Evolving Emotional Storytelling in thatgamecompany's Sky

[Music] hey everyone good afternoon thanks for making it down to gdc narrative summit day one um i'm guessing that you're all that game company fans maybe [Applause] thanks for making it down everyone i feel like i'm presenting this slightly prematurely we did actually have a big beta release recently but i wanted to do a quick sense check before i dove into the presentation to see how many of you guys have actually read or seen or even played a new games guy oh a handful okay great okay um for for the rest of you guys in the room there's actually a lot of surprises that i won't be covering um in this talk today so uh don't be afraid don't shut your ears down when there's you know spoilers um in the presentation i think that uh hopefully every everyone in this room will walk away with something um as well so let me make a start

so my name is jenny kong i am the story writer at that game company studio based out in santa monica um and i'm really thrilled to be sharing with you the presentation evolving emotional storytelling in our new game sky for those who don't know me i'm also a narrative writer for a couple of indie studios who are showcasing the games out here at gdc this week and most recently i actually directed and shot a docu-series around storytelling in video games it follows 15 iconic and indie game creators and is currently streaming on comcast and youtube if you haven't had the chance to check it out yet and just taking a step even further back i've been working in the video games industry for around 15 years or so now i began my career on the publishing side back at sony playstation uk working on a number of titles there so i've been working at that game company since 2013.

sky the new game is probably the studio's most ambitious project to date i would say that because not only are we developing the game but we're also publishing the game for the most part as well we announced the title back in late 2017 at the apple keynote stage and over the past year we've been aggressively beta testing two key components of the game the multiplayer aspect and also the emotional aspect we want to get both of these right i think we're in the home stretch now we're nearly finished with the game and ready to kind of launch the global release but i i'm so passionate about this area that i feel that over the past decade emotional storytelling has really seen um some highlights over the past few years primarily in the linear game experience and what i hope today will do is to offer additional conversation to explore emotional storytelling and the multiplayer domain as well so i would say that sky

is a spiritual successor to some of the previous games that the studio have made um i studied screenwriting at school but boy this studio does things very very differently um but they did break from tradition compared to their previous games so sky is the first fully fledged multiplayer experience that they've launched it's going to be multi-format coming on ios first the world itself is wholly online and then the game itself will touch upon both aspects of non-linear story as well as more mmo type storytelling the big vision really is that we want to launch the game and have sky appeal to as many people as possible and we've tried to do that really with this next release sky's been development for the last six years it's a very long time i don't wish six years of development of production to any of you guys in the room there's been a lot of starts and stops u-turns etcetera

and my hope today is to really share with you some of the creative processes internally at the studio providing a top-level case study and analysis of how the story had changed over the six-year period i would say we're a team of 25 everybody in the studio interfaces with story at some point we're highly collaborative but i do want to give a shout out to my boss personally genova chen he's been a true inspiration for my work in this game as well as my colleagues chris bell and the design team and uh nabi and the art team uh both of these guys have really put a lot into the emotion of sky too so that game company how do we best define emotional storytelling in the approach i would say that our goal is to connect players globally through a positive emotional experience in interactive entertainment we are an emotion first studio what does that mean so for other studios a green light

project could look like oh hey there's a new new new piece of technology let's explore that and green light that project someone has a great idea from a design perspective let's kind of flesh that out or someone might want to translate an ip a film ip for example into a game let's let's go for it we don't do any of that we are very much about focusing on what that positive emotion will feel like for the audience and advocate that forward so what that means is that we will iterate and iterate across the other uh disciplines so whether it's design story art music we will keep recalibrating time and time again to make sure that the emotional experience is spot-on we also focus very heavily on non-competitive play this has been kind of our domain over the past few titles and as we push forward with our next release we want to advocate that more genres and narrative are explored because if we touch upon different genres rather

than the ones we've seen in the past two decades let's say we can possibly precur different kind of emotions in the games and what kind of you know games and narratives can we explore that will nourish and enrich our emotional selves as a player we want to see games accepted as an art form alongside the other forms of entertainment so let me talk about some emotional storytelling tools that we work towards at tgc um let me highlight three core tenants the first is emotion through universal language so you know a lot of other developers may lean on you know voice over or a flashback or you know a character dialogue piece uh even a text kind of popping on screen to hint and maybe like explore what the exposition of the story world is we don't do any of that i kind of wish we did sometimes it'll make my job easier instead we focus on prospectively

looking towards the universal language of visual of themes of music why is that because if you think about these elements of language across the world sometimes all it takes is a little piece of music to evoke a certain kind of emotion we don't need words we just need that piece of music and so we've kind of been developing this area a lot more and focusing on this too i would say that our previous game journey did lean on the joseph campbell model of the hero's journey and with our next game sky we touched upon that as we made a start on the development process the second tenant i would like to explore is emotion through the environment you know we're all familiar with environmental storytelling here one of the kind of aesthetics that we've kind of approached in the past again with other titles like flower and journey is that our artists like to work within a minimalist design space what does that mean so rather than try

to reveal story through an object or an item or a person we try to remove these obstacles out of the way because we feel possibly it might get in the way of the emotional interaction that we have as a player and the subject at hand sometimes maybe something off screen is more powerful as a emotional trigger than something that's on screen genova talks quite candidly about inviting players into the game as though they were archaeologists the idea that maybe backstory hint of character you know portrayal could be buried and or hidden within the environment it's a playground and we invite you to join and kind of you know showcase what the story could be there it's more rewarding to unearth a piece of story item than it is just to sit and watch another cutscene and the final tenant is emotion through action and what i mean by that is you

know let's think about if you can imagine redefining what player actions and the move set could be within the game so if you're a player a and you have a sword and you're walking around this is an adventure game you're wielding your sword or you're player b and you're carrying a candle instead now i'm praying that none of you are going to be carrying the candle and pyroing the sky world once you get in because i don't think we have enough budget to rebuild the world again but granted the actions of each are very different and therefore the emotions of each are going to be very very different so again player a has a sword he's going to be destroying stuff maybe player b has a candle with light maybe he or she is illuminating things in the world so let me talk a little bit more about sky what is sky sky is a social adventure set above the clouds you play as one sky descendant of many

um that flies across this mysterious kingdom looking to spread light back into the world the end goal is that once light is restored the constellation will come back alive it's a very fantastical world and very early on we wanted to ground it and kind of thematically how could we do that rather than portraying skye as a fantasy game we wanted to portray it as a coming of age game instead we like the idea that the character could be growing up throughout the game's time we felt it was a very positive message to send out we liked the inclusivity of this genre too and i think the feeling that we wanted to explore also was the idea of childhood wonder as you explored this magical sky kingdom a lot of you know us we've all have childhoods we understand what that means we remember some nostalgic feelings of this world and of this time and so we wanted to

leverage maybe some language and motifs around childhood and i think that's why the characters were designed as children you play a child and you primarily remain a child through the course of the game but this was a perfect entryway into the world that is pretty fantastical so i actually have a lot to cover but i will focus on how story changed in this in these three areas over the course of the six years i want to share with you how we adapted to a different story structure uh i will explore with you how we developed an emotional engine uh to explore the user story in the game and finally how we ended up testing emotion in the live community space so the first two years of sky we had a very small team that explored prototyping the world as you can see we wanted to feel the way that flight could be for a player we wanted to see

how the traversal would work we had an awesome engineering team that developed cool new technology to make the cloud robust and fun to fly within and we also looked at the scope of gameplay as well in this early stage for the next year or two we started with a very small story development team that included genova myself and a couple of other artists and there's no difference in maybe if you've you know if you've studied uh writing in the past we generated a lot of traditional story materials and what that meant is that you know we would use a whiteboard we would hash out what the emotional flow could be at each point in the game we developed kind of mini story bibles in google doc and drafted out what the player's background were what the character's motives were and again looking at the different kind of uh pinpoints of the story that you yourself would be developing and finally we also looked at prospectively

uh how we could visualize uh the sky wall system but this was kind of early stages so we wanted to kind of park that until a later stage at this time i also revisited some coming-of-age classics um re-watching wizard of oz stand by me even some of the the more kind of more recent coming-of-age stories spread it away um and re-reading the little prince that was one of the things that inspired us so as we started moving into the development phase this is a pretty large map that the art team drew out around the kind of the the grandeur of the the sky world we would start out in number one around the avery area and the isle area moved to number two which was the prairie realm and then the forest number three so on and so forth and we devised the multiplayer linear story path

across each realm within the sky kingdom um and then you know in between development we would uh kind of map out almost like a mini three-act structure so for the prairie around what would happen in the first act second that third act in terms of the story beats how the player moved what was the obstacles uh myself and the concept art which anova would kind of feel these elements out but a big mandate from genova was like hey we want players to repeat and play the game again and i'm like so we've already gone to number seven so you want them to kind of start again at number one and what play through again with the same emotional beats and the same things that happening it was really tough to justify the current kind of setting that we have so we kind of banked it we put it to a side and asked ourselves okay so what emotions would spur a multi-player group of people to revisit the sky world

and kind of just progressing further on each realm we started to look at the linear progression of each area so we started with the isle and the prairie and the idea is if you can think about it the idea is is that with each of these realms we would uh kind of showcase or unlock a new emotion so let's say for instance you and your sky friends you go in to the prairie area and the idea is that this is kind of like the first burst of childhood memories you feel freedom you feel joy and then you would meet a character at the end that would kind of compound that emotion and then through each realm as we kind of navigate through all the way to the end uh we wanted to ultimately showcase the emotion of sacrifice now how can we do that so we did a quick test in the forest area and the idea is that you and your friends would kind of fly into this enchanted forest and then the further down into the woods you

would get things aren't kind of looking so great and you actually lose your friends this is where we separate you from the friends for the first time um you would be confused you're not really sure what's going on you'd feel uncertain right this felt very contrived it was like i don't know how we're going to do this is we're retro engineering and refitting emotions into levels and so another try another crack at motion we set this plan aside too and we decided to keep some of these emotions in place for the art team to develop the look and feel of each realm but they were kind of more like mood boards at this point the art team also started thinking about the design of the character um and the design team in genova agreed that the player should really be kind of showcased as a very plain character at the beginning kind of going back to that minimalist design if you will so that you know any people jumping onto the game they could almost connect to the avatar a lot

quicker because it's not customized yet they can kind of see themselves within that character just as your character is getting kind of you know all the garb and the masks as you see in the final picture the idea is that you know if you visited certain lands and mets and characters you would unlock masks power capes items along the way and other people would kind of understand that oh hey you've actually been to that area i see that you have that item concurrently we spent some time developing the backstory i created a lot of kind of mini documents around each of the characters the personalities the motives and the concepts around these eight elder characters in the sky world that you would meet and at this point we leaned against the archetypes that you would see in a lot of the storytelling books but it felt very cliche even when i was writing them the idea that hey here's a child of light look at them they're holier than

thou they're here to help the world and here's this these elder dudes that have just ruined everything and somehow they're evil um i felt it was a very tragic story i wanted to share that that feeling of emotion or tragedy and the history of what they'd done how they cared about the world and what happened and so we started looking at maybe elders as anti-heroes rather than villains i suppose and during this time we kind of went one step further and looked at the hero's journey again i just felt like the model was doing the game a slight disservice in terms of not explaining the narrative fully how could we account for the range of players coming in to join the multiplayer group how can we showcase the variance of characteristics in each of the npcs and how do we include a replayable story loop in here conflict was something that we looked at time and time again

we looked at stakes in the story we went back and forth and you know we asked ourselves okay is sky a world that's driven by conflict or is it a world that's driven by purpose do we see good and evil in this world or do we see and celebrate the beauty of light and dark and the duality that we are all in ourselves light and dark i did some additional research and i want to share with you if you guys haven't read up on this yet uh this is a new initiative called the collective journey by jeff gomez the brilliant jeff gomez and his team at starlight runner he's not trying to replace the hero's journey he's trying to kind of add an extra layer to basically say that hey modern day story structure in the digital age is very different you see it online you see it in politics every day people want to get involved it's not about one person saving the world we like this model we like that empowered and activated communities

coming together in the sky world communities that wanted to not bring down one big bad villain but to seek systematic change that would change the world inside out and to showcase the multiple sides and the voices that people are involved so genova and i will go excited about this tv structure of the ensemble storytelling you know looking at game of thrones etc uh and this side migrating into some of our brainstorms that we were actually now thinking more of the story as tv episodic maybe rather than kind of one big story so the collective journey really redefines some of the emotional qualities of sky and the nuances of our game and it started to shift emphasis towards more of a multiplayer non-linear experience what i like is points 10 and 11 the idea that in this model we're celebrating vulnerability in the character and also sacrifice and again we have all a part to play in this world

again not just one person is going to save the day so we now start moving into the pre-production build and you're going to see this map time and time again it's getting a bit crazy there i think but kind of building off the first play through where we started with the avery the prairie the forest once as a play you've locked those areas you can actually fly to those areas at any time you don't have to play through the entire map to kind of get back to it and we like this idea of zigzagging back through the different realms because encourage group exploration you can go back and delve into an area of a realm that maybe you've forgotten to take a different path or maybe there's hidden areas of story and items that you didn't see and i was getting really worried at this point i was like i don't i don't want to i want to protect the a story i don't want to like start impacting and messing with that but it actually didn't the players that

that tried the game actually enjoyed the a story mythology they wanted to learn more they can't wait to kind of finish the game and play the global release but the b story components of seasonal content and the world events allowed a bit more of a breathing space within the world and it really uh pushed the design team the story team to think a little bit more about what the core gameplay loop would be so just to track this through what it meant was that as you travel through each realm it was a looser kind of structure the group would be you know moving from one realm to another solving puzzles flying through new areas meeting these elder characters and spreading light right it sounds great it's collaborative no no it wasn't so the pre-production build it didn't when we played it as a team and we did many trials i don't think it moved as emotionally as we thought it

would be like we're spreading light we're doing great things in this world uh we had a lot of internal play testers too it was really funny actually in one in one survey with a playtester a woman was playing with another woman she was set opposite her and she actually thought it was all npcs in the world at some point and i'm just like wow we really have not done our job if she felt it was all npcs in this world so we could see the players you know physically traveling traveling together through each of the realms but they weren't emotionally connected so if they're not going to be emotionally connected they're not going to do the other stuff that we want to you know see if they'll be gravitating towards the one thing that did happen during some of these play tests was genova explored the element of including a tool the idea of the candle which was a breakthrough in some of the story work that we did and i like the candle because it actually forges the player to have both a physical and emotional relationship

and connection with the world so the idea that you would be going around lighting things um and you know helping the the npcs in the world out but not only that that it was connecting player on player as well so the idea is if i have a candle and i want to hold it out to you you have a candle that's not lit and i'm lighting your candle and giving energy back to you wouldn't that be a great thing and so as we were moving uh very sluggishly through this pre-production build we kind of i think had a eureka moment okay well we've zeroed in we've exhausted all the emotions we can maybe let's start looking at what an emotional engine could look like and we focus on altruism as an element and also connection as an element what do i mean by an emotional engine so before we were looking at emotional moments in each of the realms and that would help drive us through and build us through to the end of the game we scrapped that we decided

to focus on an engine that would power the gameplay and the story through from beginning to the end the big question was was this enough really to sustain positive experience with the entire world and to invite people back into the game and for them to enjoy it so as we were ramping up to the beta build we started looking at the friendship connection this is something that you might have seen before in journey we started to kind of build off of that um and we liked the idea of the candle moment so the team and design team started looking at how can we leverage the gifting of candles to each other the idea that you can unlock friendship functions so if i give you three candles we can unlock the capacity to hold hands and then i can lead you around the world and share with you some of my favorite parts of sky or maybe you want to give gift me three candles and then we will unlock the hugging

function people like to hug in the game you'll see why when you play and then so on and so forth for chat functionality and other things is pretty cool we also experimented and pushed the needle a little bit to see hey you know can we can we leverage candle currency maybe people can buy candles and you know if they haven't you know found a cape here or a mask they can leverage some of this it's not necessarily like i will buy the candles and then i'll buy things for myself the idea is that i will gift you candles and you can gift me candles so that you know we'll have that exchange and depending on what you want to do with your candles you can buy some some things or unlock some things and vice versa as well so this was the big one we went into beta testing over a year ago and really you know testing emotion at scale um we had over 20 000 plus players global some of you guys in here you've had a chance to check it out and these are the kind of key areas that

we began to test in so what was the emotional feedback of the game multiplayer dynamic friendship replay value that's the big one and in the beta test i would say that we kind of leveraged around six to eight builds um again focusing on you know each time all right what was the emotional experience of the game and looking at the engine of uh altruism and connection uh with each of the build we would get feedback and then we'd slowly tweak controls game mechanics story cooperative play some of the quests in the game and even move things around in the world if it helped you know people to be more generous with each other we used a tool called firebase which sees when players drop out of the game it's a terrible thing don't use firebase you're just like hey they're having fun no no they're not they hate the game and we also you know followed up each

build with in-game surveys let's find out what you think about the game we read uh you know feedback on discord twitter facebook we opened up our inboxes to the world and said send us your long emails tell us what you think pretty please and you know this was great we really wanted that feedback and so we built upon this narrative gameplay of altruism spreading light to the world and this was pretty much what was in the beta build again this was a time to refocus and recalibrate around friendship again the team spent a lot of time on this area because we felt this would be the key to the replay value and this was a big focus during the time okay so six months to nine months of iteration lots of qualitative and quantitative data we're all piling you know reading through every team member oh my god people were harsh

on this game um these are the things that we don't want to share but here i am sharing them um the the players as you can see struggled to understand what was going on in the game they didn't understand the user goal uh you know story was unclear to them sure there was some placeholder cinematics some players didn't even want to help other people they were not compelled they were just doing their own thing and that was it and then a certain the vocal members they were just outright rejecting multiplayer all together like this guy he was like i don't like that i'm forced to do this for some stuff let me be free to choose all right okay um and we had this consistently for the first portion of the beta trials it was very clear that we hadn't uh built enough into the story world and the players compassionate or friendship behavior but the biggest complaint really was that players felt the

friendship component of the game was imbalanced and this is harsh because we're trying to you know make a game that connects people right so you know one one guy was like you know i'm leveraging my friendship points to unlock content and collectibles in this world you're giving me candles i'm giving you candles i want your candles just to unlock the cool stuff you know um and it felt very inauthentic and at times very very greedy and we're tgc we don't do greedy i don't i don't know how to do greedy um and this was really tough on us so we took a bit of a break we took a step back and began to shift focus a reiterate on this emotional engine and try and look at different ways to represent altruism instead instead of building friendships around the act of altruism could we actually leverage altruism first and then see if people come to it and then form lasting friendships so

what that meant was we didn't focus so much on the friendship building component we just had to trust that it was going to happen people are going to be friends in this world we instead focused on building out moments of altruistic play across the npcs and also between players we redesigned some of the creature and civilian saving quests but you had to do it in a multiplayer setting the idea that four players would come together and and kind of shepherd light back into into the soul of a creature we began thinking about how we can make multiplayer more fun and start designing and releasing instruments musical instruments in sky people loved it even the people that didn't like you know to play instruments didn't know how to play it they were jiving it was awesome for them um and then we started also looking at new areas in the game that had nothing to do with story so we built out things like

an ice rink we had a crab pit i don't know why we would have a crab pit but there they are holding two crabs on the left they love that area by the way and this was just promoting you know friendship play was nothing to do with the story and the main focus is not progression through friendship but progression through altruism we talked about hugging and holding hands those abilities became unlockable very very quickly in the game very soon after you could just you know spend one candle and and you had that ability and finally we started to look at multiplayer challenges where the players would have to protect each other during certain sequences in the game so over the next six months we found that there was a slow but somewhat drastic change and some of the player feedback we were getting people were beginning to understand some of the story elements that we were trying to get through

and we were starting to see compassionate and community driven behaviors within some of the beta players a lot of the beta players stuck around and played the game every day and what was interesting was that they were once they had like you know played all the a story content and the b story content they were making adventures and stories on their own unprompted that's what they were coming back for in sky it wasn't necessarily the stories that we relayed to them um and somehow the unexpected replay value that we've been seeking all this time actually came from the players themselves instead of preparing content to put out into the world the world actually have became theirs already so it's still a work in progress but this is kind of the chaotic map of the different story structures we've been kind of playing around with we still have them the kind of main a mythology story the seasonal event content and then what i call the user generated

multiplayer stories peppered throughout the the world as well i want to share with you a letter that encapsulates what's possible with positive interactions in games and to really emphasize that the community themselves has redefined the trajectory of storytelling in sky we owe a lot to them and that's why we're working so hard to finish the game here's the team they're hustling i'm at gdc thank you very much the global the global release will be uh hopefully with you guys very soon so in conclusion uh just some tips as to how to approach uh emotional storytelling uh more so in a multi-player setting rather than a linear setting i would advocate that storytellers and developers look outside the conventional tropes and structures to find and explore new ideas of what emotional storytelling can be you can't dictate emotion at any point it's very hard instead experiment extensively how to

uncover and reveal what this emotional engine could look like keep testing keep working at it and see what drives the player from beginning to end that emotion might not be what you think it is treat your community very well their feedback is completely invaluable and probably the most authentic it can be and stay open to what could be available emotionally some of the emotions we saw in the game are happy accidents and actually reveal the true nature of what sky can be so i started the talk advocating more genres of narrative in video games can evoke more emotions in video games and i hope for you know hope that there's some ideas that i've shared with you today that you can go back to your teams or your studios to experiment with this topic is very very important to me i wholly advocate building out emotional storytelling in games and thank you so much

for your time today thank you