this so now I got to go tell my guys their work was for nothing Jesus Christ you say going over well with them or me don't let this happen again the ambience here ain't enough to keep me coming back brother I think I'll excuse myself for the time being all right that's it we're done for now so here after choosing doc balance was kept all characters received one district each they're all neutral although their value is the actual value is much less than the starting one because of the tension escalation now I'm going to show you what happens if you choose another character than bug

Colin this would post a letter I've had enough of this shape you're a lying cheating bastard for dragging me into this you preyed on my [ __ ] sympathies and I'll never forgive you for it come on Irish relax you've been around the block enough to know it's just business there is only so much non an Irish man can take before he wipes it from his eyes and comes at you with both barrels I see you clearly nary Lincoln and it's time you made this right Burke come on now [ __ ] don't need to jump that far yeah you made your point Burke now that's enough y'all don't have to like the decisions I make and to be honest your egos are the least of my [ __ ] concerns way I see it you fall in line or you fall out all together now let's go make some [ __ ] money so here Burke transition to an ultimatum States even veto and Kazama tried to calm him down he requests the next

district and that last line from Lincoln is one of my favorite one he actually has unique reactions from characters going ultimatum depending on how early the ultimatum state is triggered and this one was the most aggressive so I invite you to play the game and see how your choices impact the under buses the dialogue experience differs tremendously depending on what you do and who you choose now you've seen the resulting game I want to give you a look behind the scene as to how we structure condition and choose dialogue assets incident I'm going to present you my methodology I am sure there are many like it but this one is mine so here case study on veto if you remember the total amount of dialogues that we talk insane a sit down is approximately

approximately 250 dialogue lines let's look at how one dialogue line is defined in the data a dialogue is first a unique ID we track how many times it has been played in the game when it was played last through a timestamp and then we can define one option called play once which enables us to discard the dialogue completely from the database when it was played once in the game and finally for each dialogue there is one or more conditions defined so conditions are logics based on game set variables when we pass a dialogue all linked conditions have to be true for the dialogue to be available let's take a look at what conditions are in sit down for example conditions other loyalty states content-neutral

angry or ultimatum if characters are war or was dead they don't attend the sit-down meeting then you have conditions related to the number of racquets secured in a district 2 1 0 and then really any other additional variable for example it's the first district it's the last district veto is the least powerful character in the city the most powerful etc that's for dialogue data now let's go back to vetoes library of dialogues because there are so many we need to organize them so first we put them in context or greetings together same for pitches focus dialogues and reactions then inside categories we define priorities as many priority levels needed depending

on which dialogues are more important than others for example dialogue specific to the first or last sit down in the game are always mapped as priority one in priority to our dialogues related to characters being killed since the last sit down reactions to an ultimatum States etc then you really define as many priority levels as you need and finally your set of generic dialogues you're ready based based design they have less specific conditions usually down to the loyalty state of the character and so that's how we structure dialogue data for the other buses in sedans first we organized by context then within context we organized dialogue assets by priority for example here greetings have three different levels of priority pitches have 8 different levels

for each dialogue which rack a bunch of statistics and conditions our mix of game state variable so that was from the data structure now when we detect that it's a character stone to talk we run a selection algorithm passing all dialogues from a context to choose the most relevant dialogue to play first we look at the play ones status if the play ones option was ticked and the dialogue has been previously played the dialogue is discarded then we look at the game state conditions linked with the dialogue all conditions have to be met if more than one dialogue returns true conditions we compared different priority levels if a priority dialogue if a priority one dialogue is available and another priority - then which was the pretty one

if dialogues have the same priority level then we compare the number of times they have been played we pick the one which has been played the least amount of times if there is still a tie then we pick the least recently played dialogue and finally if there is still a tie we pick a random dialogue from the group the random part is interesting for me in sit-downs because of the enormous dialogue scope most of the dialogues actually have never been played and so the algorithm or very often has to pick randomly without dialogue group so it means that actually as the designer I know what characters can potentially say on which game state variables they could react depending on player choices buttons in some situations I really can't anticipate exactly what they are going to say and it makes the sit-downs

sequences feel very unique so the public reception was interesting to see on the loyalty system and sit down one of my favorite comments is this person asking on the steam forums where can i see the underpasses loyalty is it like a bar or something and the other user response there is no bar or indicator as to how loyal the underpasses are to you you should get a good feel from the conversations when you elect allocating districts to them all at the sit down and this kind of comments really validates all the design writing and animation work on the characters as feedback direction and it makes me really happy another fabric comments the other bosses are just a bunch of greedy animals and I love them I don't know how I feel towards the night match a great again though so some lessons learnt pro

development since communication is so much a part of our everyday life players seems to really dig interesting systems around dialogue and choices especially when they are integrated in the gameplay experience and saddam's proved to be a popular feature not over exposing your system helps creating interesting valley patterns so with play tests we figure and the rest of the public reception we figured that players had a really cool tendency to project lots of difference and personal reasons to choose an underboss and through projection they created a play pattern deeper than how the actual system actually works and I didn't mention it in the presentation but late in the development we introduced a new state royal better than content the best date

possible but as we were passed the voice of a deadline we had really no way to reflect it through dialogue and we know UI to reflect that it was not as as well presented than the other states so that's definitely a big caveat when you are working with voice other deadlines are crucial and it's a real blocker for any majors late system design work so yeah plan ahead in short the takeaways from this presentation define and know your constraints well here I needed to find interesting rules around territory division define the basic concepts that you want to explore when you need an update revisit these basic concepts and see how you can improve the execution prototype learn implement and iterate it takes a while to get comfortable with

the design to know it and to know how to measure it we validated a lot of decisions with the twine prototype for example when there are player issues with the system ask yourself this is this core issue or can it be solved by working on the per session of the player by building on top of the system that you already have so you can see that actually the these are pretty classic game design lessons here even working on narrative heavy features like the loyalty systems and sit downs so there's no question we can tell engaging stories through game systems the biggest question now is how when we have the possibility to bring designers animators writers and actors together we can't let traditional storytelling

practices take more importance than the actual DMZ or simply rely on proven concepts we're not making films we're not writing books we create games there's definitely room for improvements about how we can best use performance to self again design and the work we've done on mafia 3 is just a small piece in the incredible potential of emergent stories through interactivity and I really can't wait to create and play some more thank you [Applause] [Music] hi or self can self contained or is any

of it built out of component parts so each dialog IDs is unique we organize them in in blocks for visualization purposes but really it's defined pair dialogue okay oh hi thank you for the talk it seemed like it was very design driven narrative approach so I write a wouldn't come in and specify what they wanted right in you'd say okay here are the parameters kind of fill in the blocks did that cause any issues with writers not understanding the flow of structures and did you have any kind of cool debugging things where they were trying to test out a specific flow of a conversation and then secondly was there any instance which is where you thought I kind of want that the NPC characters to converse

between themselves whilst making decisions because it seemed like very much just like you play off thing when you play or thing was there any like all day I said something about you and they retort to that so so the first question is related to work with writers so my goal as a designer working on on the system was to make writers work as comfortable as possible so I would define text conditions and really expose the game system and what I need in in dialogue assets in Excel so really hey this is the combination of number of racquets that they hold the interesting game set condition that I want them to reflect and all of that was just a very back and forth conversation and work between writers and but really the debug the debug was done by myself and Q way actually debugging dialogue is quite

simple because of just if there's something wrong you figured very very quickly and your second question two-way conversations between characters yes so characters being able to bounce off of each other was done through talking positions so in pitches and reaction sequences whoever speaks first for example bounces off of Lincoln line and then the the character who speaks second I don't know if you remember the first the first dialogue but v2 starts with something like shut the [ __ ] up and it actually doesn't matter whether it's Cassandra or Burke who speaks first and that's how we create that kind of illusion thank you hi I may have missed something in what you're describing but I wasn't sure for things like the greeting where a single character speaks

is there any sort of priority given to a character who has more at stake or is more dissatisfied or is it purely random in each set down so it's a very good question actually this is the these are the rules for choosing who who speaks for the greeting I prioritize angry characters than the previous peak for sit-downs ultimatum is the biggest priority actually the characters in ultimatum states take priority even of Lincoln lines and the interim they interred him for the pitch it's the number of racquets then the lowest loyalty level and the reaction is angry characters so yeah I this isn't really priorities i prioritizes angry characters of the rest because that's its it flows nicer definitely thank you i I really enjoyed

your talk thank you and my question is you attached a gameplay reward to choosing the different characters a distinct gameplay award reward and I was wondering did you see a conflict that players had between choosing how they want this story to play out and supporting their own play style and did you see that as a good conflict or something that was kind of a bad choice that players had to make and if so did you do anything to try to minimize that so conflicting choices economy reward versus characters is really the base of the design and that's how it creates interesting choices keeping everybody happy you don't really there are there are so many variables that can drive a decision that actually differs really from players to to players for example in my

specific playthrough I focused on rewards first but I felt bad for characters and I started ignoring these rewards and so yeah it really differs from faithful to playful thanks okay thank you for attending [Applause]