Getting Players to Care: Using Narrative to Drive Retention

[Music] everybody welcome to the end of GDC my name is Roy McGraw I'm a writer producer and designer of pixel berry Studios this is Carol ooh she is lead writer and studio manager at pixel Berry before we get started a little bit of bookkeeping we don't look too crowded but we do have some gameplay footage with somewhat small text so if you're at the very back and you want to read it you may want to move forward other than that we're supposed to remind you to turn off cell phones so you know vibrate all right how many of you guys are familiar with high school story that's a good number it's a good number okay hopefully the talk today will help illuminate why we do some of the things that we do for the rest of you guys let's do a little bit

of a introduction all right high school story is a high school simulation game it's available for iOS and Google Play in high school story you create the high school of your dreams you can choose your clique mrs. jocks preps and nerds you can throw parties with your friends you can go on dates you can send your classmates on dates you can dress up like a witch and party with the vampire all right so the thing that most differentiates a high school story from the other apps in the market is this story a lot of games they pay lip service to story what they would call story we would call maybe a set up an introduction it'd be the the land that you inherit the story decide to open but in high school story we really put the

story in high school story so there's not just a little bit of story either we have over a thousand unique quests we have hundreds of scripted dates and breakups all at all for talking over 200,000 words so to just put that in a little bit of perspective that gets you to pretty robust to young adult novels all right so what does the story in high school story actually look like we have an example this is a quest log from the game this is actually my personal quest log that I'm playing through right now so you can see on the left there are different icons that indicate the different stories going on and so each of these represents a quest chain it's kind of an ongoing story and made up of several little quests so first my band is playing at a music festival kind of a big deal my friends are throwing Kimmy a sweet 16 birthday party I'm sending some people out on some dates playing cupid and then my friends are also throwing a

Spring Fling dance and so you can see we try to have a lot of different things going on in the game so it's multiple story tracks that people can check back in on every time they come and also after people collect on any given quest cus link in the chain you get a little clip of dialogue playing between the characters and so I'll show you a quick example of that so this is what plays when you collect on the Spring Fling quest and this is kind of the setup for the story you'll see two of the characters interacting and it kind of launches you into the narrative of what's about to happen over the course of the Spring Fling [Music]

so you can see from this clip that the story is pretty substantial we don't just give you the bare minimum set up of

you know oh you should buy some flowers we really want to show the characters and we want to show them coming into conflict with each other and we want to put you right in the middle of that so in addition to that we also are releasing two to three new questions every single week so you can imagine that's a lot of adventures that our cast has gone on so far here are some examples of things we've done we've done a ski trip Olympics Spring Fling most recently a st. Patrick's Day and yeah so just is ongoing in that way all right so the important thing to know about high school story is that we don't just have a lot of story we're not just cramming story in there a story informs every single design decision that we've made so just an example this is the core game loop in high school story you enroll students students earn coins you spend the coins to buy hang out hang outs have slots to allow you to enroll more students that's not like crazy you know it could be in another game it might be something like plant crops you sell the

crops the coins that gets you seeds you can plant them get more crops so it's all pretty basic stuff with one pretty dramatic exception here you can see the core game loop is constrained within story so what does what exactly does that mean all right playing high school story basically the story is mandatory story gates leveling you can't get from level one to level two without playing through some story but you also can't get to level 20 from level 19 without flying through some story story gates new cliques at the beginning I showed you jocks preps nerds well we've got some other ones too we have artists slackers rebels musicians we have all the various types of students you can get if you party those together well to see any of those you're gonna have to play through some story the final thing that story gates and this is actually the big idea what we're hoping to convey today is

that story more story so you might be asking yourself why do we do this 200,000 words is a ton of words thousand unique quest events that's a ton of extra complexity and you're absolutely right it is a lot of extra complexity it's one of the reasons we haven't localized the title yet but we've done sort of the math internally from the pros and the cons and we think it's absolutely worth it so you know if you just take a take a look at this top-down view of the world you can move buildings around you can tap on students you can change their clothes that's really fun you're kind of like a god with your own like perfect high school but the problem is you're kind of at an emotional remove we want to take the player out of this top-down view and make them feel like they're actually a student at this sort of idealized high school so we use story to do that once we get them down there

once we give them the story based bestfriends the story based romantic interests once we've gotten that connection then we can use story to put to involve their romance or maybe like put their best friends in a bind once we've got that we've got them really anticipating what's going to happen next in this story and once they're doing that we're absolutely sure they're going to come back we're going to get to our retention numbers kind of towards the end of the talk if any of you guys saw Andrew schvartzes talk earlier in the week you'll know they're pretty good so definitely stick around for those all right now I'll talk a little bit more about both the tools that we use to create this spirit of and also how we set up our team to do it so first off we have a unique studio structure out of 16 employees we have eight writers and this is the team that's dedicated to crafting the ongoing narrative and so why do we have eight well this is not necessarily a magic number and we've just found that

this is what works for us so some of the reasons why include brainstorms we've found that any given writer if you give them a prompt you know write about the spring dance they will be able to do that but if you really want the story to go further and you want to make sure you're telling the best story that you can at this particular moment it's good to have ID people to bounce ideas off of so maybe one person will say oh you know autumn made that new year's resolution where she wanted to try new things maybe we should have her try to do it and someone else might say well pink is not going to like that because she usually plans all the dances and then suddenly you have a conflict and you know people are working together to come up with that another reason is just for editorial and review this is pretty basic you don't want a lot of typos in your game you don't want grammar errors all of those work to throw the audience out of the game so you want them immersed in it and feeling like these are real characters talking to them you don't want them thinking of the writer messed up and put a typo in there and the last reason for us is that were able to subdivide people up into groups so we don't necessarily have every writer working on every quest I

used this example earlier of my quest log and so obviously you know you wouldn't necessarily want all eight writers trying to write about one spring fling as too many writers but you can kind of divide them up so we what we do is we put groups of two to three writers in each of these quests so maybe one group is writing about the quest chain about making your band maybe another group is writing about the Spring Fling and so on alright so getting into the narrative tools that we use this is kind of an overview and we'll go through each of these in more detail but the ones that we want to focus on today our characters romance and drama comedy choices and cliff hangers and if you do all of these correctly and we feel that you know we did in high school story then you end up with Hart frogs emotional engagement viral screenshots that people want to share and player investments all right so let's start with characters we in high school story rely on a lot of stereotypes and we're introducing

characters and stereotypes are something that you usually hear spoken of very negatively people will say something is stereotypical if they feel like they've seen it before it's nothing new to them it's kind of played out but when you're trying to pack a lot of story into a small space like how you're doing when you write for games you don't want the story to take over or get in the way of the gameplay you really want to tell the story quickly at least in the beginning and then kind of get out of the way the worst thing you can see is a player spamming through dialogue because they feel like they just want to get to plain game and that's particularly bad for a game like highschool story where the story is so much of the gameplay so what we try to do is pack it in tightly in the beginning when you're introducing things and then it's a lot to expand more when you have more time with players so we're gonna use stereotypes to introduce the characters but then we build on them later in later quests so here is a classic example from film this is The Breakfast Club so people hopefully can recognize some of the high school tropes that are pretty common you see the guy in the Letterman's jacket and you think he's a jock you see the guy with a long hair and the leather

gloves and you're like he's probably a bad boy and so on the important thing is everything from how they're dressed to their postures to their hair tells you something about these characters that you can immediately Adeem without even necessarily hearing them talk so we use kind of those same strategies and for that I will introduce you to Julian he's one of our leading heartthrob characters in high school story you can probably tell from his Letterman's jacket that he's a jock and you can hopefully tell from the football under his arm that he loves football and based on those two things you might kind of conclude that he's an alpha male he's probably pretty competitive things like that and that's exactly how we introduced Julian to the audience when we first introduced him in high school story you meet him as a character who wants to transfer to your school because he's having problems with his current school's football team because of some politics with the coach he's not being allowed to play he really wants to come to your school if you'll let him start a football team there so through the course of getting to meet

him you know that's pretty much where we leave it you recruit him to your school you start this football team and it's only once he's in your school that we start to dig deeper with his character and introduce more contradictions and quirks the stereotype so once you get to know him a little better you find out that he's actually really worried about paying for college he doesn't get the chance to decorate often but when you kind of push him to decorate for a school dance he really enjoys that and he also really wants to be a better student but he's not quite sure how to go about doing that so these are all traits you wouldn't necessarily assume go along with being a jock and hopefully with a contradicts the stereotype in a meaningful enough way that people are able to see him as a fully fleshed out character all right so one of the metrics that you use obviously the determinate players are understanding and beginning to engage with your game is tutorial completion so we're using these we're using what players are bringing into the game their own experiences in order to soar like

set the stage let them feel comfortable with what's happening and then after that we're sort of evolving it now is it working well a pretty good something you might shoot for tutorial completion would be around 70% in high school story using using these techniques we've gotten our tutorial completion up to 87% and then once they're through the tutorial they basically have some buy-in we're probably going to have some time with them so our average first-time play session is nineteen point six minutes that means we can introduce a character leave them pretty flat at the start and then know and trust that we'll have the time to sort of deepen that character over the next twenty minutes so just to summarize make sure you evolve your characters after you introduce them if you are going to use stereotypes and make sure you use them sparingly and so we've told you that this makes players care and so I have a couple examples of

what players are saying about Julianne in the game these are some player reactions that we've spotted on Twitter and on forums one person just checking Julianne out saying he looks hot another player has asked a question in one of the quests where you get to make your band Julianne is your drummer and you find out he's maybe not the best drummer and you have a chance to kick him out of your band and maybe you'll have a better chance at winning the music festival but this player is really in dilemma because as she says she really wants to win but she doesn't want Julian to be angry with her and so you can see she's really treating him like an emotional person that is gonna be interacting with her that she's accountable to another thing is because we have dating in our game and because you can date Julianne we've found that Julian has a number of girlfriends throughout the world and they like to post about how they are dating Julian on Twitter these are just a few examples and they also get really excited when they find out that other people are dating Julian - which is kind of a funny response such as people think I have a boyfriend name is Julian we're online official so next

I want to talk a little bit about how we build up these these contradictions and the characters and how we move away from the stereotypes so we want to make sure the way you're getting to know the characters all happens very true to life you don't just want someone to come up and tell you Oh actually I have all these insecurities that's not how people operate in real life so that's also not how we do it in the game to do it we try to tell stories that have emotional heft and we want to make sure that anytime people are playing through requests and they're investing that time they're feeling like there is a social consequence that's coming out of it and we want to make sure all that all the interactions are in the feeling realistic in genuine to how real people would act so on the right you can see Peyton she's another character in our game and you first meet her as a party girl and that's pretty much all you know about her is that she likes to throw parties she actually introduces our party and gameplay mechanic so that probably makes sense but once you recruit her to your school and you get to know her a little better you find out more about her background her backstory they have a couple of clips that show this and how we do it I'm just going to show you the

beginning and the end of the quest just so you can see kind of the movement there so this first question interaction between you and her and she is going to an animal adoption event and both you and her get more than you bargained for so the next few quests in this chain you spend running after rabbits and trying to stop a goat from eating everything in your school and just general the general fun you would have of having a bunch of animals at your school were they're not supposed to be but then when it's time for the animals to go home you learn a little bit more about Payton than why it

was so important for her to have [Music]

you can see from that example that Payton's quest party animals it starts off with you doing something fun in the foreground then we go deeper and you learn more about painting so we're both telling the story and we're trying to grow the character and to give you some context over two million players to chose them to play and complete this quest alright so one last example of building up drama and characters so this is a special quest that we did about the topic of cyber bullying and so I don't know how many people are familiar with the issue of cyber bullying but it's a big problem right now and not that it's a problem that not that many people know

about or know the tools to deal with it because it's a relatively new issue and so a lot of teams maybe going to their parents and they have no context for what it is they're saying did someone punch you I don't understand how are you getting bullied and we found that it's a topic that really resonates with teams because it's something that a lot of them are going through so we wanted to do a quest to the dress list and we wanted to do it in a realistic way that both helped teams and also felt genuine and not necessarily just like a public service announcement so we introduced this character that you see on the screen her name is hope and she is Julian's little sister in the game and the way that we wanted to introduce the topic we didn't want to just have her coming to you for help because you don't know her that wouldn't necessarily be very realistic so we had it via that Julian comes to you for help he's noticed that Hope is withdrawn and she's seeming depressed at school and as a concerned older brother he wants to get your help so he comes to you and you take hope out bowling you buy her a milkshake you try to get to know her and through the course of getting to know her you see her as she like gets a text

and you see her face ball if she it's that something mean that someone sent to her and you kind of get her to open up through the course of that and once she starts talking to you find out people are sending her really mean messages and she thinks she can handle it on her own she doesn't want to make a big deal out of it she doesn't want to go to her parents or the authorities because she thinks that they'll over dramatize the whole situation and she thinks she should be able to handle it and of course you as a good friend you know you're not necessarily responsible adult in this situation you try to go along with her wishes and you try to help her just by confronting the bullies roughly you try to help her ignore it and all of it kind of comes to a head and ends up blowing up in your face and you realize that you do need to get some bigger help from this and so we partnered with a real cyberbullying charity for this the cyber smile foundation and they both have resources for teams and they also have a outreach program where teams can contact them and get help and so by working with them we were able to craft a real real scenario in the game that actually showed teams the steps to take when you are being

cyber bullied and how we can help them in a realistic way so if you click facts about it over two million players have finished this quest and over a hundred players reach out to cyber smile every week through our game so that teams who wouldn't necessarily have found a cyber smile without our game is kind of a gateway to get them there and we've also donated over two hundred thousand dollars to cyber smile all right so story and gameplay any game can have romance is a famous quote by Royal McGraw this is something he likes to say all the time during our brain storms sometimes we talk about it more theoretically and you know particularly in participating for GDC or saying any game can have romance in it not just a game like ours about high school so for example alone the where's my water the alligator wants to get clean but he wants to get clean because he's going on a date and I guess in that little extra romantic push like that extra motivation another example that we talk about in the office is if you were to challenge us to kind of put a romantic angle on

flappy bird we might say he is trying to make it through this obstacle course of pipes because there is a lady bird on the other side that he is trying to get to but it's his true love but in our case we are pretty lucky because we integrated this dating mechanic so we don't have to stretch for it it's right there in our game you can send any two people in your school on a date you just pick one from each column and I have an example of a date here where I've sent Peyton and Julian on a date together and every time you collect on a date well every time you send people on a date it takes a certain amount of time and you can rush through the date or you can let it play out and then you get a little story that goes along with it so here's an example

[Music] so in our game you can have you and play matchmaker states can be good and bad or you can also salvage a bad date so let's say you spilled soup all over your date and that person is very upset maybe you buy them some flowers and everything is that being okay you can also level up relationships with enough good dates so you know you can go from crushing the flirting to online official and you can also break up couples so we've seen a lot of player response to this dating mechanic and this putting bromance in the game this way some of examples or this one which was posted on tumblr is someone saying there was a cluster I had to break up a couple it was not an easy choice it was like watching my own kid go through their first breakup another example is people like to share the relationships

that they put together especially when they reach these new dating levels so this couple is now crushing and this person chose to share it and said my babies as the caption so the kind of takeaway from that is people like to see romance when they get to you know interact with it in the game they want to share they want to talk about it and they want to come back and see how it's going so some more player reactions people saying they're too emotionally attached to highschool story fairly down a little bit today in high school stories becoming my life but I honestly have no problem with that and so on so we feel like it's working pretty well alright next I'm going to talk about interactive choices in our game so we have all of these different mechanics at work but we also have choices to make sure that the narrative is really drawing players and making them feel engaged so we have two types of choices in our game when a story choices and another is pass/fail choices so in a story choice this is just how you want to interact with the game here's an example you're playing truth or dare you

want to pick truth there or just making out and there's no right or wrong answer here it's really just how you want to play in the high school world how you want to experience the scene and how you want to see it play out this is more of a test type minigame this is pass/fail it kind of is checking how well you've been paying attention to the scene and it's also checking you know how quickly you can read and react to this so in this case you're running across somebody field do you keep your balance or do you freeze and fall and each of these have a story-based reward so if you keep your balance you win the race and everyone's very impressed but if you freeze me fall you're in the mud everyone's laughing at you and we want to make sure in all of our writing that we give our choices consequences so not only do we have the story you know the scene plays out how you want to play out or you see the reaction but we also have hidden flags that our players don't necessarily know about and we use those to track different variables in the game so for instance royal showed you at the beginning that you can choose to be a jock a nerd or a prep and we track that

choice in the game and we call back to that in dialogue so if you've chosen to play a jock if someone asks you later if you like football you might be like of course I'm a jock or if you're a nerd you might same things in a more academic focused and so on another example is the band choice so I mentioned earlier that I have a band in the game and you get the choice of what instrument you want to play so you can take guitar vocals or fiddle and then whenever your band plays you'll get a callback to that either in a scene or a mini game or maybe you have to match the lyrics the song you're singing or hit the right notes and then they'll determine whether your band plays well or poorly and then the last example I have about this is something we do on the back of the game that again most players aren't aware of this but in the very first choice that you make you can pick whether you are a male or female character and if you choose to be a guy in the very first confrontation you'll be matched up against max who is an antagonist from the rival high school first high and he and the head

cheerleader they're both kind of an antagonistic duo but in this case if you're playing as a guy you'll see him in the first confrontation and your choices will be about how to deal with him as he tries to bully you if you're playing as a girl then you'll square off against the head cheerleader and this is one of the small tweaks that we make to the game just to give it context because if you're a female player and a male character comes up and tries to punch you that has a very different connotation than if you're two guys fighting so this is again just something we do to try and make the world feel real and immersive and tailored to the player so you might notice that in either path your last choice there is that you can flirt with the bully that has antagonizing you and we've noticed that this is something that is really popular in our game especially when we see people playing through YouTube videos of like they'll do a playthrough and show themselves progressing through the tutorial and usually they're pretty straightforward about everything until they get to this choice which is the point where they've laugh out loud and stop for a moment because they don't expect a game like

ours to make a joke like this and not take itself too seriously so that brings me to my last point of comedy and fun so we found it's very important to try to delight and impress the players and whether that's through being silly clever or surprising you just want to do something that kind of sets the story apart so I have some examples of our most shared moments on Tumblr and Facebook and Twitter and I'll just walk through those and kind of why we think that they are funny so this is a post from tumblr and this is a character in the game talking about tumblr this this line was written by royal that's a royal McGraw original and it's about talking about how this character has been been posted about on tumblr which is something we see our players doing and she's using all the Tumblr terminology that we could fit into one line of dialogue and the caption of this is why I love high school story so in this case we feel like the players feel like we get them we understand what they're doing we understand how they talk another example of something that has

been posted is this item description of a potted plant not necessarily a place where you expect to see a joke but because we try to pack humor in everywhere and make it just feel like a cohesive Lee fun world this player chose to post about it and lastly I have an example of a date in the game so in this date is which is one of them's we see most posted about Peter and Kalia this is a real fan post of this example so Peter and Kaleo stayed up all night playing high school story and they named two characters after themselves and since I'm on a date and then they had an amazing time together in the game and in real life it's so meta and players like this one because they're again not expecting us to to take the step I guess of being a little bit silly and as one player put it my game just murdered the fourth wall and they're all the posts about it are kind of along this line of their surprise they're delighted and they really appreciate they were trying to you know make the game a little bit more clever

than it needed to be all right so all this romance all this drama all this comedy so on the one hand it's just like giving players a very enjoyable experience but on the other hand it directly impacts the bottom line all right so most apps we're seeing I'm just gonna take an aside the marketing most apps we're seeing when they're trying to grab non incentivized installs they're paying for about two for every one organic install that they receive because we've been able to tap into our player base and get them posting on tumblr get them posting on Twitter sharing on Facebook because they're talking because they're having a good time they're having something that's emotional they're sharing it so we launched it on August 1st we're still seeing a paid to organic ratio of one to three that means we're purchasing one install for every three that we're getting organically another benefit this

is this was something that was sort of unexpected when we put together our writing to him we knew that we wanted a big narrative game but what we didn't expect was that we were going to end up with a pretty savvy marketing unit as well because we're generating all these quests every week you know in October we're thinking about Christmas we're thinking about ways to hook the player for events they're happening far in the future and that basically works out to marketing as well so we're generating all of our marketing copy in-house I've heard a lot of talk at GDC I've seen numbers on the Internet it seems to be about two dollars and fifty cents for a non incentivized install these days on mobile we're still averaging under a buck 25 all right so the final point on stories is cliffhangers let me see if we've got Westra dressed up like Indiana Jones but this is you know it's it's a joke but

it's also really true cliffhangers really are one of the most important tactics for ensuring that our players return the first one the first aspect of it is just functional we released two to three new quests every week but even with that some of our players are at the bleeding edge of the content that we deliver so when they finish their weekly quest drop there literally is nothing else for them to play quest lies in the game that means it needs to be exciting it has to have some sort of emotional hook some sort of narrative surprise something that gets them to say you know in seven days I want to come back the second aspect is you know our bread and butter we need each of our links in our quest chain to be exciting they have something that's compelling something that's driving it forward so that players will either choose to rush through that eliminate the timer with a premium purchase or they'll come back

when the timer ends so here's an example we had a question with a mysterious figure named Pandora she was sort of blackmailing your classmates she was making them do things like jumping a fountain or embarrassed themselves in others other ways this was a big long quest chain it lasted about a month our players were really eager to figure out who Pandora is they really really wanted to know so Wes one of your friends who runs up and is like guys I know who Pandora is you tap through and of course you know you hit your 24 hour wait wall and of course you know some of our players are going to come back the next day and we really like that some of our players are going to choose to rush through so the question is how many of our players are choosing to rush through based on these cliffhangers well 83% of all of our users have rushed at some point the caveat is that were pretty liberal with our premium currency in the early game but still I mean there choosing to rush through to go from story to more story rather than spending

their rings on premium decorations or premium outfits or new the other things that they could choose to purchase so for cliffhangers if you're going to implement them that these are the things that sort of you want to focus on the first is positive worry you love your grandmother if she's sick you want her to get better the same is true if like classmates in the school if they care about them if they're in a tight spot the players will want to see them out of that spot need to know the Pandora Quest is a good example of that if you have a mystery if you have some puzzle that will be solved fans are eager to move forward through that and then the last one is just delayed gratification everybody has a favorite TV show there's a big explosive season finale you're wondering okay what's what's going to happen next how are they going to get out of this spot are they going to make it well you're gonna have to come back in the fall when the show starts back up again so earlier I talked about story gating story and I want to get back to that the first the first aspect of that is just simply when

you complete a quest you're rewarded with a new quest and fans are very eager for this they want more story it really hooks them but once you know fans are really eager for story once once they you have them hooked in this sort of narrative world then at that point you know it's not a big step to say okay maybe we'll offer some premium storylines maybe we'll offer some quests that they'll have to pay for so we've done that and our premium quest chains offer first off more time with characters you like say for instance autumn she's the first character you meet at the school she's sort of in the game world your best friend we had a quest Harvest Festival you got to see where she spent her summers as a kid and just spend more time bonding with her we offer unique emotional experiences over the Christmas break we had a quest where you could choose who you were going to spend time with under the mistletoe that was a lot of fun and we also offer opportunities to do something fun that's

a little bit elevated from the traditional high school context so you could fly to Paris to like view a runway fashion show you Los Angeles to see a red-carpet premiere so this is haunted hearts it was a premium quest we released during Halloween you can see that it cost 100 rings now the four gas lamps it requires are also premium decorations they cost 25 rings apiece so that's two hundred rings total which works out to about a dollar forty in real US currency alright so how many of our players are actually buying these premium quests well 63% of our players have purchased a premium quest at some point again same caveats were pretty we're pretty generous with our premium currency but here's the real number that's pretty great during the initial week of launch 25% of all of our active users purchased haunted hearts alright so I'm going to

recap a bit and then we're gonna get to sort of what this gets you with retention so good game writing as Kara mentioned it's memorable characters we recommend for mobile to start broad start with stereotypes and then deepen them over time after they've found their footing after the players have found their footing romance and drama you really cannot have too much romance choices and consequences every choice of player makes makes the experience there's the more there's it is the more likely they are to come back comedy and fun if you can give a player something that delights them something that surprises them they're going to share it and that that's so huge and then cliffhangers you know if you can figure out a way to make them come back narrative lee that's so so powerful if you can do all these things story becomes its own reward you don't move through the quest and what though one is another quest and they'll keep coming back and keep coming back alright good game writing is not

over long you know if you're starting off with a five-minute history of your world maybe you shouldn't maybe you should get some something funny something heartfelt and then if you really have to after players so that's the time for the history lesson it's not present for its own sake everything should be tethered we tether dating figure out a way to make your storyline integrates seamlessly it's not self-indulgent you know in an ideal world your interest would align with your players interest 100 percent of the time that's just not true so right for your players always remember who your players are and see if you can tap into the things that they know and good game writing is not lacking and delight or surprise if a player is surprised that they're gonna talk they're just gonna talk alright so very good retention in a mobile game these days there's sobriety of numbers but what we've seen in what we're sort of basing our claims on is this idea of one day 60% after one week 40% after one

month 10% I've heard some talk at GDC about some apps that are averaging 20 or 30% one day retention well where are we with high school story for high school story we've seen one day retention of 71% after a week we still got over half of all of our users and after a month we've still got a third just so you can sort of visualize this as the difference we're talking about all right so hopefully as a takeaway we've convinced you that story can be a really powerful tool to aid retention we definitely recommend that you add story if you can we recommend you add it judiciously we think you should integrate story early with writers writers are really good at shaping emotional experience and if you can shape that emotional experience your

players will be drawn in and then you know finally don't be afraid to revise or cut all right and that's cutting cutting is so important all right I think that's about it we want to thank you guys for for showing up on Friday we really appreciate it and we'll we'll take questions [Applause] hello my name's Martin this is a narrative story with a lot of reading and you know gamers say well nobody reads which of course is not true but I wonder if you can think of any examples of games that have used story very very well without all the reading and conveying it visually the question was

are there any games that have used story very well but do not have all this reading you want to take this right off the bat I'd point two brothers did a remarkable job of character work without any dialogue that was either spoken or or written on screen would you would you like any more okay excellent next question yeah you had talked briefly about players kind of spamming through some of those repetitive pop-ups with with the narrative being delivered um it's kind of twofold question do you think there's anything particular particularly special that you guys are doing to really engage people at that time and do you have any metrics that you know are actually testing whether or not people are spamming through them or actually staying around to read them I

don't actually have any metrics on whether or not players are spanning through I can't tell you that we keep our dialogues a little shorter at the beginning of the game and then gradually ramp up the duration of them so they get longer as the game goes on and if you play through the tutorial of our game there's not too much dialogue just fan through hopefully just keeping it short enough yeah so we ease them into the length of the narrative I also think putting in choices is another way of breaking up things for people who are spamming because if they get to a choice point then they might realize like I shouldn't attention because now someone's asking me you know like what the combination to the safe is or something and they need to know that too to get my coin reward I'm next question I so your system is very like open for addition and stuff with how you're adding quests every week is there anything you say about like the process of coming up with this system that was very easy to add more story and

stuff without like messing with the world in the sense yeah okay so the question is how do we keep adding more to the story without breaking it I think from the beginning we knew this was going to be an ongoing narrative so we tried to brainstorm everything from the characters that we were using to the type of story that we were telling around kind of these big narrative chunks so there's two kinds of quests in the in the app there's the main storyline so there's a main storyline where you kind of put it up against Hearst high and when that's over there's another storyline that royal touched on which is the Pandora arc and then in between playing those you also get you know the seasonal quests and the other types of content so I think part of it is having a big plan when you start so that you know the bold strokes are where you're going and then that way all the other quests that are coming in you know not to step on like weren't toes not to step on that he can say well Julian's gonna be having some troubles so you should not talk about Julian in this other quest until like much later do you do you have a lot of provisions based on

the use of feedback I mean do you monitor how they react to the story do you have to rewrite based on how they like you the question is do we react to feedback from our fans yeah we definitely have to feedback from our fans and we're always we're very curious on the writing team so we like to follow our Twitter account and our forum and see how people are reacting and we definitely had times where people have said you know like well this character seems like they're good at everything we're like oh we're gonna make her really bad at something next things like that so we definitely pay attention in terms of revising things that are already out we'll definitely tweak things if people mention something that we feel really hits home for the most part though our internal revision I think catches most of the things because it's just such a rigorous process of review and peer review we end up getting a lot of rioting in that way do all gamers all players essentially get this same narrative experience or is there opportunities

where someone can branch in one direction and close off a bunch of quests that they can never do the question is about if we if choices make you so that things branch off and block off different pathways I'd say for the most part we try not to limit players because we don't want them to we don't want people to feel frustrated with this game and because there's no real way to replay it without starting over from the very beginning we're not expecting anyone to do that and especially since it's ongoing so we wouldn't want players to feel like oh you know because I did this I didn't realize I totally missed out on forming my own band or something like that so for the most part we try to let players play everything but it definitely is customized to the choices that you've made if that makes sense yeah the one exception to that would be seasonal quests which if they don't access them in a timely fashion filters never see them so some players will see content that other players did on okay thanks I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about the relationship between the writers and maybe the monetization team or the live ops team and how those things how these two kind

of parallel pads that in the end have to result in monetization how do writers how do how do you deal with that tension between the writers and and live officer monetization team so the question is how do we reconcile the differences between what the monetization team does and what the writing team does the our CEO likes to joke that we have zero monetization experts and that's basically true other than Ben Hammond and one of our writers all the writing team all wears multiple hats so you know one of our writers is doing work on the monetization so it's not that there's no butting heads on it we're all sort of like moving in the same direction because we have so many writers in-house it's a lot more of you know everyone's kind of looking at the numbers and understanding where how everything is happening so there's not that much I guess tension because just every there's so much visibility so

people understand you know we have to do it this way and they're like okay we'll come up with a really good narrator that works for that can you tell us about the statistics of the users well teens older okay okay I can speak to that so the short answer is that because of the child online privacy and protection act we do not track anything internally our best metrics come from Facebook because the users have to be over 13 to sign-in for that so we can see that data constantly because of that we have some limited amount of data from our ad partners our our principal demographic is 13 to 22 so high school and college students that may be a little off just again because we cannot track younger players I would

say we definitely skew heavily female you might've caught that from the Twitter post we can we can talk more about that a little later if you'd like it seems like you're adding a lot of story and a lot of quests pretty frequently and you saw up there there's eight writers and 16 people total in the studio how what kind of tools have you guys built so that you know once someone writes a quest it's actually not that much engineering effort I hope to actually publish it into something that's a user would see because it looks like there's a lot of emotional reaction to what their characters saying there's a lot of stuff that seems to happen in the background so I can just talk a little bit about the tools you've developed in the workflow that you have to publish that number of quests yeah so our workflow is and we have really great tools set up by our developers and so the writers are actually able to take it from you know story all the way to

playable ourselves and well we have the help of an intern who's really great and messing around with some files for us but we don't need any development help to do it and so that's one of the best tool that were able to just play it immediately and see how it plays in the game you know if we're able to try it out me like all this weight feels really long or something like that as evidenced by your cyber bullying class he seems you there you have a really good soapbox available to you how do you decide when to engage with issues that that has a lot to do with Oliver our CEO but I think we're really big on using our platform to try and do some good in the world yeah and we're definitely looking at other topics to cover and so I think we're always kind of on the lookout for it the thing we just want to be most careful about is always doing it in a way that feels very genuine to players and never coming off as too preachy or like we're throwing too much at them you

know definitely since we had such a good response to people from our cyber smile campaign that we did I think we're definitely working on like right now trying to figure out our next step on that really sorry so high school story seems pretty specific to a lot of North American high school in terms of narrative is that do you find it that's limiting in terms of your audience that it skews very American or do you try it or write it in a neutral way so that it's a little more accessible to to Europeans and another another and other people so the question is is high school accessible to areas outside of North America so we have chosen because we have so much story content but obviously we have not localized to other regions so that would limit our accessibility right off the bat that being said we've done very well in the United Kingdom so

clearly we can we can go across the pond I think if we were trying to transition more fully to Asian markets China Japan we would have additional concerns in terms of art style that we would want to address as well before we we let big there my question is the idea that North America of course has people from many many countries and you have a lot of ethnic diversity here and how much do you make an effort to reflect that in your storytelling and then on a connected note how often do you get players who actually do flirt with the bully of the same gender yeah we've actually my question is about diversity and same gender flirting so one of the mechanics in the game is dating and you can have you know girls dating girls and guys dating guys and we've seen just an overwhelmingly positive response on

tumblr and social medias about it and also just putting diversity in the cast was something that was very important to us from the beginning so you know you can see from the examples that we've had up here and also if you play the game the cast is very diverse so there's definitely a factor for us so I'm impressed by both the retention numbers you guys share but also the viral aldi numbers in terms organic installs you guys get and I know from all the examples you've shown in what you guys mentioned just now that a lot of us through social media channels player initiated how much do you guys do in terms of in-game sharing that makes that process easier or do you guys do anything how much in game sharing do we do we you can link you can you can link to Facebook you can share or Game Center or Google Play if you're on Android but I would say that is actually an area that we need to work on making that process easier so it's exactly what you

said it's a really user originated at the end of usually a quest like or a date of screen will pop up and if you're logged in through Twitter or Facebook it'll ask the player like do you want to share this and so we do see a you know the supporters of that button because it's right there next to like okay so sometimes people you know will just share whatever we've we've prompted them to post thanks all right I think that's it for questions thank you guys all so much for for coming out and watch from the top