Interactive Pacing from the Museum Flashback in 'The Last of Us Part II'

[Music] thank you I am here to talk about interactive pacing we're going to do it by talking about The Last of Us Part Two so what about pacing and when I say let's talk about pacing let's not talk about graphs we don't need these graphs we don't need any of this at all instead the way I'm going to approach this talk is that we're going to treat pacing like running so as the person going through a story you're the one setting the Rhythm the tempo the actual speed that the story happens we try to give that to the player in Last of Us Part Two and I also might maybe talk about one graph just just one just this one in particular it's not really the same as the others I totally promise uh but we'll kind of dig into that and you'll see what I mean but uh yeah before I get

ahead of myself uh who am I uh so my name is Evan Hill uh I was a global designer at Naughty Dog working on Last of Us Part Two currently I'm at obsidian working on outer worlds too I also did a bunch of other games but the main thing we're here to talk about obviously is The Last of Us Part Two uh and even more specifically the museum flashback scene so this was one of the main things I worked on at my time in naughty dog and one of my favorite things I've ever made ever uh I think it really connected with people and I credit a lot of that to this approach that we took kind of allowing people to set the tone for themselves set the pace for themselves and like the results kind of speak for themselves shout out to Gene Park and I apologize for maybe ruining his shirt um but yeah I just want to kind of share this process this uh weird approach that I've really seen talked about as much in you know branching narrative Focus games which has been a passion of mine for just decades so uh let's kind of get a

quick overview uh first we're going to start with the where and why then we're going to go into this three-part uh breakdown of how like the core content of interactive pacing and story kind of works and specifically in this level then we're going to dive into the extra spicy stuff about what I call Secrets they're a little different than what you might think and then I'm going to cover a little bit of like how I actually did it and then I'm gonna have an hour-long talk in a level design Summit tomorrow if you want that but for an hour uh but let's jump into it uh first things first where and why so as I kind of talked about before the goal with this level was to have a player tuned experience uh you figure out the Rhythm that works for you I don't want to outstay my welcome for even a second because given as we'll see what this level is if I overstay my welcome as a designer if we overstay our welcome as a team it's gonna just collapse like a house of cards it's going to get boring so what do you need to do this well

that one graph I talked about uh this is a four start that four-part story breakdown uh that is really common in Asian literary traditions real easy way to understand it is it's the anatomy of interesting events really straightforward first you have the introduction you let the audience understand what's going on you take those ideas and you develop them you set more Stakes you add more complications you then take all of that tension twist it about give it new stuff rattle them around that's your climax that's your payoff and finally you have a conclusion like I said it's not too complicated but the best way to think about this is not like those previous graphs like some kind of magic formula but as the anatomy of interesting events this works for analyzing everything from a baseball game to a meat Cube between you and somebody else to just what makes a good story that you want to tell your friends even a good tweet even a good joke a

good example of it being used in some places you might expect is like the Mario series currently this is the Cornerstone of their level design it's this four-part breakdown Mark round does an amazing job explaining this more in depth on his channel uh Super Mario World 3DS uh four-step level design uh but yeah me personally the best place I learned about this format and this process is from manga in theory and practice by hirohioko oraki yes that is a JoJo's reference um but yeah literally there's like a couple pages in this book that Trump almost every book on writing I've ever read I'm not saying that lightly but uh yeah main thing to take away right now is we're not going to be talking about this as a graph it is just the anatomy of interesting events so going from that we can kind of understand that we're not just talking about optional content or side quests or Collectibles this is something that's more fundamental to the moment-to-moment experience that the player has like this includes things

like how immersive Sims allow you to approach different situations how puzzles work you know looking at the system we had you get introduced in mechanics the mechanics complete and develop you have an aha moment you solve the puzzle is very very Universal even RPG leveling systems we're not talking about dialogue systems I'm talking about the fact that you get that one piece of your build fundamentally changes out the way you play move on to the next level so even without challenging mechanics we can give the player tools to shape their experience and now why are we focusing on this level in particular why why this specific part of The Last of Us it's a really brutal game honestly it has some really amazing combat but we also cared a lot about creating a lot of human moments things that focus on character and Rhythm and I think the the museum level is where we took that the furthest so as an overview like this level has no combat or stealth doesn't use any of the core mechanics that we had previously it's mostly dialogue

and critically of all uh the reason I wanted to bring it up in this talk today it's totally linear for the most part there's no branching story there's no alternate endings and yet we still worked to again create this interactive experience this interactive pacing so the big goal for me as I mentioned already was perfect timing I wanted to reward the people who wanted to linger and enable the people that wanted to rush so we had to create systems so that both of these radically different spectrums of players could have a compelling time how do we do that jump the gun um the first and most critical part is what I call focal points these are the important and unmissable parts of your experience literally your whatever it is leveling system level story moment combat encounter should be complete with all of these and

literally nothing else anything in addition to these if it makes the story worse it needs to be added to this list um and finding out which one of these moments work and like how to build these moments goes back to this Anatomy so we're going to go through an example of what these moments were in this level and kind of roughly talk about how it fits to the structure so for those that maybe don't know or need a refresher the flashback level starts three years in the past Joel is just messing with Ellie like they've taken out and gone into the Wilderness he has not explained why it's her birthday she starts asking what the hell his surprise is going to be and in response he shoves her into the river which is extra shocking if you played the first game because we have not established that Ellie can swim yet so as the player you are now underwater and we teach you the swimming mechanics in the game that we added and as that big twist you know set up develop twist

Ellie already learned how to swim she's actually great and you're totally safe and then they just quip at each other and continue on that's the first kind of Arc the next part is you move further into the forest and Joel does actually reveal what his big ass surprise is going to be turns out it's a [ __ ] dinosaur it's brought Ellie all the way out to the remains of the Wyoming National History Museum and her brain just [ __ ] explodes uh they then get to explore the museum and as we're kind of going to dig in that's where a lot of this really interactive stuff comes in we did not want that part to be too long or too short for the player so that when the final payoff happens it's gonna land like Joel in addition to just taking her here uh knows about her love of space and has gotten a recording of the Apollo launch and then hands it to her into the middle of an authentic Space Capsule and she gives her this perfect moment where yeah she can imagine that the world's

going to be a better place that it's going to go back to the way that it was they both get to share in that they both kind of align in that single moment again set up develop payoff conclusion and then finally because Ellie is also you know riding this High really generally curious she wants to see more of this Museum this amazing place that Joel's taking her unfortunately uh she winds up getting lost in the last Annex totally alone gets attacked by a boar and then also finds a bunch of graffiti referring to the fireflies the one thing that they're still not really talking about and the relationship starts to unravel from there again set up develop twist payoff but as we pointed out this is just the high level beats this is the most condensed that this story is you know as I told it right there it's not it's fine like you guys get it but you know I don't see anybody crying so how does the player seek out more how do they add and kind of season this experience with more of what they want

out of it and that brings us to prospects so prospects are these exact added things for other games that might be like side quests or optional encounters um you know dungeons like a Skyrim Prospect would just be a dungeon but the most important thing to take away of what a prospect is in this format is they are clear options these are not hidden things these are not special things you have to search for you can see them you get them you give the player a bite and then let them decide how many to take the idea is if you have a set of prospects they all should take the same amount of time it doesn't matter if it's about 10 seconds or an hour of content the player needs to know what they're getting into in order to do this thing that we're talking about season their experience all of you have probably done similar things like everybody's playing Elden ring right now you can look at the map and be like all right cool that's a boss fight I'm gonna go somewhere else but in this level in particular we tried to Showcase this as best we could so

early on in the museum we just have one little skeleton one dinosaur to mess with you're able to walk up you see and interact Ellie has a little quip Joel has a response great you could also skip this that's why we put a second one in the next hallway again you can interact with it Ellie does a little quip drill responds great and then you turn the corner and you see this a whole Cornucopia of these weird little moments and by that point without having to say anything without a tutorial without anything else as a player you're able to look at this and the one of two things cool moving on or I will do every single one of these and and that's what we allowed for like everything that seemed interesting everything we felt that needed to be said or could be done we just piled on and on and even more importantly though it was for those first group of people you can have whatever opinion you want about them um it's also clear how to move on

there's this big staircase in the back when they walk up they really like make it clear like oh hey we're moving to something else and then we also put a hard valve A Heart That level design term where you can't go back to just signal hey once you move past here there's no backtracking there's no nothing are you sure you want to go so again you give the player a bite you let them decide how many to take and kind of going back to our format this is kind of the first half of the equation you know I'm setting the player up I'm developing it we're stretching that second part to be as long as they want you know it goes right up until the point where you get to say like I'm done all right like this is cute but what else you got and that comes to the second half of the graph where we answer the other question that kind of comes with this format which is cool we've got prospects but how do you keep it from being repetitive like I'm literally telling you to be repetitive be consistent okay it's kind of boring so how do we

spice that up that's where these uh things I'm calling threads come in like it's a bad name I don't know um but the main thing I want to talk about is how it uses this ancient tool used by an illustrious group improv factors what we need to do when we're dealing with uh prospects is yes and the player anytime you interact with one of these things anytime you go about this there should be again we don't want to be predictable there should be a decent chance that we're going to take it we're going to run with it we're going to yes and it we're going to throw it back pretty straightforward again believe it or not this is kind of similar to what we're talking about already you take the player action you react to it and then when you build a thread you expand and you throw it back so yeah like I said same formula we've been talking about here but it's that back half it's that extra layer where the player is like oh cool this is going to be a 30 second interaction oh wait it's a 40 second interaction oh wait that's a joke oh my God this is memorable suddenly uh

so yeah it's the back half of this graph um yes and Prospects so let's look at some examples in the level so one of the early prospects we kind of give is is the [ __ ] hat simple thing does seems a little innocuous Ellie picks it up she says equip Joel reacts great you know she thinks it looks great he thinks it looks lame but then we also let you mess with it all of a sudden like you see this interactable and kind of ask yourself like what the [ __ ] is this no no no no no yes yes and yes and Joel hates it yes and you can put the Hat on Joel as well to it liver is a super wholesome moment that you only get if you lean into them

you only get if you engage with the prospects we reward you we take in and listen and say like all right cool I see what you're doing I'm gonna add I'm gonna react I'm gonna send and and this works for moments and connections big and small uh it brings that sequence to life you know everyone listening around like you heard laughter there like that's the thing that we're talking about it's that little bit of surprise a little bit of twist that goes it from being repetitive to something interesting um you know so like some small examples are like as you're talking Ellie and Joel can just start talking about Jurassic Park and it just keeps developing until like oh they're actually going to watch this movie you know he promises her they move on uh you can actually sit in the space section and just have Ellie just fire truck or fire hose about space for like six different interactions keep going and again like this it doesn't have to be these big moments uh brings the sequences to life it's this back half of the structure

can we take it further how do we ratchet this up to 11. how do we make these types of moments really stick out that's where we get to Secrets these are the mold Breakers so threads build off of prospects you think you know what you're getting into we kind of give you 50 more it's a good way to think about it this stuff just catches You by surprise this is the stuff that does not follow a pattern does not actually like sit with what the player's expectation is and it's how you make something memorable they're memorable departures these aren't hidden Collectibles these are just twist on Twist on twist it makes the player feel like anything's possible if they lean in the other thing to be kind of careful about is like these are not the focal points do not be afraid to let the player miss it out if they care they'll hear about it like these need to be moments that are big and interesting but can be completely optional do not need to be a part of the story so like a really clear example that I'm

not only just really happy about but like how it came about was great was the first time we showed the leads uh one of the early mock-ups of this level one of them just chimed in first millisecond can I climb that and then we did and this is something that like I'm sure even a lot of people who played the game might have totally missed but have heard about like uh the constant reaction always see with this is like wait what you could do that what the [ __ ] it has this whole interaction Ellie's able to get on top she [ __ ] jumps down uh and yeah for the people that engage with it they're they're on cloud nine they're they're like what the hell else is here for the people that didn't engage with it if they still liked it they come back and they're like wait what the [ __ ] else is there you know but it's also smaller things like Ellie can find this mirror in the bathroom and then we just give you this whole freaking mini game where you're able to just pose her face and look like a doofus because you just get to be here for a moment you get to mess around you actually get to find out that oh hey you can put hats on

Joel there's an achievement for that and you know and then this is kind of like the borderline between them threads and secrets this is like a little hat moment um you know other small things like you can find this palette off in the river she equips a Joel like oh hey let's let's write on this like totally optional but uh but yeah the main goal was like it makes players feel like anything's possible it keeps them from just kind of condensing down and just consuming your content like it's uh predictable but that's all nice of giving you guys a good framework how do how do we find these moments we talk a lot about scripts and planning and structure but in like my decade of doing this the only thing I can honestly say is just iteration like it's writing we're telling stories good writing is rewriting and specifically the approach of last of us we kind of took the approach of

storyboarding more than script writing and if anybody here knows about storyboards they also kind of know how rough they can be and that's a really critical part of why they work this is an example of a storyboard from Knives Out soak it in they did not care about making this look good they just wanted to know if this would be interesting or funny and hey that scribble's pretty funny and this this like extends to a lot of other medium like guess who drew this look at this mess this is by hirohiko Iraqi this guy's been in the Louvre this is how he sketches his ideas out you want to see what the dinosaur looked like the first time I put it in I'm sorry thank you this is what one of the leads looked like and said I want to climb it

and so we did and like all of this is really critical because like we didn't know if this moment would work I had no idea whether like we were even gonna keep this dinosaur all these other things I wanted to get it done in 20 minutes and just show someone and after putting in front of them seeing they wanted to climb it I'm like all right cool we can move forward with this this is doable this is workable this is something we can put this much effort into instead of spending a couple months and then deciding but that's like that's the generative part but how do you how do you also like I don't know Vibe with it how do you build that iteration how do you discover stuff and that's where I think like another thing we don't talk about enough is inspiration so for me working on this project was a huge challenge like there's there's none of the guard rails that we normally feel as designers no core combat no nothing all dialogue and I got super lucky because then I suddenly found the work of one naoko Yamada uh this is a Japanese anime film

director uh she is just a master she's on par with how Miyazaki not mincing words here um she mostly works with Kyoto animation and all of her films are the kind of subtle beautiful stuff that makes me cry every [ __ ] time and if you even like my work a little bit check every single one of these things out I'm dead serious uh but another thing we were looking at too was um firewatch again had a really similar structure to what we were doing so just just the fact that I'd interacted with this game years ago it was starting to chew on this problem I was able to break down like okay this kind of interactive pacing is like what they did like I could decide to kind of live in a moment or do these types of things just didn't do any hard branching we didn't need to have a big payoff just these little things that let you kind of linger in a moment really add a lot and then the final thing is like in addition to it's like okay we know what we're trying to do we know where we're getting our input how do we get this on the page how do we

actually figure these moments out honestly we just kind of improved it uh the way we worked was uh we would have a short outline I would do something horrible like that dinosaur we did earlier and we would literally act it out together as like a Strike Team and yeah no I wish I wish I had footage of this they would never let me never let me show any of this but we're talking like uh when we get hit by the boar me or one of the leads would literally like tumble onto the floor roll around like ah it's got to feel like this just to see if these rhythms if these emotions are valid and like if we're able to sell it then maybe we can get the player invested into it if I can't sell it if I can't make it interesting even with like all my energy like maybe it's a bad beat maybe it doesn't work um and then that feeds back into like oh we're using all of these tools like we're using improv and uh you know finding out what works for us by looking at other media and we just gave it to the player

like that's the other way to think about it like find what works for you like don't don't worry about like copying my formula or looking for graphs but just get in tune with what makes it fun for you and then try to make that thing happen to the player we're interactive like we can do that but uh yeah that's pretty much it uh looks like we're actually gonna have some time for questions which I'm really excited about but uh yeah you know follow me on Twitter we've got a website and stuff uh uh also have some stuff on the horizon on the side doing some Audio Drama with some cool people and uh yeah check out my stuff on outer worlds too and also watch listen to Bluebird and Silent voice and the haki story they're all real real real real good uh we do have time for questions [Music] thank you

hi great talk thank you so I want to know about prospects in relation to threads and secrets because prospects thread and secrets all have like some aspects that are in common in that they're like for instance a thing in the environment that you can walk up to and press triangle on but all prospects should be roughly the same like size correct so does that mean that if you have too many threads threads and secrets can break the size rule so does that mean that you can screw your like red flower ratio up by having too many threads and secrets and not enough prospects absolutely correct like that that I think hits to the core of the balancing act and like one of the things that like I can't solve for you solve it for your content as it comes to it but that's exactly what we're kind of getting to even back to the keyshot then cats

the big part is that unpredictability you want a little bit of it you want a little bit of consistency with your prospects but then if you're just threading all your prospects you're just back to having prospects you're just doing the same thing over again you have a list of side quests of all equal length size and weight and it doesn't feel good but yeah finding that ratio I can't give you like a rough estimate or anything else like that but no what you said is you're on exactly the right wavelength to be asking those questions cool thanks hello thank you very much for the talk thank you um I'm curious as a level designer I do a lot of work like this um maybe you're going to cover this in your talk tomorrow so maybe that's a good segue sorry um what how do you build this in the earliest stages when you're stubbing it out you show that one image this whole thing is full of moments that essentially won't sell the way they will in the finished product until like way at the end of development how do you how do you

actually stub in things like the hat and things like that early on do you use like storyboards or or title cards what do you use so we would normally like get this kind of Jank in engine walking around and then as I kind of touched on we would just act it out like I use my physicality we like I would play Joel one of the leads would play Ellie or vice versa and we would try and like feel out the dialogue and just talk through it like the the hats literally just came from a stupid joke I did where it was like oh you know maybe she finds a stupid hat oh maybe she puts it on a Sabretooth tiger it got a really big laugh that I wasn't expecting and then all of a sudden I'm like okay we're gonna do this and yeah from there in the talk tomorrow we'll kind of dive into what are the next steps of like how do you actually build a playable prototype how do you shift that to production how do you polish something like this and all the processes and stuff in that iteration cycle the big answer for that is have a really really competent team and keep them on track and it can work out

cool thanks hello my name is Ethan I'm a narrative and level design student that's my voice that's weird um so um if you're able to talk about it can you talk about any like components of this story that you all tried that didn't work and why those didn't work and why they didn't end up making it in the game Oh you mean so stuff that got cut or just didn't work out um I think like somewhat vaguely um so like the other flashback I worked on the one where Ellie and Joel go to um the hotel and then fight the bloater um initially they were going to find the strings like they they're like oh we're gonna set out we're going to try and like find these strings it's gonna be a metaphor for repairing our relationship and then we dialed it back when both for scope of like oh hey like this is a whole third of the level that we don't want to make and then right when we were asking that question we're like oh they don't find the strings that means they don't repair their

relationship it spirals out so it was actually like a thing where cutting that element we then looked you know through our story framework and analyzed it and said like oh all of a sudden this actually makes it better this this develops so like cutting down the rhythms and in the outline stage like we didn't get very far uh we kind of got to like the playable prototype of like the the uh music store a couple times when we looked at it like this is stupid this is too much this is too complicated cut it levels now two-thirds is long and the reason we went really fast and forward with that was because we realized oh hey makes the story work better awesome thank you hello hello I'm Paris um you talk a lot about unpredictability and I'm curious how you bounce unpredictability with player intentionality making sure that players are doing actions for you know a reason that they actually know of and

especially with you know the last of us it's like you know I see a prompt and I might not necessarily know what that leads to um so if you could speak to that yeah so we kind of covered it a little bit in this talk um the initial two exhibits that Ellie kind of sees in isolation that's that's exactly what we're attempting to do there where neither of those have you know big threads attached to them there's no like big yes and and by doing two at once we're simultaneously letting the player like oh hey you can skip things oh hey these things are of all equal size um and it keeps us from like lowering the amount of people that go without touching anything before they get to the main room so again it's a light touch there but in general like that's where that four-part structure you can kind of break down and understand with it's like that development part uh that first half of like setup and development that's why you kind of want to do it in order that's where like you don't just want to go big twist big twist big twist because they didn't weren't expecting anything

because the the unpredictability the subtle part of it is it needs to happen after they start forming predictions so you do the you do the things that set their Expectations first and then you do the crazy stuff and like that constant flow back and forth is what generates that feeling of story of like experience the ahas the oh shits or the oh no thank you hello friend hello uh I have a question related to uh secrets and threads uh secrets in particular because you said it's okay if people miss them um and I guess I'm wondering if after the fact uh how much data collection or studying did you do to to basically get an idea of for particular Secrets what percentage of players actually found them and uh how did that impact uh your mental model for how you approach these kinds of things in the future of like I want to go into a secret but last time I did only 20 of the people found it do those things kind of factor into your decision making uh that's just more of

that yeah so uh it kind of comes out in iteration uh we did a lot of play testing on the game and say for example the dinosaur climbing uh I forget what the exact number really was but we in conceptualizing like this we're honestly happy if like 10 20 of people got it like and we just ate that content scope we felt that like having that quality was there now there were times in play testing where that was not the number that we were hitting so we would do things like uh increase the affordances around that some like just basic level design getting thrown at it where we made it more clear we made it look more like a ramp we highlighted it more we had Joel walk by it more to just kind of nudge and nudge and nudge until we felt it was like a little more consistent uh I don't know the final ship numbers but yeah when we did a game makers toolkit on this level like one of the common comments was like wait what you can climb the dinosaur and yeah it looks like we might be out of time everybody but I think I'll be in the wrap-up room and yeah thank you so much

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