Narrative Breadcrumbs: Guiding the Player Experience with Live Events

[Music] hello everyone welcome to the free to play summit at gdc my name is abigail rindo i head up the narrative efforts at king's stockholm studio and i'm here to talk to you today about narrative breadcrumbs and how they can help you guide the player journey through story driven events so i've been working in games for about eight years now uh i've worked on 20 different serious and mobile game titles in a variety of roles and about a year and a half ago i had a wonderful opportunity to come to sweden and help the stockholm studio at king with narrative design

i was so excited to embark on an epic new journey where i thought i would work on fantastic titles like candy crush me amazing new people and explore astonishing new places and locations within europe well i did get to work on candy crush and i did meet some amazing people but i think we all know what happened next um after about three months into my role the covet 19 pandemic hit and like many of us i found myself with an over abundance of time at home and also like many of us i decided to spend some of that time learning to bake um now i've always loved cooking but baking has been something i've been traditionally pretty bad at um but

after a lot of practice a bunch of youtube videos and big big failures small successes um i did start to get the hang of it and as i'm baking i'm working from home like so many of us and i'm trying to also think about narrative and candy crush i've always thought about live games as a journey rather than a story with an ending and i was trying to figure out what that candy crush journey might be our narrative team had already done some pretty amazing work on this they had um created a revised lauren story bible that told the secret history of the candy kingdom uh there was also an amazing character bible that was filled with detailed casting notes character relationships and lots and lots of backstory um

all this was created to support a brand that was immensely popular with uh with a really successful and long legacy our new challenge and opportunity was to figure out how to make all of this player facing so i'm baking and i'm thinking about journeys while writing about a sweet and whimsical fairy tale world filled with candy and i realized that with our events and features we're leaving our players a trail of breadcrumbs throughout the map uh each moment of this bite-sized narrative builds that player journey and our journey in candy crush has been a long one i realized that i needed to get a full understanding of what that experience had been so far so i asked myself what is the trail of breadcrumbs that we've created for our players within

candy crush i began digging i played the game i talked to players did some research and talked with the team and on first glance candy crush is a whimsical and sweet world it's filled with paper craft imagery and quirky characters it's a world of escape where players can forget their daily troubles and have a meditative moment of sweetness in their day but as i looked deeper at what we had been offering our players on a day-to-day basis that world became less clear the events we were offering would vary pretty widely from day to day if you followed a typical player experience in a week it became apparent that we were throwing a lot of narrative information at our players through these events and features

but we weren't necessarily doing it in a strategic or coherent way i discovered that we weren't getting the benefits that narrative can bring players were so confused by the messages that we were sending them that they just decided to ignore the content entirely they decided that the story didn't matter they didn't know where they were because they didn't know where they had come from now this isn't necessarily an unusual problem in our industry let's be honest at so many casual gaming companies there's this misunderstanding between narrative design and just putting text up on a screen often as narrative designers were given a game or feature at the very last minute and expected to fill in the blanks with flavorful and brilliant copy

but as much as i love writing this method of acting adding narrative treats it as salt to add flavor at the end rather than the core elements that actually hold the brand together and strengthen it it's a missed opportunity in in many casual games and candy crush saga and candy cross soda were no different unfortunately the environments and characters had become relegated to decorations that were entirely disconnected from gameplay this resulted in our worlds becoming arbitrary for the player unfortunately our characters had become interchangeable and generic players didn't know the difference between them they were pattern matching our characters to features rather than thinking of them as you know people that they could help or friends on their journey and because of this the perceived value of the brand suffered

even players that had spent years with the product couldn't differentiate between our main characters and very few were able to tell us anything about them beyond the feature that they may have been attached to some people on the team saw this as a non-starter or even a non-issue but i saw this as an opportunity after all i'd come to king after working on a on a game called disney heroes which had some of the most memorable and uh amazing characters and brands that we have in the world today i i knew the strength of characters i know the strength of characters and i also know that our story world has tremendous potential but i i not only had to convince our teams of that potential but just the potential of narrative and characters as well and that wasn't necessarily an easy

thing to do after all king has had tremendous success with this product for nine years candy crush is a deeply beloved game played with by millions of people all over the world it's genre defining and it's excuse me and it's a privilege to work on but teams were skeptical that narrative could add value to the game i had to be convincing but i also wanted to make sure an honor wouldn't come before while paving the way towards a future that would allow our players to have a deeper enjoyment of the game for nine more years so i set on on my own journey to find and evangelize the recipe for a narrative driven event strategy for candy crush soda and candy crush saga now like baking both of these games seem

simple on the surface but they're difficult to master anyone that has played these games will recognize the sweet and simplicity and appeal of match three i had to take the core elements of that simplicity and use those elements to build so sophisticated and coherent stories to do this i needed to create and hone a technique through dedicated practice and experimentation just like my adventures with baking there were successes and failures but each attempt got us closer to delicious results through this practice i discovered that there are there are simple core ingredients for adding story to live events and that when you combine that with masterful technique honed over time something magical happens so abigail what is this magical

narrative breadcrumb recipe well just like candy crush our recipe begins with combining three sweet core ingredients or is what i like to call them the three c's context characters and conflict each game in an event is different so the amount of these ingredients is going to vary it should vary you'll need to experiment and discover what blend works best for you but once you have the right blend of those ingredients you can start to blend them in with your gameplay mechanics and event structure to seamlessly build the strength of the event and hold all of those pieces together like needing bread to build bread dough to spring build strength in that dough you need to seamlessly blend your story elements

into your game play and strengthen those events to to create deep and meaningful impact so far we've seen some pretty good success with this model um with the right blend of ingredients and technique we've seen increases in both player engagement and spend with this strategy now i can't share specific spat stats with you today but what i can do is give you a trail of breadcrumbs to follow so you can find the right balance for your games our journey begins with candy crush soda last year we were presented with a unique narrative problem the art team was changing the art style from a flat 2d paper cut to 3d while we could have just flipped a switch to make this change we decided to

ground it within a deeper narrative context to do this we used live events spanning multiple months first we built anticipation around the event by having a mysterious soda storm hit the candy kingdom by bringing the soda of candy crush to candy crush soda into the game world we were able to contextualize the moment-to-moment fluid dynamics of the puzzles that the players have been playing for many years soon this storm flooded everything in the 2d world causing chaos and a massive soda flood our characters were suddenly presented with a difficult choice do they give up or do they rebuild

rather than give up our characters decided to work together to save candy town we challenged players to help the characters rebuild which allowed them to take part in revealing this new beautiful art style the series of events not only helped transition players into the new art style but it built hype around the game in the event as players speculated about what was actually happening in soda and as the players built a new scene they were able to feel they were able to feel like they had a hand in restoring and revealing this beautiful new artwork they felt invested once that town was rebuilt and the new style was unveiled the players were then able to free the the old 2d characters from their former paper backings and they saw the brand new 3d ones uh emerge all of a sudden something that was a flat decoration in the game became

character that characters that were filled with personality that were alive and vibrant the personalities started to come through in these fantastic animations by our animator she's just so talented and then the players became uh more deeply connected to those to those characters they gave us great feedback saying that this event allowed them to feel hopeful and connected during the pandemic as they investigated the mystery of the soda flood and helped the characters rebuild they were able to deeply connect with them in a way that felt related to their own situations players wrote really moving poetry and they recorded video and andrew do pictures about the experience that they had our journey continues with candy crush

saga where one of the first areas of opportunity we explored was the saga map so we wanted to contextualize the players movement throughout the world and we also wanted to introduce them and and reinforce two of our most popular rewards the lollipop hammer and the color bomb uh we then raised the stakes by introducing a heist plot to the event bubblegum troll uses the bubblegum pop blockers to blow up mr toffee's vault and then he steals an experimental color bomb by building a conflict around these rewards that was uh grounded or into the game world directly we were able to build a foundation of understanding uh around the game's uh power-up boosters and also we were able to motivate the players to earn them we we tied the sequential action of the event um directly to the level

progression as well and this synthesized the the action and feeling of chasing a villain throughout the game world and along the saga map which uh took a saga map that that was relatively static beyond a few animations and brought a sense of life to it that was previously lacking it all of a sudden felt like it was more dynamic and that anything could happen in the candy kingdom after finding success with these smaller events we decided to raise mistakes with our assault nato event players were given a specific call to action bubblegum troll had unleashed a salty tornado on candy town and crystallized the buildings and characters players had to use the magical power of candy matching to save the candy kingdom we used newspaper headlines to punctuate the stages of this event um and the narrative beats to uh highlight the drama and the cliffhangers in bite-sized

and highly visual ways and while doing that we reinforced the narrative with a salty scene that players transformed to sweet they would complete levels uh earning a magical sweet energy and then they'd use that energy to free the buildings and characters from their crystallized to salty trap traps revealing the sweetness within i'm hoping that you can see the power of all three c's at play here we started by contextualizing the gameplay and using the sweetness of the candy matching to influence and change the game world we used our character relationships to drive the action and create motivation through emotional connection and then we raised the stakes for the greater conflict that players had a direct hand in being able to execute change in our aim here was to give the candy

matching meaning we decided to take that experiment and explore it further in candy crush soda as well where we created a conflict in candy town by covering it in bubblegum as a way to reveal the newly styled 3d version of bubblegum troll we wanted to make sure that we were blending context character and conflict even further with this event and so we created a conflict that was specifically visually tied to the character and the gameplay and certain gameplay elements and then made sure to contextualize the gameplay activities into that conflict we used our themed achievement system to to them it around creating a situation where the player could

remove the bubble gum and reveal the character we directed the player activity through the progression system which deepened the narrative and gameplay integration while also giving the player directed activities and giving them the opportunity to explore soda and realize that there was always something fun happening and because we uh made the unveiling of the character an event in itself and devoted an entire uh event's worth of content to it we were able to introduce key character traits in a bite-sized and fun way that actually fit the play style without interrupting moment-to-moment gameplay but conflict doesn't always need to be centered around soda floods bubble trouble salt nato's

we got to give our characters a break sometimes so we have peppered some of these through with some humorous slice of life elements uh that are smaller parts of conflict we recently experimented with integrating gameplay into our reward system by adding this humorous conflict to an event in candy crush saga in this event we temporarily transformed our purple candies into hearts and asked players to help misty the unicorn fill her box back up which had mysteriously emptied right before her big date this charming slice of life scene gave our players a glimpse into a humorous moment with misty the unicorn now don't let the simplicity of this event fool you it was actually extremely popular with our players we found the perfect blend of contextualizing the activity of collecting candies and reinforcing that

by further metaphorizing a gameplay element and when we combined that with a simple everyday conflict and the humorous use of a popular but lesser-known character we were able to find a blend of ingredients and techniques that really resonated with our player base thank you for joining me on the journey that we've had in candy crush saga and candy crest soda so far with our story driven events i hope you've been able to follow my trail of breadcrumbs if you do remember anything from our adventures today i hope you'll remember the recipe once again it starts with the core ingredients or three c's context characters and conflict you want to experiment with these and

find the right blend that works for your game and for your event mechanics but once you do you want to experiment with your gameplay integration and come up with the right technique that's going to build the strength of your event and hold all of those pieces together remember like kneading dough blending all of your narrative components directly into gameplay in a deep coherent integrated manner is going to create this meaningful impact within your game an emotional connection if you can perfect your game's recipe i think you'll find that story driven event moments can lead your players on a sweet journey that will keep them engaged and entertained i'm abigail rindo uh and this has been narrative breadcrumbs thanks for joining and i look forward to

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