GDC Plays IGF Nominee Eliza with Matthew S. Burns

hi everyone welcome to the GDC twitch channel my name is Brian Francis I am here today with our wonderful guests in the lower left hand corner of the screen our wonderful guest is Matthew burns of Zack Tronics Matthew I believe would be accurate to describe you as the lead developer on this game we're playing today right mm-hmm yeah it's kind of unlike every other SAP xtronic scheme this is look sort of like my game I guess in a way the game question is called solitaire yeah it's called cup of food a soldier uh-huh okay so this is a different kind of solitaire from it's a it's a salt sir based on Kabu food out cards which are a kind of a you know a kind of Japanese playing card that you can still buy today in Tendo actually still makes them so you can bet by a nintendo brand physical couple through the cards if you want cards I really

hope I pronounced that right I'm sorry if I didn't that was actually not the game we're here playing we're playing Eliza this Eliza conveniently we have the name here on the screen for us is the latest game from the fine folks at SAC tronics like I mentioned Matthew our good friend here the developer if I call it a visual novel is that wrong is that not right that is absolutely correct it is a visual novel in almost every sense of the term yeah yeah well dig into that a little more but yeah Eliza is a visual novel set in the far-off land of Seattle in fact I got a really eerie look when I went on the light rail in this game and I was like wait I've been here it is it so like I said it's a light novel which means a narrative story about a app developed for treating mental health which is something that is happening in our real world it's a little weird a little prescient you might say it's different than a lot of the other games we've streamed which have been kind of

delving through all kinds of systems this one shows off some of the fine writing that has showed up and in interesting characters and settings that have been part of others act Ronix games but usually are sort of helping make the the interesting puzzles take shape but Eliza has been nominated for a couple of IGF rewards and I'm pretty sure that those awards are the award for excellence and narrative and the you Seamus McNally grand prize that's right right mm-hmm yeah with that in mind we are here today with Matthew to take your questions and my questions and everyone's questions whoever's questions we are here today as we play the game check it out sort of dive through the ins and outs of the way Eliza tells it's pretty unique story we are only going through I find about 30 minutes of the story so if you're concerned about spoilers we're gonna go through what what I call the first 90 minutes or so unless I get stuck on

something or nothing's anything gets stuck on or if I get distract you won't get stuck yeah unless you want to try to beat solitaire on card or something like that but this is not exit punks no look it's not any Zack Tronics game and that sounds right like you can it's a visual novel would you mind just explaining to us the origins of this game and what sort of got you and the folks in Seneca College started on a visual novel as opposed to the normal puzzlers that we see for me only sure yeah so before before I worked at SEC Tronics full-time I worked at a university the University of Washington here this is sort of in-between like working on Triple A games and and the other stuff that I was doing and as part of that academic job I saw a bunch of different technologies that were you

know that were in development having to do with like trying to apply game technologies to like health and education and things like that so while I was there one of the demos that I saw was this like kind of virtual therapist application think that people were working on where there was like a an avatar like a second looking avatar that would like interview you about your day or whatever and this was in 2014 and I remember seeing that demo just being like that's that's such that's so wild like it just struck me in a certain way you know it seems kind of dystopian it seems just like an interesting story like I had this idea for like just the scene of like someone talking about some very very deep topics about themselves you know when you go to therapy sometimes you're accessing some really deep things and then it's just

like this Amazon Alexa on the other side of it you know it was just like not like like that's the contrast between those things is so great so I was like thinking about like telling a story about this and so I found on my own time I always do my own writing I have some twine games that I've that I've made and so I thought well maybe I'll do 28 about this where you are talking to a virtual therapist or where someone is talking to a virtual therapist and maybe maybe you can maybe you work at the office and you are like applying AI therapy to people like you don't actually do therapy on your own but you like are the vector for this AI to do therapy to people so I kind of worked out that basic premise in twine form I still have some of the twine prototypes that I made that they're like two or three of them and the basic like format of the game was actually all just done in twine so there's like there's a

there's a very early one where it's just like you're sitting in your office and then you have a couple options of like look out the window do another therapy session go into the kitchen and see if there's cookies and things like that and so it's working on this again in my own time and then around the time after we shipped opus magma my thinking like 2016 as echt Ronix I was talking to to Zack and I've been we were just chatting about stuff and I was like well I'm working on this story about this virtual therapist and it would be cool to do it as like a visual novel with with some art and you know if you could get some actors and things like that and Zach was just kind of like yeah let's do it like let's let's give it a try I mean so because I had this kind of fully formed idea already that yeah I mean it wasn't fully for him but it was was pretty well well formed and I had a lot of the

script don't worry so it wasn't it wasn't you know hugely risky because to him for his partner that visual novels is very simple there's no you know he doesn't really have to like think about like the the design space of it too much there was some user interface work obviously but there wasn't like this you know big design space that he needed to explore anything like that like by saying it is gonna be a visual novel II kind of grounds it in an established genre you know an established style so it was pretty easy to think about doing at that point yeah let's talk about the visual novel miss of it and how there's still kind of a sense of interaction with this game that is means you're not just sort of clicking through dialogue and you're not making a lot of choices like there's

some light branching that I've encountered so far but I want to talk about what we're looking at here on screen which is the dialogue that's playing as you know the character here is explaining their problems to you you can character you're not just you're playing as Evelyn who is using the eliza interface to interact with this person so right now things feel very on rails but early but early on there's a lot of talk about something that feels like it will be a choice which is the idea of you you're supposed to be reading off this script here that i mousing over and then down here obviously the texas is popping up and in the very first conversation the the character here trying to help begs you to go off-script and the the software prompts you to go off-script by staying on script by saying things that seem off script so yes it kind of this loop that even though it is nothing has changed in the in the scripting and the formatting and the in the string of pearls that you're constructing there's an illusion the player is suddenly conscience of control

than what they have choice over in a way that a lot of other games like to make big statements about but this one sort of does just by a railroading right through the conversation how did you sort of come to that that so there is design space right like even though there's yeah a lot of those doesn't choose your own adventure there's still the player's brain is being wrapped around the idea of what choices they have the ability to make and how that affects these characters I'm speaking broadly Mowgli did go into specifics but yeah what were your thoughts about that when you're writing in I think I you know I didn't have this term when I was doing it but I feel like if if interaction if interactive design is like giving people choices or is about giving people choices then taking choices away is kind of like a it's kind of like the negative space of game design in a way and that can be very powerful to say that you know in this instance you don't have any choices and so there actually was I had I played

around with a couple different ideas of life how these therapy sessions would actually work and in in some early versions it's like oh well you should you should pick between like these three things to say and then maybe the maybe the client feels better if you pick this thing versus that other thing and the more I thought about that and like making making therapy like a mechanic the less yeah the less I like that because it would be making this you know you'd be making the argument that like all someone needs to do is hear the right thing and then they feel better you know it's kind of it's there there's a lot of um but it it there's a lot of issues around around trying to like that make make something interactive that actually has to do with real human beings and and like what you say to them and how they feel like I didn't want us

reduce people to like these little mechanical objects that large just like oh you did a great job they're applying them by like picking this picking the right things because that's not what favorite thing is right like Oren shouldn't be that if you go to therapy your therapist is not just like picking items from a menu or I should I should how I should hope not is unless you're using one of the apps unless you use one of the apps which is right a whole other thing and manualized therapy also isn't as a thing and so that's a whole other thing that this could be critiquing I think but so eventually yeah eventually it was just like you know I think the therapy sessions are going to be completely linear you're gonna be railroaded upon them and then hilariously you get that you get that sort of completion screen with you like little metrics and like how they rated you and stuff like that those are you have no agency over that right yeah those are completely can't write like them and and it's funny because some

people understand this but like other people play the entire therapy session click through it and then they're like oh but how do I get a better rating oh yeah and it's it's funny because it's so it's so ingrained in us that like you know you do something and then you get your little overwatch badges at the end and that's just like you did you got this this this and so those you know that that completion screen being completely fake is you know my way of like having a little bit of commentary on that because like you you had absolutely no choice there's nothing you could have done but you still get these like fun little instrumentalized badges and you know XP and stuff like that at the end yeah we are looking at it right now I wanted to talk about the interface soon you said Zack you know I had a lot less to do this time but but you did some interview I work on this this UI is really simple this is sort of a little standard I like although I like the nice Paigey kind of feeling here along the

top of UI but when you're in there there's a couple really cool things happening which is on the left there's kind of some prompts that are firing off on the left side the screen which is what we are here there's the prompts that are firing off that are like positive or negative responses to the dialogue over here there's kind of like this thing you know like their audio inflection I was really surprised that the waveforms on this seem to be lining up and I was surprised at how there were all these little things firing over here positive negative on the dialogue and it wasn't just generic flow like it was felt really immersive for for even though this was in such an intimate moment how many work did that take it was a fair amount of work to hook that all up all of those you know all the all of those metrics and things like that are pretty fake they're they're kind of like fluttering around and just there to to make you feel like it's doing something that even comes up in the story that like if all you really have to do is say exactly what they tells you

to you don't actually really need all of those metrics right like if this job really existed you wouldn't need to like actually have all of that information but the the headset the fictional headset that you put on shows all that stuff just to kind of like make you think that it's doing something it's it's sort of like when you you know when you like go to your bank's website or something and they're like it'll have like animations and stuff for things when it's not it's not really you know that it's not doing anything but it'll play that animation for you anyway just to like make you feel better about how it like can't contact the server or whatever yeah so that stuff is kind of a little bit of a UX like commentary on like how we like to see that it's like so that it looks fancy but it looks like it's doing something and you can imagine that the tech company in this built all that out so that it demos really well so that

like people you know think that it's doing so conversation get back on talking about the game's narrative if you got folks for a question if you folks have questions for Matthew and chat feel free to drop I'll grab them and ask him myself the name character story Evelyn takes the job as a Eliza proxy in part it seems because she seems to also be dealing with kind of a emotional or mental I wouldn't call it a crisis but definitely a hard time is sort of fits the bill and I was sort of struck by playing the first five ten minutes of this game how super emotionally intense it is especially when all there is to focus on is the text and not any shiny doodads overwatch badges company whatever and I was wondering about what your experience was I can sort of conceive of what it would you know sort of the writing and letting understanding a character and letting it flow out but

I was curious about how you wanted players to understand Evelyn in this way and and how you could help them understand her printed position when all use her to have her dialogue trees to work with yeah I mean I think you know there are a lot of cues at the beginning of the game that this is gonna be kind of a more introspective kind of experience right like it's start the keep the key image of the game is sort of sitting on the bench and it's this very very blue grey Seattle day and there's a big focus on the kind of the clouds in the sky and things like that Evelyn at the start of this story I think is sort of recovering from a depressive episode and so there's a lot of like people saying wow I haven't seen you in a while you know where have you been how have you been sorry I didn't contacted you and things like that because she's been kind of just more or less moping around in her apartment for close to three years which is a

pretty pretty long time part of that part of that is it's really not like it's there's a lot of reasons why that's the case one is that it's kind of it's nice to start a story that way because she's like reconnecting with with people that she used to talk to but but don't quite know so that you know they it gives you an execute a little bit of an excuse to like fill people in on what has happened in the past right this is this is it's sort of like a gentle ER version of like starting a story where someone has like amnesia or something like that like that you know the hero washes up on the beach and has amnesia then like everyone you meet it's new because everyone that the story is new to you as well so mechanically like that's a useful that's a useful thing emotionally I think it's really important to show her kind of

like getting her bearings again and making a very large decision about what she needs to do next in her life that's where this game is basically going is it's building to Evelyn needs to make a decision about what she's gonna do for basically for the rest of her life for her you know for her career what is she gonna dedicate her time and energy to what's important to her and having that depressive episode where she didn't have anything that she cared about you know this is this story is about coming into the process of like discovering that again and figuring that out and making a big maybe a career change or moving away or something like that just a little very large decision that affects your life quite a bit and then you know there's there's another aspect to it too of like she's really burns out I kind of wanted to tell a story about people in

their 30s and so Evelyn isn't her that you know Evelyn and Ray and Nora are all in their 30s and at least you know my personal experience of like kind of like getting into my 30s I had this moment where I was just like wow I don't I don't even like I worked really hard throughout my 20s and I don't even know why I did that like I look back and it was just like well I worked very hard and I now I don't like what do I have what have I accomplished by doing that and so there's this kind of like moment of looking back and feeling burnt out and kind of asking myself why I did that and I think that that is definitely part of Evelyn's character as well I was right on this is a usual thing that I reply with and every time I say today horrified um for this not for this game there's nothing

I'm struck by how in many Choice dialogue-driven games there's a moral system sometimes as a character system some really interesting games are kind of using an information system like you want to make a different tile out of choices because you're motivated to get certain information in a game without those tangible rewards I'm still sensing kind of a reason to pick different dialogue choices here as I play like the it's kind of its kind of like how something like people people say people don't say what's on their mind they sort of translate what's on their mind into dialogue if that makes sense and that's true in real life and that's true of really good screen places and you're talking about one thing you're talking about you know sort of something else I mean I'm curious how you approach that as a writer in this in in this story and maybe other stories you work on too cuz you've had to transition from objective-based dialogue to open dialogue I think that it was important

to me to like be honest in a way like I don't I don't really like the idea of fooling the player into thinking that that there's more agency then there really is you know I would rather I would much rather say here's here's this thing that you have to be on board with and go along with as opposed as opposed to saying here's this mysterious system where you pick dialogue options and then stuff happens but you're not you don't quite understand why stuff happened you know like maybe it's tallying points and in the background or maybe it's like you did this you did you picked the wrong kind of like cookie to eat so somebody doesn't like you or something like that like that kind of stuff feels arbitrary to me and it feels kind of you know not necessarily that true to life even so like to me I think it's I just want to lay it out there and say hey yeah these

these are the things that you can choose they won't matter in the look in the long run in these these particular choices that you get throughout most of the game are kind of these flavor choices you know you can you can make Evelyn a little bit more defiant or a little bit more agreeable and these things are you know the reward for picking them is just hearing that hearing the conversation go in that direction for a little while before it kind of wraps back around to what the conversation was going to be anyway so yeah you know it wasn't like a it definitely wasn't gonna be ever gonna be a story where it was like you know there are lots of different routes and like lots of different outcomes and so and so we'll remember that and you know things like that because I don't think that just wasn't it just wasn't where this story was going right you know it wasn't like a which person's life should you

save or any anything like that in fact that kind of stuff like can be very gut wrenching if you build it up properly which person's life do you save but it's also like that doesn't come up a lot in in real life and I kind of wanted to like ground this very much in a little real life unless if you're like a medical professional or something like that but I it was it was really about like yeah choosing what you do as as as a tech worker gasps in this in this instance man and this is not a question this is not a question but an observation I sort of think it's interesting how in this dialogue with Nora she's talking about you know giving up the tech life and moving over to the artist and and rock her life but Thurston she talks about the tech business being a business causing as many problems it solves and and she got tired of trying to get rich trying to get famous trying to change the world but there's still kind of a want to change the world in her

personality that comes through right in hand even as she sort of knocks down the job she used to have it that's such an interesting and good psychoanalysis for a character you know still be fixated on something even while they're tired of it like I said observation not question my actual question is I think it's time to talk about text in games like this I was watching a interview with one of the lead devs on Disko Elysium and they talked about how they were using the right side of the screen and the lower right hand corner of particular to be this place where to create this kind of Twitter esque addiction quality to text this game doesn't have that although your choices over here do show up in the same corner the screen that he was referring to how did you exact think about this kind of process obviously there's sort of a conventional visual novel style which brings dialogue into the space of where subtitles usually go that was somebody disco Elysium guy brought up - was that most most games protect here because there are subtitles

go but this isn't text can go anywhere text could couldn't be across the screen text can be floating over people's heads texting in the scene right now the dialogue could be popping up in comic bubbles right over their heads if we wanted it to well yes if you wanted it to I have no say in the matter but did you think about that at all what was your approach for for making interactive dialogue so definitely just started with the standard visual novel stuff you know the way I thought about it was I here's this story that I want to tell and here are these themes that I want to explore and stuff like that and then the cool thing is since that visual novels actually are pretty well-developed and storied genre of game you know and there's a grammar that visual novels have developed over the past 15 even 20 20 years of these

caret you you have character portraits you have background it's that they exist on and then you have this sort of text window at the bottom of the screen and so using like established visual novel stuff was very useful for us because it was like this this way to just say like some of these some of these problems have already been solved not necessarily solved like that's this is this is absolutely the best way to do them but solved in terms of like this is a language that we can use an established language that we can use to express the ideas in this particular story yeah so so we started there and and you know I think it works out pretty well the dialogue looks pretty nice the display of the character's name on the on the far left there kind of comes from plates if you've ever read this script to a

play it has that kind of look to it this was as opposed to like putting another small character portrait there or like putting putting it in another like a box on the screen stuff like that and then because of the this this game is pretty much just a series of conversations between Evelyn and one other person there are some exceptions but like well most of the game is a conversation between Evelyn and another person so it kind of just worked to that Evelyn would always be on the right side and her choices would kind of be on you know represented on the right side and then whoever she was talking to would be on the left side which is kind of the you know in in the in Western culture the left side is kind of the stronger side because he started he read from left to right oh sorry I'm just following it falling a little bit in love with Meredith and

Mercer dramaturg and game destryed designer extraordinaire because it's an excellent title excellent Festo about know her excellent man if it benefits doe about about how to how to play solitaire right yeah I'm glad you like my my bit characters - oh man I just love that I love that even in this you know even in like I said I thought I genuinely when I was playing especially hobo's Magnum was falling in love with the like little bits of story that were creeping in there and I'm just loving that like the way you guys handle devices and you what like I love this little phone you'd built in I love buttons things there's just like look this little scroll bar works oh my god these and it she's doing it on the phone these are little details that every time I pick up one of those extra necks game your whole team in just to impress me with these sorry no but I'm kissing up okay we're at the bottom of the hour right now which means we have about 30

minutes left in our chat or so go a little shorter baby you go longer we'll see if I can see we got a few folks hanging out if you've got questions for Matt or you just want to say hi go ahead and chat we will grab them right on schedule TFK 365 would like to say as a software engineer as early 20s Erland story really resonated with them they just wanted to say thanks for making this game awesome thank you for playing yeah that's really nice to hear and also move on with my questions Matt thank you so much for putting in auto-advance text in this game text games are so hard to stream for the most part and the auto-advance making it so easy again that's another that's another visual novel thing that was like you know over the over the decades they've just developed like this standard set of features that are created based on Anita and stuff like that so it was really nice to use to use things like that yeah

I suppose the art direction for a second I didn't put this in the notes I gave you but I know you you weren't doing the visual for this game I'd love to know more about what your thoughts were as someone who had this idea for the story and you could have said you could have gone really wild with the setting you brought it in more to a more familiar setting I'm curious how you then worked with an artist to go okay we still want things to look i catching and appealing and and to let this the visual sell story to which yeah thankfully they have been in the background here the coffee shop the that's behind this text message stuff oh my gosh so many cookie options give me a second here but yeah would you mind talking about the art and how your process interacted with your art team yeah well you think about what your favorite type of cookie is I can say that it was we did take a bit of time at the beginning to really think about like the best way to approach the the style of this because we knew we didn't want to do like super anime art or anything

like that for the story it wasn't it wasn't supposed to be like super stylized or anything this is a story that like takes place in Seattle and modern day right so it's a pretty it's a pretty grounded story at the same time we didn't necessarily want like this photo realistic treatment either without a point under that even means so we kind of settled it took a little while but we kind of settled on this sort of painterly mostly realistic but also somewhat stylized approach to both the characters and the backgrounds and sort of taking reality and then like painting it with a little bit of a low stylized eye but that you know kind of going for going for a kind of a naturalist look I

think it I think it ended up working out pretty well like I think you can you can get like aware this game is coming from by by looking at the art and character portraits which is a testament to the to the artists who did a scent fantastic job oh here's one of my favorite questions to talk to writers and narrative designers about I have a weird big stump speech about how the incredible stories we get to experience in videogames and elsewhere outside the outside of videogames and movies and books how the narratives and the themes and the characters that we get to encounter are often shaped and informed by the medium and not just by the medium but by the tools that are used to make the medium so there's a lot of things that the average player sort of doesn't get to see about the the the process if you will that totally shapes the kind of story that comes out using twine at the

top I don't know quite how you translate twine into whatever tools you guys use electronics excuse me y'all use electronics um what about definitely yeah for sure yeah yeah well so so twine when I was using twine it was definitely it was super super early in what this was so I didn't it didn't go directly from twine into this um and I when I decided like okay this is gonna be a visual novel then I then I like wrote it for real basically keeping that in mind that it was going to be a visual novel I think that you know having that having that set form again really does inform a lot of things like for example most of the conversations are one-on-one that's not necessarily a limitation of visual novels like some of them have like free

people some of them have scenes of up to like 4 or 5 people sometimes I don't think that it always works as well this kind of the the basic visual novel conversation style is usually between two people and so the form platform like in forms like what I wrote write like and how how I take advantage of the strengths the strengths and weaknesses of the medium in some way the idea of like having your phone for example like not all games give you like a little in-game phone but because you have an in-game phone I wanted to play around with having some of the conversations happening over I am versus happening in in so called real life and then also just all these like emails that you get right you're looking at one right now [Music] someone forward forwards you an article that they saw in the newspaper and that

kind of like adds another dimension to the to the story so thinking about like the the technology that you use absolutely affects like how the how the story is told and then from there like the content of it no I just want to say thank you for being one of the like there's a lot of fake newspaper articles that show up in video games almost none of them use the inverted pyramid that we have - we have yeah yeah yeah I am I'm proud of like like actually following newspaper II guidelines for writing the newspaper right thank you my partner works in news too so I'll let her know that you guys did that now that I found that y'all did that no that I found that here yeah but that's that's um that makes a lot of sense okay I'm going to advance oh my god like folks I don't

know if you know we are the game developers we're a little far down the rabbit hole right now I there might be a little bit of GDC in the scene Simon doesn't doesn't kill me but there's a little bit of there's a little bit of GDC in this show this year the dates are moving corner of the screen and we hope to see you there the award show that Eliza will be is not many devorah's on Wednesday night Wednesday the 18th there there's it there's my counter here okay well this is also kind of a TED talk as well so it's time you can see the the very dramatic presentation here is kind of

meant to evoke the feeling of like his his sort of TED talk like pageantry and pompous your you you called them pompous I didn't well no well so I mean this character is pompous so I'm making you know yeah this was fun yes it's true I'm including myself in that um this was fun because I designed like I offered these like fake slides for him to have and then it kind of the artist stood of passing like making them look especially like techy and kind of yeah all these triangles here artist did that's that's what really makes and like the green glow right yeah [Music]

planning and producing this kind of game obviously you're the lead you're the writer you get to say like you get to have a lot of creative control over this thing and you know you sort of get to say what's possible what's not obviously with a script that you were working from that sort of makes it different than other narrative games get written but there is still a factor when you're making him like this okay we're producing this much content it takes this much time we can budget for this much we have to scale for it going over by game much if something's not working if we get stuck somewhere how did produce some challenges sort of intersect with your creative vision that's what I'd like to know I think for this it was just a matter of like really keeping a lid on on the number of assets that we made and I tried to be really careful of that and keep that in mind when I was writing a script like characters and locations like everything is pretty stripped down to like what absolutely

has to be there because the only way we would have made this is you know as frugally as possible so when I introduced like a background or a character it was always with you know there's always a very specific like purpose that that exists for and the stuff that we did that was a little bit bonus or extra was like the solitaire game the little meditation app that you have with the pixel art on your phone those are like little bonus things that we might have we might have cut if we had running overboard on some of this other stuff but luckily you know we went in the script was basically done the the the entire script for the game was kind of at a rough draft point when we started bringing on the artists and actually putting the game into production so when we started it was

like okay we know we'll need exactly this amount of stuff because the the script was not like open-ended like I don't know how I'm going to end this and I oh wait I need I need new assets in order to do this so it was actually you know from a production standpoint it was actually quite under control the whole the whole time but that but that's not always possible I think we really benefited from having a basically a finished script and having this say like just saying right off the bat that it's going to be a visual novel and not necessarily mechanically innovating in any particular way right like I wouldn't say that this game is mechanically innovative it's not really doing any any like things that any other given game hasn't done before and so it's really though if it innovates in any way it's in its content mm-hmm yeah it's so interesting that's such a that's tough I feel forgetting developers because

part of the the push for any game is you're trying to make something that you can find appeal that can find an audience one very quick way is to say we're innovative gameplay you're going to play something you haven't played before and that's straight true and when you say you're gonna play something you haven't played before the liza that's still true in that this unique story is you know it hasn't existed before especially not in mainstream games but but sometimes it's a harder sell for an audience especially wouldn't unfortunately discourse or dialogue about narrative the games can sometimes game oh well this could have just been a book I don't think lies it could have been a book I don't think so either although definitely you know some people I you know I've criticized it for for not being like mechanically innovative right like it's it doesn't it doesn't give you any like fancy new like reverbs to play with and so I can I can see that like if your interest is in narrative games for the purpose of like creating this you know cool new way of

interacting and stuff like that then this Eliza might not seem very impressive yeah but my hope is that yeah people can focus on the content and like think about the the themes of the story and think about the characters and it's like that enjoy it on that level you're transparent about where advances and other games sort of brought me as a player I'm kind of used to the idea I'm growing more used to and in love with the idea that if I mouse over the text or or mouse over things in the scene interesting things will happen maybe even go back to the classic adventure game format where like if this scene was sort of presented without the text you can mouse over and then maybe one of these like heads would pop up and do a weird thing or something right right that's like an educational game the gate in the right the but you've got the folks who were working on tyranny you've got disco Elysium like like making us that when you mouse over things other

interest or or interesting things happen and the thing is I know you know how to do that because they played the writer will do something which was you and Tom Bissell and that was such a cool like interactive experiment that is also the kind of work that has been done by a lot of great works authors entwined shout out to friends of the show like Chris Leben who gets to do stuff like that and they're so what was your thought process about like it's weird to say why is this feature not in the game when we just talked about not innovating on features right but I might as well ask like what are your thoughts about like that kind of those kind of mechanics sure I think you know but I mean I love those kinds of mechanics and I would say that like if it's not an Eliza it just didn't feel right for the type of story than it is the limited amount of like kind of looking around an environment that you can do analyze it you know it's every so often you get the scene where you could like you can look at your apartment or you can look at the office and and f1

has a little line about the like the coffee maker and the in the office and things like that those are these little very you know extremely light exploration moments with no stakes and completely optional I think my answer is just that like that's just it's just not the type of game that I think really supports that I think the delight of like those edutainment games you remember the word edutainment that people used background that was my first article for gamasutra was about edutainment oh my god um so you know that like that like when you click on something in a fun little animation plays or something like that it's just not that it's not really that type of game you're it it's not it's just it's not gonna reward you like just clicking around on stuff because it's you know when you're when you are attending a conference about mental health applications and watching someone's keynote speech and

then running into your old boss in the in the lobby as you are now you know that that kind of like fun exploration stuff isn't really on your mind right so I would say like it just comes from like the story and being in embodied in that place man this contractor parking is so work the job I worked at before I worked at this job we didn't even get partner when I first got there so it's like yeah usually to find street parking and I and in Los Angeles like you know what's the challenge looks all a lot of that you know but you know it's a lot of that like it's it's funny because as you as you have learned in the story by now Evelyn used to be a full-time employee of Samba and so coming back as a contractor she's like kind of encountering all of this stuff that contractors actually chase and it's a

contrast from her previous you know experience its Condon and I kind of I kind of wanted to do that whole like blue badge versus orange badge thing which is the thing me and the time is - tech industry thing that's a game industry thing - it is yeah I hope I hope I don't get you in trouble right now because I on Jesus I stumbled on something that I was looking at screenshots for this game that made me pause and ask so our friend here is wearing the logo of a popular football team American mm-hmm I assume you had to get clearances for that or is this artistic interpretation this is an artistic interpretation artistic interpretation there we go up skewness if that was a like like making things real-life in games is sometimes hard because it's so hard to like recreate them the brain did world we live in this is I'll just I'll just say it that's that is absolutely a calculated risk that we decided to take we thought about it and usually game makers are very very skittish about this yeah they don't want

anything at all in any kind of capacity to possibly show up but you know I thought that like by setting things in Seattle and making it realistic you know why not have some some real stuff in there and we thought we were just like you know it makes sense and I think that they there is a case to be made that this is allowable right so it's like kind of making a stand a little bit like making a statement and saying we think that games are you know the the defense for artistic interpretation as games are like art right so they should be to do things like this yeah and so obviously like a TV show would go ahead and get clearance certainly independent art there's a lot of times also hazard to the risk of the skirts the lines on this paneling often for the same reason for not for naturalism Persians these are

great people where these are things that people right right so yeah this is kind of like our small you know our small flag that we're planting and it's saying that I think that that this should be allowable [Music] I really enjoyed just getting the talk and and I've enjoyed having you folks listen for my part I will go ahead oh yeah here's one visual novels are the visual novel style is actually a little more familiar than folks may know if they play games like Fire Emblem if you play other Zach Tronics games it's elements pop up there you know the talking head of the scrolling text and depending on how high the budget for the game is you may have different animations that accompany those like

even if we're fully animated or just jumping from pose to pose obviously I have you know played more of Eliza I realized this is very this is sort of one face per conversation which seems quite economical but what were your thoughts about that what we thought was sort of making the most of a limited asset palette which is something the visual novels do so well yeah I we so I was hoping that it would work this way I think it does work I think that the you know the actual still expressions that the artists drew and painted are actually very very expressive like Gabriel's face right here that you're looking at right now I think it's actually a very expressive face and has a lot of emotion to it already and if he was like switching between faces a lot and you know as you spoke to him I think combined with this kind of semi realistic art style it would just kind of like bring more attention to the fact that it's like not animated and

then he's like switching faces and things like that so this was just a it was another aesthetic decision as well as like a production decision that kind of went hand in hand which is that I think that these these very nice expressive portraits are enough on their own you know and combined with the with the amazing voice acting that the actors provided I think makes these characters very rich without needing to to give them away facial expressions that actually change I'm really curious what kind of approach you've bought as this kind of the person in charge of the story to go into the recording booth and hear your dialogue what was kind of your process for working with the actors here so the biggest thing that I told that every actor was that naturalism was the was the most important saying that all of these people that were speaking to

are real people and that it's just important for like if they if they read something and it doesn't feel right that they can they can try to like say what what comes to mind like like you know contract things or run two sentences together that are listed as separate lines in the script or put in throwing pauses throw in throw in you knows things like that to try to make the dialogue feel like people actually talking yeah and it turns out video game boy sectors don't get to do that as much as maybe other types of actors because a lot of video game voice acting is you you must say the exact line and have to stop between each line there's there's a lot of parameters and that's not to say that that's bad it's just because of the way the game works if they have to they have to stick to a very very regimented way of like kind of like saying things so

being given the freedom to open up a little bit I think they really responded to it and I gave some really amazing performances and if they said something that was different from the script or if they ad-libbed a little bit or added things or whatever it was fine I could just go back and change the you know what the text says to match that so it was a it was a great process because you feel like you're like creating the character with the actor and not just having an actor committed like a state where it's in that way and that that I think you know if the voice acting ended up working well I think it's partially because of that it's like including them in the process of creating of creating that character and giving them you know making them feel like they have the space to really go places and really explore things okay with that we're coming to the end of our hour here and I think Matthew is going to go back to you

know life is done there's other games that got to get made out there in the world um yeah we're gonna we're gonna quietly wind things down here on the GTC twitch channel thank you all for watching today thank you for playing Eliza with us this game is nominated for the 2029 GF Awards you will be able to watch the award ceremony here on the GGC twitch channel again that is on Wednesday the 18th next month which is coming up real soon you keep saying next month in February and suddenly it's a few days away because even though it's sleep here it's still you know like there's a couple of less month days you get to work with if you are attending GGC you will be able to watch the awards yourself if you've just dropped by West Hall lower-level you will see all the signage to get in there just sit there and watch and hopefully you'll eyes it win something but if it doesn't another great game is gonna win because all the nominees are great students on top of that I would like to recommend if you're going to the show you can check

out Eliza at the igf pavilion I don't remember exactly where that will be on the show floor this year because they move around a little but if you wander the show floor you will find it you'll be able to check out the game for yourself and hey maybe you'll decide to pick it up and play it but that Matthew I think we asked this question every time we wrap up but just in case where can they find you if they have more questions about Eliza you can find me on Twitter at Matthews seiji Matthew s ciji and my website is also Matthews AG calm and you can go there and see my other work my short stories and you can contact me either way this profile picture is of a wonderful cat it's your cat right yes yeah my Twitter profile is a picture of my cat you can really nervous on your live like saying things that are definitive because that must be like really onerous as a guest but let me tell you is like trying to hose these things making definitive statements just feels like Oh as someone to come back gonna come back and see me I don't know

why I'm Scottish all of a sudden but don't know what there's gonna sue you for saying that the profile was there cats cute may go excuse me that was not my cat it was my friend's cat oh I see I see I see it's like I mean I don't know if I don't know if that's like just a normal hosting problem or if that's just my own exactly but you know what I won't do if I have anxiety I'm not going to use therapy at myself alright that's wandering into territory I should save for office channel but have a good day everyone bye