GDC Plays Pendragon with Inkle Studios

game aimed squarely at me because it is uh narrative and strated and turn-based title strategy all in one so as i begin uh we're watching some pre-recorded footage here feel free to uh ask questions for john and tom while we're talking we're here to talk about making pen dragons so please be sure to um square your questions that way and uh yeah we're just gonna have a conversation about making these games but i should let them introduce themselves john tom how are you doing we're good i mean launch day is always a bit crazy um i'm suffering a little bit from having pressed the refresh button on twitter just a few thousand too many times today but otherwise i'm good it's been really nice actually as we've launched a lot of games zinc has been going about 10 years now and this is the first time that we've launched a game that we actually had finished like two weeks ago like you kind of sprint to the final line but this one we because we knew the game is so complicated and so like weirdly put together that we really

were very scared about getting it solid and tested so we started testing ages ago and then we finished testing and then for the last few weeks we've been going should we add this nah let's not add that it's been quite relaxed actually for some in some ways but launch days always launch days always nerve-wracking so we're we're okay we're okay yeah and uh john we've had you on the stream before tom you're new to the stream would you mind introducing yourself hi yeah i'm tom i am uh john what's my job title um senior designer developer now it's all the words i make things with john inkle and yeah everything john was saying like we took today off in fact um because apparently we're that confident or stupid but nothing seems to have gone wrong which is really nice and yeah such a change of pace to normally our games get released yeah sorry everyone who has caught me looking down on my phone i had to tweet out that we're live

uh we uh you know it's it's live it's live television this is where we make our mistakes uh for you to see a quick shout out to follow let in chat thank you for joining us today fablet we'd love to have you uh john and tom let's get to it uh pendragon like i said narrative game turn-based strategy uh um uh and it's cool it's neat you're seeing me discover how cool and neat it is right now where i'm like navigating a conversation by doing turn-based strategy things can you tell me how this game started and what were sort of inkle's design goals uh after after the uh interesting game that was interesting and ambitious heaven's vault yeah so the chronology doesn't quite work like that the game pen dragon was already quite heavily designed by the time we released heaven's mother so but the two are kind of connected basically while we were working on heaven's vault which is like a big 3d game lots of cameras lots of like [ __ ] around with 3d and stuff like that

when we wanted to not be working on heaven's vault when we needed a break especially tom tom was building a turn-based strategy prototype board game mostly just because it was the most unlike kevin's vault thing he could possibly do with his spare time while still making a game that's about right isn't it it's about right yeah yeah um and so we were messing around with that and kind of over lunch breaks and like when we went to the pub in the evenings and we'd just sort of try out the rules of this game and sort of and play it and after about maybe two years of fiddling around with that prototype we ended up with a really good really strong two-player game that was a little bit like chess or a little bit like checkers and it was played with counters on a 5x5 board and you could have made it out of wood and sold it in a shop and we kind of thought well we can't do anything with that because we make narrative games and you can't possibly stick a narrative on on a game like that can you but then once you have a feeling like that once

you have a question like well you can't possibly do that can you you start to think well or can you that's kind of how pendragon happened i think it was like after the end of heaven's vault we had this sense that we didn't really know what to do next we didn't want to make kevin's vault too we had this bro just like knocking around so i think we kind of thought well let's just see how far we can take this idea of putting a narrative onto an abstract strategy board game and making it work because it won't work it's going to fall apart it's going to go wrong this is a ridiculous idea it can't be done and then we carried on doing it and like yeah and now we've released it and it appears to work so if we got to the other end of it but tom do you want to tell any of your experience aside you know fiddling it's cool to see a game that you fiddle with in your spare time become you know a full game yeah i mean it's honestly the dream at least it's certainly my dream um to have like a boss be like oh let's make that game you've been playing with um but yeah it goes back a really long way actually goes back to when i first joined the company and

we were porting 80 days to steam and that's when at least according to my notes that i've been keeping it goes back to and i remember showing it to uh joe because i think john you were off having your second kid so joe actually played it a lot more at the time and then when joe went up to have his kid that's when you started playing it with me and that's when you started throwing these dangerous ideas of adding a story to it and i started getting all scared um and you proposed that you would add the ai into the game because i couldn't play it um against myself so i had to test it over lunch you said i'll write the ai and then i might also add a story or something and i was like yeah sure that sounds like yeah i made a i made a fasty impact with you which was i agreed to write you an ai on the condition that i could also write a narrative layer for it and you were like yeah sure that sounds like a fair trade slowly over the next two years the narrative layer took your beautiful balance symmetric game and ripped it to

pieces yeah let's talk uh we're actually the game is demonstrating something interesting which is so unlike this the strategy game has a little bit of chess in it which is uh your units can only move certain directions depending on uh uh certain tiles and capturing is just a matter of like this isn't like x-com this isn't fire emblem there's no fancy stats it's just move capture so it's very chest like to me um while units mostly move diagonally they cannot capture other pieces while they must be adjacent to them so it creates this interesting back and forth that it's more complex later on tom i suppose since this is your baby like what made you go oh yeah chess that's a game that is already solved i'm going to make strategy chess with and then it's arthurian um so it's sort of a bug bearer of mine like i really really like tactics games and like i started playing fire emblem and advanced wars on game boy when i was a kid and i always really loved those kind of games but i'm not a pc gamer and so i sort of missed out on um like xcom and that kind of thing and

whenever i tried learning them i i just couldn't because there's too many buttons and rules and menus stuff and so this was kind of me trying to take what i really loved about tactics games and boil it down into something without any context menus without um like resources or numbers i want to just basically make it really minimal which you know also means you can make it on your own fairly easily i thought it would be a really fun design challenge and it actually turns out that that's really hard because it needs to be all of the menus and stuff that you know gives these games the complexity they need to be interesting for like 20 hours um and obviously chess solved this you can play a lot of chess and so i ended up sort of going down the same route just because that seems to be the route if you want to make a tactics game that is very replay although i won't get infinite um you kind of have to find ways to give all of your

actions um as much nuance to them as possible like this action isn't just something minor it actually changes the state in this sort of fairly important way so you have you can really puzzle over each move right on yeah so oh john go for it go for it i was just gonna say i remember one of your goals um was that that idea that you wanted people on every move to be stopping and thinking oh this is an interesting situation and i really want to treat it as a puzzle like i think we tried a lot of iterations of rules over the years but i remember that was always the metric that was like the pillar of the strategy game was am i puzzling am i am i getting an interesting decision to puddle over during this game or am i just working for a patent so i had a really interesting interview with another reviewer last week who was a turner who was quite a chess bath and he was saying that he felt the game wasn't like chess because when you play chess at a high level you just execute patterns like you do oh this is the sicilian defense and this is the whatever gambit and chess players look at these patterns

and just apply the patterns to each other and he was saying one of the things he liked about pen dragon was there weren't any patterns but you genuinely had to actually think about what you were doing on every move and i said well they probably are patterns you just haven't found out what they are yet yeah and but you know it was kind of a nice thing actually to to try and make something that had the responsiveness of not chess played at a high level but chess played at like a sort of low level where you do interesting moves but you don't actually know how to play chess properly and i thought that was quite a nice thing to end up with it's like fun that's actually uh we have man we already talked about like the interesting procedural story things that happen here and we're and we're off to some great design questions uh i agree with it i have just such an inverse reaction to that to that reviewers talk about chess which is that um i think of chess and i think of it more like you know the strategy games i enjoy which is i'm looking at but that's because i'm a bad chess player um i play other strategy games where i'm like a much better player and even then i'm still more like reactive like okay i'm here i have these abilities like

like that's where i thrive as a player um so what did you sort of learn about like i don't know like you know taking sort of the core part of chess which is moving pieces around throwing out the pattern the pattern part that you know identifiable patterns and like help making it so that players could make these decisions you can see me negotiating decisions around these bears as we speak um so i'm kind of curious like what your thoughts were for making sure that like you know uh it was never a solved problem i guess you never you were you how did you avoid making a solved game he said knowing many developers would happily make solved games i think i think when we when we originally building the abstract board game like it was a 5x5 grid and the team started in either corner and we played that game a lot and we enjoyed it it was interesting but i i think it probably was a solved game or a solvable game i think tom you were much much better at it than i ever got to be but i think you had a sense that that game that game was finite you could get to a point where you could just master it and then it wouldn't be interesting

anymore yeah right and as soon as that happened i'd say right uh it doesn't work we need to change a rule because i solved it and then you'd go no no no you you haven't solved it look i'll beat you and then you'd lose it and this happened a lot like maybe like 30 40 times or something like that and i remember there was this one time when i was like i've got this strategy and i'm pretty sure i can just completely ruin the game at the time you could um infinitely create new knights there wasn't a limit on it and there wasn't a variable that said you know it costs this many to spawn and so i said look here's what i'm going to do i'm going to spawn a knight i'm going to move him and then i'm going to stop another gun and move it i just built this wall and it completely broke the game and like numbers are really thought to play like that because it sounds really boring and it's fun to move your pieces across and you know that's kind of a prime example of how we added a rule to the game we played it broke it and then said right this doesn't work let's in this case i think we went straight for adding um a variable like uh like admiral which

really helped actually straight away um i think we called it spawn monkey for the longest time and i don't know why let's be clear you called it i as a writer wouldn't dream of calling it spawn monster never mind um well while i could let you two uh um insult each other and slag each other and chat let's talk about um there's a procedural narrative component here so as you can see uh if you're watching the gameplay footage um gwenevere my chosen character has has an ability called push forwards uh which he picked up when i made a decision back there in the meta in the middle layer uh out in the game world um or maybe i got it earlier because i still love author arthur and this is this is an ability that i could see normally manifesting a character having through you know a leveling tree a talent tree um it's as simple as like she can move further she spends energy to move further sure simple but these abilities pop up in pen dragon this is what makes it unique um because

of narrative choices you make and narrative choices aren't just dialogue trees they're how you get through missions how do you do you murder these spiders like lots of interesting things will happen in this hour because not just how i made decisions narratively but how i make decisions strategically which i think is really cool so would you two mind talking about that layer of gameplay and how like abilities came out of story and that sort of thing it's interesting to think about how we designed that like i think there was so we were talking about how the 5x5 game felt quite solved and we started to solve that by partly by adding rules but also by adding variation to the board right and changing the shape of the board and we found that adding just one of those hummuck squares where you can go in any direction completely shifted the balance of the strategies and the patterns so that was really useful but then another idea we kind of naturally had was well you know what if we have pieces with with extra abilities we have heroes and they have some kind of special ability and like can we find some special abilities that don't just destroy the game straight away but are fun to use

and eventually that got tied into the resolve mechanic but we didn't really have a sense of how to how to pace those out like when should we unlock it we didn't want to do experience points we didn't want to do like another resource that you collect we thought about like you know you gain 10 for clearing a level and you gain five for killing an enemy and when you get 30 you get one but it just felt really arbitrary it just got really like random like it wouldn't be very satisfying and then i think the particular solution we hit on actually came i was re-watching the lord of the rings films and uh there's the bit where the i've forgotten her name but the lady in armor like the the king of the undead guy says you know no man can kill me and she rips off her helmet and says i am no man and there's plungers are sword into him and and kills him yes and i thought oh i love that thing of heroic figures having like a call to arms or having a kind of motto or having or doing a big speech on the battlefield where they say for god and king henry and then everyone suddenly is buffed up and can do stuff and that

idea really resonated for me because it kind of connected the mythological tone but also the strategy board game so at that point all right okay basically they should do a special move when they're able to shout a rallying cry yeah and that brought me to think well okay what gives you a rallying cry and like well it's it's you declaring your love for someone it's you're losing you you've lost your lover on the battlefield and that that just felt so felt so rewarding and so good that we had to explore it and like yeah it's quite it's quite weird in a way because it means that you have you don't really know what's going to happen in terms of what moves you'll get or what moves um or how the moves will change over time but the one thing i really like is when you when you've got a move that's really good and you're really enjoying using it and it's connected to something like you know i found my love and then your love gets murdered by a spider on the battlefield and you lose that move and it changes to you know i will avenge my fallen love and you get something else

because you lost something because the character did lose something that's just lovely like that kind of whether the change in the narrative causes the gameplay to change in a way that you might not actually like that isn't technically an upgrade but it's right and that felt to me really strong and really interesting and i'm kind of every time the system can do that can make something happen which is not great but feels appropriate yeah then i think yeah no we found something interesting there but before our nerd cred gets slammed too hard it is a win who shouts that and i also double checked that if you saw me go for my phone because i really wanted to make sure i didn't have aoen and irwin mixed up uh because uh i am a nerd and nerds are pedantic um uh but yeah i love that example john um tom did you have any thoughts about like from a gate from a design perspective how how these these narrative abilities manifest and how they make your game better your perfect chess yeah so um john was always like i want to add this this thing and i like from the story side it's going to change the gameplay and every time he said that i'd be like

oh no he's going to break the game and i kept throwing down these rules like okay like yeah fine they can get abilities but you know we have to test all these because we carefully just break anything and like they all need to be perfectly balanced with each other and actually in the end like a lot of that turned out not to be true um like for the reasons john was saying like it's it's so long as they are narratively appropriate it's actually really interesting when you get a move that is actually you know quite overpowered or maybe it's underpowered because the thing that caused it is you know embarrassing or sad or just sort of fits the tone um and there's also sort of moves that feel like they've been meaningfully upgraded or downgraded and you just don't get that sense if everything is all perfectly balanced um which was kind of always my instinct for this game is to keep everything very pure and elegant um and i feel that that's this really nice tension in the game um was sort of yeah the way that the gameplay and the story interact

it doesn't ever fight but it creates yeah this tension all of the time my uh my my my writing loving brain really wants to dive into more of the uh like like writing arthurian legend blah blah blah but i also want to linger here in game design world for a minute longer um you know we've sort of talked about abilities we've talked about movement and traversal and and adding things to the game um but how do you like how in a game where like the game has to generate scenarios for the player like this one's really interesting the one we're in right now because this isn't a clear friend or foe situation with where we're going um although these rats apparently move diagonally and attack diagonally um which is just video games um uh what what is the secret sauce to making interesting encounters so that the computer can go oh i'm gonna grab this and this will be the right time for the player to encounter this thing even though i am a dumb computer and i will only do what i am told to do and i have no agency for now

yeah that was really hard actually so um internally there's i i totted them up on twitter just the night before release and i think there's something like 20 different heuristic or analytic or algorithmic or ai systems in the game that determine and control what what the game is doing or what the game is going to give to the player like in terms of the board layout or where the resources are spread and one of those systems is the one that decides what what scene you're going to encounter so very broadly the game has template scenes you can get into so this one that you're playing at the moment is the the meeting the archer in the wood scene um and that's quite a specific one because it's always the archer they might be quite generic ones as well like you know go to a village that's got a problem with some animals and like the animals can change and the villagers can change whatever and that system looks at what you've done and looks at what you're about to do and looks at where you are through the game and looks it looks a whole bunch of stuff and it

doesn't generate a level i shouldn't really reveal this because i feel like it's secret sauce but like um it doesn't decide what scene you're gonna get until the absolute last possible moment and then it's all just balanced to try and make sure that the adventure is interesting like that's its goal there are lots of systems in the game which are fair or which are kind of you know based on difficulty sliders but this particular one is purely for narrative interest and i remember just about a day before we shipped the demo which was like one it was five levels long it was a run through a file five levels one and it did the tutorial and then it did another level and then at the end of it it tended to give you a hero a new hero in a castle you get to the coffin you'd meet them and it was this really limp ending to a demo because it felt like oh everything's going fine here so i wrote a version of the scene where you go to the castle and the hero's supposed to be there but they're not and there's a mordred knight there instead who says oh yes sakei was here and i killed him and that was such a good ending for the demo because it was like

and that kind of totally like non-design focused pacing but much more narrative pacing of just sort of playing it and feeling like well have we had enough tension recently we had enough drama recently well okay what what lever can we poke or what variable can we tweak to try and make it a bit more inclined to give you something exciting now because you're sort of at the right kind of time for that um and that took ages to get right but it was kind of just another kind of balancing really in the same way that we balanced the ai we balanced the board generators but it was just another system that wanted to like stick its elbow in and muck around with the game experience i thought we felt we got that right tom do you want to throw in anything at all yeah it's really complicated it's like this one i mean like i'm allegedly the programmer on the game but i'm fairly certain that the ink script which is sort of john's side of things which

is supposed to be the story but actually has ended up being just this massive amount of logic control everything like so much ai has ended up being piled onto the ink and while a lot of gameplay stuff is kind of like okay we're gonna build a feature and then it's in and then that's just a box and then you can stack the box on top of each other this thing was just constantly improving for like the whole year and a half of development gotcha um uh let's talk about failure uh we're not failure will come much later in the stream because thankfully i'm sort of savvy um this is a game where failure actually no we're getting some mild failure i think in a few minutes um sorry pre-recorded footage i hate sounding like a prophet um but uh um failure is a weird thing in games because it's it's failure in a shooter means oh okay i can try again and i can do a twitch skill a little bit better in a procedural game failure might go oh well come on like you gave me this when my health was low like come on why didn't the rng go like twitch this way but because you

have a game where we talked about failure sometimes means interesting things change in the narrative and the abilities like this is a this is a specific like it feels like you need a specific vision for how players fail in order to make this game fun is that accurate and if i'm wrong tell me why no that's absolutely accurate and it's something that we thought about a lot and actually has been a kind of common recurring theme throughout all the stuff that we've done at inkle that we're always interested in creating a story that has a beginning and a middle and an end and the problem with failure and it is a drastically serious problem from a narrative point of view is that the minute that the player fails and tries again the narrative dies completely until the player has got to and surpassed whatever point it was where they were getting stuck and there is only one solution to that in current games which is the time loop solution where you go oh well we just do the whole level again and that's that's part of the narrative and it's fine but not every game can be a time loop game yeah so what i what we've tried to do and we tried to do it in

we sort of dabbled with it in sorcery but we definitely do it in 80 days and we do it in heaven's world too is this idea of failing forwards so in heaven i'm running away right now yeah right exactly exactly so like in heaven's vault you can completely miss huge amounts of like the content and the the clues that you might that might be in a particular location and the narrative will work to cope to make sure that that just becomes the way that your story went rather than where you need to backtrack and pick up that key that was in that chest like in most adventure games um in 80 days of course there's no way to die really and there's no if you go over 80 days it's not a problem so for this game we knew we wanted the idea that you could fail but that it would push you forwards and it will push your narrative forward but then you have that question of well how do you do that if when you get killed you get killed which obviously led to us bringing in the flee button which was pretty controversial um

uh you know within the team and i know tom was convinced for a long time that no one would ever press the flea button because it was like having a button that literally said i am a loser and you press it um he may not be wrong still may be true well it may be but like even the weird thing is even when it's strategically absolutely the correct thing to do like you know you're massively overwhelmed you don't have the support structure to do it you could throw all your knights at this problem and kill them all or you could flee and save your entire party that's a reasonable thing to do strategically but in game world it feels completely unpalatable and i thought that was a really interesting friction actually to kind of bring the player up against this idea that they feel like they're supposed to win every encounter but the game is a tragedy about being overwhelmed by forces much stronger than you like you ought to flee like you ought to flee because everything's going wrong you ought to flee because you found the level that's too hard you want to read the board and decide you can't win this one and go and do another one

and those were all interesting and they come with other narrative consequences attached to them yeah this is about to get very interesting in gameplay for what you're talking about with where gwenevere winds up because this is a can't flee level because i've already fled right okay yeah so some of the levels so that kind of went backwards and forwards what the balance of that was but yeah there are some levels where you can't flee to create pinch points where you can die early because in the end we decided it was nice it was nice to have that as as an option um but then there's also the other kind of uh way of avoiding failure which is the rage mechanic which i i don't know if that's going to happen in your oh it's going to oh it's going to happen yeah right and that again was just it was it was kind of thinking about well what's fun like because we do want the game to be fun as well and so if you're overwhelmed and you get trapped in a corner and then your character just flips out and completely loses their rag and turns into an unstoppable terminator with you know a cost associated with that like that felt really interesting and it felt really enjoyable to play and it was just a lovely narrative moment everybody remembers the first time their character

goes into rage mode so it just it was really interesting to me that this idea of saying we are not going to let you simply die opened up an enormous number of design questions and design ideas and design and narrative opportunities that we simply wouldn't even thought about if we just said yeah when you die you die and then you restart you know or you can restart any level at any time which was the button we had well i mean we still have it in the debug builder game but like that was going to be a button the player could press you know just go again um now it's rage time so uh here we'll get to show off that mechanic right now um right you can lose a raid if you don't manage to murder everyone in within the kind of time limit she's got like an energy bar which goes down um but you also are very very overpowered when you're in rage mode and that really is different that applies for uh real life too tom do you want to throw in on failure uh making failure interesting before we move on to my next question

ah yeah i guess it's i mean i think john sort of said it all but i feel like it's almost an ankle philosophy at this point every time i pitch a new game design johnny says yeah okay what happens if you die and i never have a good answer and something john says a lot and i think it's definitely true in this is um it's about surprising the player so when they think they've lost you can give them an extra life they didn't know they had and that's sort of what rage mode is here it's like oh you really thought you've lost but now we're gonna give you one more chance and you obviously can't keep giving that for a player they can't keep failing forward all the way to the end but it's a sort of get out jail free card you didn't know you had and i feel that's a lesson that's um applicable to a lot of games actually kind of hide a little extra continuing there i like i like it but for the longest time we had um heroes could have zero health and they'd still be alive and this is kind of that philosophy extended and we took that one out in the end because it was sort of two against getting convention

where you know if you have one heart and you lose it you expect to die what we had before that was if you have one heart and you lose it well now you have no hearts you're not dead you just have no hearts and then it would take another hit to die um and john really really liked this um and i kept pushing back and in the end i think it was just because players kept reporting as a bug that we took it out but it would have fit the philosophy and it would have i think if players had understood it it would have felt good for the same reason that rage mode felt good which is just that they thought they'd lost and then they kind of get this this moment of hope yeah i sadly i think we've been too conditioned by red bars and video games in general um we are a stupid lot um okay uh now i finally get to be the the story nerd that i love being uh this is an arthurian game um arthurian legend in arthurian lore is interesting uh because by even the game kind of reflects this it's a little bit whatever you want it to be do you want the happy story well it's

about arthur finding the stone and or finding the pulling the sword out of no wait lady in the lake right arthur is lady in the lake um uh if if you if you want that you get that's how you get excalibur that's the hero story if you want the comedy version you get monty python and the holy grail um if you want the tragic version you have the various uh merlin mini series which have made their way to tv like the whole story of arthur um and i'm speaking as an american so i'm literally like this is the most outside perspective well not the most outside perspective but it's a very outside perspective on on uh on something that seems very like like everyone has opinions about this you know and instead of telling sort of one linear story about arthurian legend you've told a lot of different stories at once that like you know and i'm curious how once that where that came into the game and how that influenced the narrative and design direction yeah so i mean i've always i've always been an arthurian nerd i love darth varian legends as a kid my favorite book is an arthurian retelling so i kind of

had that context and i think when we were first trying to thinking about narrative frameworks the idea of making it knights in armor battling out just sort of fitted the the flow of the game a few people have described it as being a bit like a dance you kind of dance around the board and strike when you can and it feels a bit like uh swordplay it feels a bit like that kind of a swashbuckling feel especially when they're trading insults while they're moving around so that that tone of being knights with big swords thwhacking each other really heavily and really hard felt felt right um for the for the game the pace of the game that we've built in terms of the narrative more widely though i think it was quite a struggle for a while to work out how to make it work because i mean as you say the arthurian legend is is a lot of different stuff and it covers an enormous amount of time but we knew that we wanted something you know very focused on combat because that's the core mechanic very focused on traversing across the space across britain yeah um so you know it could have been

the quest for the holy grail but i mean that just feels quite nerdy in a way and not actually that compelling um and i think i don't know when it was that we had this idea of setting it like after the end of the arthurian myth and that felt tonally right to me that you know the goal of the game is not even to save arthur or to build camelot it's just to literally witness him die um and that felt like i had to they had the right sense of well you're going to die everyone is going to die the question is only where do you die and how do you die and how well do you die and that had all that kind of chivalry sort of honor against the darkness like hope when hope is unreasonable which which i think speaks to me as a tonal thing but it also makes the gameplay feel kind of tense and taught and fraught with danger and it ties into that mechanic that we have that which i don't think we've mentioned which is just that anyone on the board can be killed at any time

and the narrative will deal with that um you know nobody is ever safe at all and if you want to murder all your key people then you can and you will sometimes but whether you want to or not um but it also tied very strongly into into uh the political angle as well that i think when we were when we were when we were getting inspired about this game i realized that one of the reasons that i wanted to do arthur was the what was happening in british politics at the time which is still happening and it's very much comparable i think to what's happening in american politics as well where you have a new class of leaders who are so committed to lying to us and to and to hurting the population that they're supposed to be protecting they are so happy to do that and they do it on a daily basis you know in america the the covered situation is unbearable the police brutality situation is unbearable britain is not quite that bad but we are not doing very well either and that sense of um of a leadership

that has abdicated its moral responsibility to its people is at the core of the end of the arthurian narrative as well arthur is this noble just king who is um thrown off the throne by his son who's just rubbish who's just this power-hungry brat um who doesn't want anything apart from just to hurt his dad and to screw stuff up um and arthur goes to face him even though he knows he can't win against this he can't he doesn't stand a chance but he has to and that's always spoke to me as a kind of you know the as an honorable and noble sacrifice in that kind of romantic vision um the book that i liked as a kid which is called the once and future king was written um very much about the rise of nazism in the 30s but as a king arthur story but that it's that same tone and that same tone applies now and that sense of we can be good people and we should be good people um and and what do you do when the people in in charge and the people who have all of the power have

absolutely no moral compass at all and you have to fight even though you can't possibly win and that that felt to me like a story that that i was happy to tell that i wanted to tell that i was angry enough to tell and that that needs to be out right now and that got me through the writing process because i think if i was just writing some arthurian legends you're right it would be like well here's a giant and here's like a quest for a stone and here's a magic screaming rock and it would all be very arbitrary and very random and i think the reason that the game sorry i've gone all serious but the the reason that the game hangs together dramatically is because underneath all that arthurian stuff and the thwacking and the board game and all of that is this consistent angry passionate moral core and that's something that as a writer i believe that we should always have and i think games often don't bother to have um because they're scared of being political or they're they're worried that they're going to tell people what to think which is absolutely not the point it's not about telling people what to think it's about getting people to feel something consistently and be involved with that feeling um and

that that was so important to me um that that really tied it together so for me it's because arthur is actually such a deep symbol in the british psyche and and also in the american i think by extension of like what our leaders are supposed to be like what government is supposed to be like what the country is supposed to be like we're supposed to live in a world of round tables and nights and we like to believe that we do but we often don't and i think that yeah that really was the motor behind behind the storytelling for me and i yeah and i hope some of that comes across to people i really do because i think it's terribly important i think it comes across in this one run we did like as you watch the whole arc of it um tom uh i keep just going i keep throwing out a question john answers and they go tom do you want to weigh in but that's all i can do um tom do you want to weigh in on your thoughts about turning your beautiful board chest solved chess game into something arthurian and messy

no everything he says the theme fit really well i think we all realized that we tried some other themes a little bit like ages and ages ago we were thinking how it could be a court case and it was two lawyers fighting i don't even know how that was supposed to work um and there's like we flip-flopped on a lot of things um like really early on before we started really developing it full-time but i think this was something we were really consistent on yeah um uh yeah uh there's one neat oh i think we're actually about to come across it um there's one neat feature in this game which is the tails game i completely forgot to mention this at the top but uh we low-key have to do some disclosure um this is a gdc twitch stream but we also you know this is also tied to kamasutra and gamasutra editor chris carr is one of the people who submitted a story for your uh campfire uh feature where the characters have yeah the fire uh chris carr is a great writer and i'm so glad that he got something in um the one we'll see in the stream is actually really fun um but i'm uh we'll see it i guess it's

not this encounter but maybe the next one but what uh what were your thoughts on that and roping good writers in to write little tales for you i'm just well that's a neat story what was all that about i am so happy we did that and that was a complete stroke of luck really so um we'd had this mechanic of people sitting around the campfire in the game for a while and it was really just a way of gaining an extra health point and they would sort of run some conversation between their characters and i felt like they didn't have quite enough to talk about and obviously at a campfire what you do is you tell a story so i thought okay maybe sometimes they could tell a story and i wrote the story and i thought i'll write some more of those later i just i don't feel inspired right now and then lockdown happened coronavirus proved lockdown happened and um and there was kind of this mood in the air of lots of people stuck at home and not quite knowing what they were doing and it kind of i thought what i really what we really want to do i had this sudden urge to

try and make some space for some people to do something nice and do something like fun and interesting and take their minds off this thing and we didn't have an enormous budget for this game i couldn't hire extra writers and anyway no one would have been able to understand the way the game was written internally because it's such a mess like like you know there was no way to hire co-writers for the game but here was this this one aspect this campfire was not only not only perfect for packaging up and giving to people who had no idea how the rest of the game worked and didn't need to know but also would really benefit from getting you know different voices um so i pitched it to joe joe humphrey the co-founder of inkle and said you know can we spend a bit of money and get some writers and and he said well we can try but like do you think they're going to be any good and we sort of thought well we really have no idea we just we just have to try and i remember we we put the call out for writers and it was quite widely promoted actually which was really nice

i felt it captured the mood of the moment quite well just this sense of people here's a nice thing to do do it if you can if you feel like it i remember the very first story that we got sent back was uh from one of it's in the game and it's called the man who couldn't fart and the note that came with it said um despite the titles this is a serious story i hope you enjoy it and i thought oh god here we go you know this is this is what i've let myself in for and i read the man who couldn't fart and i was i i'll be honest i was blown away it's an amazingly good story it's got a really quality moral it's geniusly delivered and i just thought oh wow this is gonna work this is actually gonna work and over the next i think it was two maybe three weeks the submission period we got something like 500 entries so i was just constantly reading these tales my family would come downstairs in the morning and i'd be sitting there on my laptop going i've read another 15 of these things and like just churning through and churning through

and here we go here's uh the kind of averages worked out if you might which one is it um uh the story of failure a knight who fails at this quest oh it's um baldwin in the chalice yes yeah um and yeah the average just kind of worked out you like you might expect maybe 10 of the stories were were not great um and then 10 percent of them were absolute yeah and then there was a middle ground where we had to find the ones which for our game and our characters my universe but it was a really enjoyable process and kind of bringing those together i was just delighted actually i was delighted with how it went um and they still just make me so happy when i find them in the game and i feel like they're kind of the heart and soul of the game is this idea of voices and stories and stories mattering and ah yeah i love all of that stuff i really do i love this little story um we started a little late i think i'm

still gonna cruise this in for uh i'm gonna cruise this in for a landing soon um uh you know best best best to get out while you're still welcome is one of my philosophies in life maybe maybe that's why uh i'm not a rich man but i don't know wow that got really too weird and deep okay that's what cobian let me tell you as an interviewer covid has made interviewing so weird because you're trying to have a conversation acting like everything's normal and then midway through you just sort of like have to admit it's not and i'm so thankful that you two have discussed that covet and locking down has influenced your pro workers designers because it saved me sort of just asking the generic question how are you doing how is your lockdown going in the uk you have a totally different lockdown situation over here like apparently i hear it's illegal to drive halfway across the country uh to test your eyesight um uh over there well they keep changing their minds about whether that's legal or not but i think it basically boils down on it depends on who your father is yes oh boy oh that's this country too oh no

anyway uh so if you have questions for john and tom let's get him in um i guess uh oh man do i have any questions left i think i do hopefully chat is willing to throw in something intelligent uh because i try to be an intelligent person but like i said this is the masks like the mask of professionalism slips more often when you're when you're just like oh [ __ ] this interview wraps up and i have to go sit in my apartment some more and then i my day wraps up and i sit in my apartment playing video games like pendragon um i guess uh uh oh okay i have one i it's shown up in the stream already so we're past it uh there's a line that repeats which is where um gwynevere says this this plot of this field reminds me of where arthur chose to build camelot and it it fires twice in this playthrough and on the second one gwynevere talks about something different that followed the first one and i feel like this is a huge challenge for procedural narrative it's why sometimes like i start off procedural narrative games and then i bounce is at the point

where i'm like okay i'm running through some of the same basic beats before and it doesn't feel or it feels stiff it feels like a machine is spinning words out of me um and i think it's for better and for worse than good games and bad games i've played have encountered this uh i love blazeball but this sort of might be why i'm i bounced off baseball when i tried it i don't know if you two know what baseball is but i don't either so that's okay um uh um but yeah like what do you think like you know for a company that keeps doing procedural narrative what do you think is sort of the the sauce behind making sure that your computer which is taking inputs and spinning outputs um you know ones that you've carefully strung together but still um you know what's how do you make sure that stories feel like stories and not inputs and outputs i guess like that's my last question for the both of you um yeah that's quite a big question so i think repetition is a particularly bad thing because we're so good at

noticing it as people um and dragon actually contains a whole bunch of systems to prevent repetition from one game to the next game like actually it remembers quite a lot of what you it remembers everything you see during the game um that's just what the ink engine does but actually it remembers most of what you've seen during all your previous games as well to try and mix things up and try and find new routes through the content and avenues that you haven't seen before there's a limit to how much of that we can do because like we can't record every word um obviously this is a game you might play 200 times um but it's definitely something we've worked really really hard to try and avoid but a lot of it is actually a balancing problem like you need a decent amount of content and you need the content to be able to vary itself which is something that the ink engine is very good at so you know a single sentence can turn out different ways depending on who's saying it and how they're feeling and

just random numbers as well but i think all so it's it's about kind of what we try to do is we try to lay down a bedrock of things that the game can say which are very very self-varying but will work and then to pick out as much specific context as we can so the way that the system works i think i wrote a gamma central article about this actually but the way the system works is that it looks for very specific matches for the current context and then drops back to generic ones we can't find any so if you have a move where it's guinevere and she is attacking and creature and the creature has just attacked one of her own pieces there might be a specific line of dialogue for that exact context which will fire under very random rare circumstances because it's so specific so that doesn't need much variation but if it turns out that it can't find any of those and it'll drop back something more generic which is just you know the usual kind of gwenevere runs across the ground and wallops something with her sword of which you will have seen the same line of content

50 100 times just tweaked and varied by the context but yeah it's an enormous problem and i think pendragon is an attempt to tackle it much more than we ever have before 80 days there's a little bit of this stuff in some places and the heavens well does too but hand dragon pretty much is entirely built out of content which is actually repeating itself all the time but attempting to disguise that as much as possible and largely getting away with it i think but yeah tom do you have any always going to be some reputations along the way do you have any thoughts i actually have a question for john this one because john is the master of story i just make like code things happen um i'm curious to know whether it was easier to give the ink um solid sort of pieces of state that you could work off with this game which is obviously really state-based or something that's more

woolly and story based like heaven's vault or something where you know there's no fixed positions of things there's just you're in a world there's stuff around yeah this was a lot easier um like the the bedrock of heaven's fault is the knowledge map which is kind of all the things that aaliyah can be thinking or realize during the course of the game and that is impossible to really write down so the only way to make the dialogue work is to have that knowledge map entirely in your head while you're writing it so at the time that was okay but now when i look back at it i have no idea what's going on oh john i lost you uh tom did you listen all right john we lost you there for a second am i back yes you're back ah uh well impede dragon anyway there's a game side thing which tom wrote which works out what the current move looks like and assigns tags to it

and that's a lovely piece of robust analytical code it just looks at the board and looks at the squares and looks at the threats and then there's the ink side can just read off that completely and that separation between the kind of game analysis and then the ink just running with it that made it a lot easier to do i think that there was a clear a really clear distinction where it happens about everything is very muddied um so yeah not that i ever want to make a game like pendragon again because it was really very difficult i thought i don't know what do you think was it hard ah it was hard in some ways and easy in others i think maybe i don't know i think because it's so much um i don't have a word for it buckets of stuff approach where it's just everything is contextual only so much is it probably took it longer to come to life i remember first showing it to joe when he came down first showing him what we've been doing for a while um and sort of having seen it in the state where like every time it would

load a level it would just say something completely random and you showed it to joe and like he had this perfectly normal playthrough and just everything just worked out and like after just piling stuff into the bucket after like a few months all of a sudden oh no it can just produce like really robust content and like yeah the more you pile away the better that system gets yeah i do love the bucket of content approach actually for exactly that but when you when you get to the point where it starts to produce halfway sensible output then everything you do from there every extra bit of content you add is just adding value somewhere like and you don't know where it's going to come out or when it's going to come out but when it does it's always like really it's a real pleasure to see it when it does not joke i remember that joke um yeah i have enjoyed that actually right on i think it's time to start wrapping up i'll give a quick shout out to chaotic 94 in chat who just says love all the talks on youtube keep up the good work uh today as a pitch for our friends at incl there are some talks on the gtc youtube

channel from uh from folks at inkle about the making of games like heaven's vault 80 days and so on um one of my favorites it's not joe tom or or john here but um uh make giants talk about the npcs in 80 days and how how you can empower your npcs to tell better stories and games one of my favorite talks and one of my inspirations for some of the writing i've done uh outside of outside of you know i love it i love thinking about game worlds in terms of the characters you meet in them um so with that uh john and tom if they have more questions for you pen dragon where can they ask them and also where can they buy pen dragon i might as well let you pitch the game so pendragon is available now with a 10 discount all week on uh this weird little shot called steam that you might have heard of and also on this lovely shop called gog which you might also have heard of and also on the mac app store if you're unfortunate enough to ever use the mac app store i'm joking it's wonderful uh and

yeah you can get it there and if you want to talk to us we're at ankle studios on twitter we also have a discord channel but you can find that from twitter probably also it's in the game you can access i thought this was really smart you can escape and you can click join discord which i think more devs are doing well there you go so you need to buy the game so you can join our discord you can ask about the game there you go okay with that uh before everyone on my team gets perfectly murdered i'm going to end this looking like i'm a smart strategic person and bid you all i do we're actually uh for fans of gdc it's gonna be an interesting week for us tomorrow we have a stream with uh the ceo proletariat they make spell break um uh later this week we've got some cool things coming down the pipe about what is happening next gec is going to be next year question mark we've announced july things but i don't it's all weird it's it's i mean we're doing that's announced that's confirmed to be clear but also like we're still figuring out how to make gdc

happen in in these in certain times um uh so we're doing we're doing that we're trying to bring more lessons for you we're bringing more great interviews with developers um we're excited to keep uh we're excited that as the world enters a weird space people want to keep making games and we want to keep talking to them about making games and learning what they've learned etc etc that's always going to be uh it's so thrilling to see that that like holds up even when everything gets weird um and i'm just grateful that john and tom are willing to talk about like how a weird world influences uh um making and releasing games it's gonna be a weird like man youtuber it's gonna be weird for all your colleagues in a year or so when they release their games and they're like yeah we finished this in lockdown that influenced some stuff um anyway with that odd note i will end this stream and wish everyone a good day thank you favela for hanging out thank you chaotic 94 other folks and have a good day bye