Making Witches Talk in 'DON'T WAKE THE NIGHT'

[Music] hi everyone my name is santo avery i'm a director at graffiti at work which is a local arts collective based in canada of different artists and collaborators working together to make unusual game experiences and this talk called making which is talking don't make the night is about our first project which was released in 2019 and the talk will cover some points about the narrative design as well as gameplay loops that we used to make the game and how we approach the more non-linear method to develop the story so specifically what the talk will cover is identifying the bias in storytelling so that means how we made sure that the story didn't favor one specific

storyline or character or preconceived notion of what the story means crafting mechanics that carry stories so making sure that the storytelling is really solid with the game design loop then relying on visual cues how we use art direction as well as general game design to tell a story without outright telogen in the text as well as building an arc and developing non-linear storytelling so how we really went in to make sure that from beginning to end the overarching theme of the story makes sense um as the player begins and ends the game so i'll mostly cover those points i'll also go into a little bit of the background of how don't make the night came to be and uh how we wanted to create uh this game with a very experimental

approach uh so a little background is don't wake the night was a game that was developed between 2017 and 2019 it's a 2d point-and-click game with visual novel elements that tells the story of a community at a crossroads and the players basically tasked with finding out why this community is facing this conflict um and seeing if there's anything they can do to help uh these community members you know come to some solution so the project was really developed in part thanks to provincial municipal funding in ontario and toronto from the ontario arts council and toronto arts council which allowed myself and several collaborators to bring this game to life so a little bit of background on myself i've been making games for quite a while now and i specialize in

indigenous guarani inspired stories uh knowing that i was kind of the first project that i took on uh that was very much influenced by that and that i worked on with other collaborators um and with dominic the nine was very much also inspired by 2d animation and 2d animation design as a background i come from 2d animation but then i kind of veered into game design and so i kind of combined the two together to create the design for this game um as well as working with other folks local to toronto um to release this game to itch in 2018 and most recently was released to steam uh in october of 2020. so generally doing the night has a core gameplay loop of two different aspects that happens between two main camera

views so the first one that you see here is kind of a scene overview of a bird eye view where you're able to see all the characters in one scene you're able to see you know if they any like clickable elements in the scene uh you can click around and interact with the environment itself uh you can see if there's any conversations available to you with the speech bubbles here which when you click them they takes you to the second scene overview which is the one that is more directly visual novel inspired so basically the player will interact and then switch between these two views depending on whether they're interacting with the environment or whether they need to view character dialogue to gather more context about what's happening in the game so one of the key aspects to this loop that we really wanted to get across is that the player themselves are omnipresent

which means that you know they can you can view everything at once but they're also absent at the same time so you have a degree of influence in the scene but you can't talk to the characters directly you can't you know make the you know you can't control individual characters as a player so you can kind of influence their actions but not directly make some kind of final decision on their behalf so you you're able to affect the environments by touching several objects in the scene uh which elicit reactions from the characters themselves but again you can't actually talk to the characters and make choices on their behalf but you can view their conversations depending on these different objects that you're touching the scene so you're primarily a bystander who's seen but who's not seen but felt not heard but um sensed so it's a kind of uh spiritual presence where you know you can sense it but you know

you can't see anything concrete you can't necessarily you know reach out and touch something physical so with this gameplay loop uh it was also very heavily inspired by barney's storytelling and spirituality so that's something that i generally work pretty closely with in narrative design as well as gameplay design in general so basically the players meant to emulate a spirit where they are not permitted to talk to these living characters but they can kind of influence the scene around them uh so that's kind of uh something i'll also touch on uh shortly and more def but basically that's kind of what influenced that gameplay decision so one of the most challenging aspects of don't make the night is having to identify the bias and the narrative

so since the point of the game is to be a bystander this means that um there's no actual influence on character dialogue you can't really you know make decisions or change anything you can only really kind of watch what happens so the only choice that you really have is to view the conversations in you know whatever order that you would like to and the main challenge behind this approach is building a narrative that is not heavily biased towards one interpretation of the story or one particular character so we had to make really sure in reviewing both the gameplay loop and the actual written dialogue that you know one character wasn't being um focused more over others so there came a point where you know we had the dialogue in spreadsheets we had the dialogue on several different documents and we had to like word search and see like okay does this character get mentioned a

lot more than this other character is this character getting enough dialogue lines so that the player can actually get an idea of like what type of personality they have or um what type of you know interest they might have uh so obviously this can vary because some characters might be more reserved than others so they talk less but the key aspect is to at least give the character to you know enough space so that they can like express the personality that they we've assigned them and to also make sure that you know this game does not really have like a main character the main character in theory is the player because they are the ones that are the main focus of this gameplay um but you know we were really careful that there was that bias was identified pretty early because the mystery of the story is that there's a conflict that you're tasked with solving but uh there's no context there's no actual

um direction on what that is uh so the point of the game is to really you know listen in all these conversations and kind of gather clues and hints to make you understand a little bit more of what the characters might be going through uh while still not getting the full picture because at the end of the day uh you're a stranger in this community and you've never met any of these people personally you're just kind of dropped in and you're expected to kind of know what's going on uh so part of the mystery of the game is to kind of uh feel out what conflict is and whether or not you know some conversations reveal more of the nature of that conflict or whether they're just more you know playful everyday kind of small talk conversations between people who know each other so that meant because of this narrative direction that the bias had to be rooted out pretty early in development so from the

very beginning in creating a narrative system that is grounded more non-linear storytelling and storytelling techniques we had to really make sure that the conversations had a main idea that they were abstract but that they still made sense so we favored abstract conversations over anything that was linear or contextualized just to really favor uh the type of direction we were going for and a particular way we approach this and doing the night is basically by posing questions that players might already have about the game coming in or asking questions uh about what might come up later in the game uh but only skirting around the answer so you know not giving the full answer just kind of like half of it or even just a small piece of it uh and this is usually shown in the game by characters

alluding to something that happened or mentioning something or an event that the player never actually saw so that could be like a character saying like you know something happened last week and i didn't like it which it just says something right so there's no actual context as to what happened so it doesn't really let us know anything and it doesn't really you know give us any clear uh context but what it does tell us is like two key things which is one the passage of time and two the character's personal reaction to that so we know that it happened last week we know that the character didn't like it so it's more similar to bumping into two people talking to each other and kind of coming in halfway into their conversation and generally when that happens um

you know you have to gather context from them to understand and catch up to what they were talking to but of course in this game you don't have any kind of direct interaction with characters which means that you can't ask some of those questions you can't ask them like oh what was this about or what did this you know mean you're just kind of overlooking them as they talk so it's almost like peering into this somewhat intimate maybe personal conversation that you have no context of and then kind of trying to get the impression that characters have of it so it's nothing concrete or informative uh but it can tell you a lot about intended personality so uh it can tell you a lot about you know whether this character what their general disposition is uh in any type of conversation it might tell you that this person is you know good enough friends with this other character to actually divulge that to them um or it could be that

you know this character is just very open and they tell everything to everyone so that's also another approach we took really closely when we identified you know what kind of characters we want to work with so there's about seven characters eight characters that um you know you see regularly throughout the game and these characters each have like a specific personality that really influences their narrative style so even just in this screenshot of the opening cut scene of the game uh you can see that the character on the left tends to be a little bit more um maybe like short-tempered uh and the character on the right tends to uh get into trouble but also tries to avoid trouble at the same time uh so we kind of came up with like very basic dynamics between each character so that we could work out what kind of conversations they could be having what might they like to talk about maybe

the character on the left likes a certain productivity the character on the right likes gardening so maybe that could somehow influence what they like to talk about and the mechanics of the game were very much influenced like from a narrative first perspective uh so don't make the night was very much a game that started out you know with the story being written first and then the game mechanics came second as well as the game design um so in the game you know we have these characters they're each named after a specific role that they play in their community things like gardener listener actions that they take in their community to basically make sure it runs smoothly so all those kind of things like names and locations and some backstory were developed and fleshed out before we really decided on what kind of mechanical approach we wanted to take

with the game we definitely knew that it would be a more narrative focused game with text dialogue and characters talking to one another we just weren't sure whether or not you know how these characters be interacting with one another how would the player come in uh to make sure that these characters talk to one another or you know what would happen you know to the ending and things like that mechanically um so this meant that the mechanics also had to accommodate uh a certain style of non-linear storytelling so that players could access key components in the game at the right time and parse information in a way that was more fluid and out of order it's also a shorter game so it's about 20 minutes uh and that also meant that the approach that made the most sense was a point-and-click route to kind of give that omnipresent feeling where you're kind of looking over all the characters at the same time and we also had to narrow down the amount of character conversations uh

by the number of interactable objects we actually wanted in the scene so with that in mind it also became important to give players a chance to always go back to conversations uh if they wish to review any previous dialogue so when you view dialogue once and during the night it's not locked away forever you can always you know re-trigger the same environmental uh cue and then go back to that conversation and review it and see you know if something makes more sense reading it the second time and part of that is also that because the conversations are non-linear it might mean that you read you know conversation a first and then you go to another conversation conversation b and then after reading that you know maybe you pick up on something that is like oh i think this previous conversation might have had another reference to the thing that this character is talking about so you decide to go back and now that conversation makes a little bit more sense uh than it previously did so that's the

kind of narrative loop that we wanted to encourage to make sure that you know you can still view older conversations at any moment in case that helps in contextualizing um what a character is saying and this also helps tie in the sense of non-linear movement in the game since there's no prerequisites to access certain conversations and they don't have to be completed in a specific order so the only prerequisite is that you have to interact with that environment asset so usually that involves like in the game either you know wrestle a branch or you touch a trunk or you drop a fruit from a tree and that like elicits a reaction from the characters and it makes them go you know break out into different conversations that's the only requirement really to access conversations but other than that you can just do them in any order you don't have to you know click the branch first or click the trunk second the only thing in the game that is

really a more binary choice is towards the end once you have viewed all the conversations the game will offer you to end it by basically uh adding one more object to the scene and if you click that object it will bring up a choice of three different endings and you can kind of choose what ending you would like to view and then it takes you to the credits and to the cutscene that wraps up the game for the player and generally with the narrative cues we also made sure that uh one thing that really helped also contextualize the player into the scene was having cut scenes at the beginning and the end of the game so the game will open up with about about a minute long cutscene that is animated by hand and that kind of brings the player into the world that the characters inhabit so it will kind of you know show you what the characters are doing

before you actually start the game and it will give you a little bit of like an initial context as to why you're there and maybe what the characters are looking for uh so in this case the characters summon a spirit because they want help from this um spiritual being to like solve their community conflicts uh so that's kind of shown at the beginning to help contextualize that event a little bit more and then at the end there are cut scenes that are shorter but they're about maybe like 20 to 30 seconds long that just help kind of wrap up any kind of loose threats of the game but still keeps it very open so that um the player is encouraged to kind of go back and replay the game to see the other endings as well and on top of that we also used a little bit of voice acting in the opening cut scenes and the ending cut scenes uh because we found that it also really helped uh give a sense to the character's personality so we worked

with several different people for voice talent uh to make sure that each character kind of had a character or a voice actor that made sense to their character and that way when you're watching the opening cut scene you are already kind of getting a little bit of an impression of what each character is like so in that sense if you have any kind of animated cutscenes or scripted cutscenes in your game that can also help contextualize more information about the characters without giving too much away in the text so that way the player kind of has an idea of what to expect from each character so the last piece and related to the animated cutscenes that helps kind of tie everything together is the visual design of the game so uh in the game this is one of the screenshots from one of the endings in the game each character is signed

around a specific animal so they have masks on their back that represent a different type of animal that is common in south america so like uh alligator capybara jaguar you know uh types of deer and eater things like that uh so the reason why each of them is characterized with an animal is also to kind of again feed into that visual key of the what personality they might have so like the character that wears the capybara mask is very friendly very kind of uh open to conversation um and also a bit naive at the same time uh then the character who is represented by a drag war tends to have like a more a stronger presence and can be maybe a little bit intimidating but they're not like like outwardly hostile or anything when they're in conversations um and things like that so we try to we

try to link these um animal symbols to the characters you know because it relates to their environment relates to the culture that is inspired by guarani culture and it also helps kind of attach some kind of narrative device to them to help contextualize what their motivations might be so it's something subtle more subtle than let's say like the anime cutscenes or anything else about their character design and when you're viewing the conversations you'll see these masks on their back so it all it's almost like they're still looking at you but just from another perspective as i mentioned a lot of the characters in the world are directly inspired by white any storytelling that i personally grew up with so uh guarani is a nation an indigenous nation that is spread out between brazil paraguay uruguay parts of bolivia and argentina so the valleys that i grew up with generally

were around accountability and personal responsibility to your community which in this sense you know it's a lot the game is a lot about you know how do you handle community conflicts uh and how does restorative justice work for these particular characters uh you know what are they looking for and those are the kind of questions that um the player might want to think about without having an actual answer so one of the important things is that we don't uh you know in the game narrative in the game mechanics we don't punish the player by picking a specific ending because at the end of the day they also don't know the answers so that's kind of one of the main ideas of the game is that it's okay to not know the definitive narrative answer to what some of the characters might be asking or wanting the whole point of the game is just kind of to like experience their conversations and experience a kind of imperfect nature of trying to solve a conflict without really knowing anything about it

um so this was kind of the basis that i used to help me answer some of the questions and solve some design challenges um in creating with your story that didn't lead players astray so the main uh the really like most important point there was that the players still walked away with like a sense of story a sense of place uh so they might not have the answer but they knew what happened uh just in that particular moment that they were in i know they it's almost similar to you know being at a certain place but not having all the answers and similarly many of the character aspects they mentioned like the masks are direct from what any as well and they reflect each character's personality you know the animals they're assigned to um and i had referenced before as well that the game also relied quite heavily on to the animation so everything that was animated in the game

was animated uh through toon boom uh parts of it were also uh animated through photoshop with like uh usually by coloring it in uh but the actual uh like smears and like in betweens and all those were done in toon boom um it was all done by hand as well um and since it was a very kind of small self-contained environment that these characters were inhabiting 2d animation really also bringed help really helped bring out their personality so it became really crucial to like really over exaggerate animations and to really overextend styles to make a lasting impression uh so generally that means that uh it was really about exaggerating those smears and exaggerating those actions so that even when the player is viewing you know more bird's eye view of the game you can still see the animations uh and feel them very clearly and they kind of

tell you like a little bit more about the mannerisms or personality of certain characters so uh in the main view sometimes there are characters are like fidgeting with their hands because they're very anxious there's other characters who like might do other things like you know rest their face on their hand like they're thinking about something uh so those little cues also help a lot with uh establishing what kind of mindset each character is at so that's also something very useful to think about um when trying to use animation to also tell a story without having to rely too much on the in-text dialogue so coming to a close here just to summarize some of the things that i've gone over so basically a lot of what we solved in the in this game was that we wanted to limit information to the player and let them fill in the gaps so we wanted to kind of

meet them halfway and let them try and fill in the gaps to contextualize what's happening in the game that way you know you're kind of leaving it a mystery and they can speculate on what's you know what might have happened what uh what might have taken place while not giving a definitive answer so we wanted to really make players think about it come up with different possible um scenarios that uh come up in the game so that way you know technically every player is right in a way you know no matter the different scenarios they can think of to kind of fill in that gap it's technically correct so that's what we also wanted to work towards uh we also wanted to allude to a larger narrative so we wanted to foreshadow a lot of things that don't actually happen in the game itself so we wanted to foreshadow oh this character had a relationship with this other character but now they don't really talk anymore or maybe you know this

event happened where um it soured some relations within the community or maybe this one character who doesn't appear in game is referenced in some way and that also kind of help escalates that kind of mysterious nature of the game we also wanted to assume player curiosity so we wanted to assume that the player would be curious about what's happening we wanted to assume that the player would interrogate the design so one of the key takeaways is also that you know we planned around the players interrogation of design we wanted to give them you know some autonomy in that even if you know there are some things that they might not influence directly and that's the end of this talk uh thank you so much for taking the time to listen uh me go on about this little game and if you wanted

to check out more of brickety at work or more of my work uh you can check us out brigadier.com or twitterbrochery.org you can find me at babygoth on twitter or you can check out my personal work at santoria.com i'm currently working on a newer project about indigenous cyberpunk that will be announced in the future so i hope i can talk about that in the future as well thank you [Music]