Narrative Moments on a Budget: Stretching Storytelling "Dollars" Across the Moments That Matter

[Music] thank you hi good morning everyone my name is Vanessa Erico my pronouns are she her today I'm wearing a blue blazer a black shirt with my Studio's logo on it black pants and white sneakers I'm a senior story producer over at the Coalition and I'm here today to talk to you about narrative moments on a budget and how you construct your storytelling dollars across the moments that matter but first a little bit about what I do and the studio that I'm from so story is a big umbrella and as a senior story producer I drive the elements and and the teams that craft an immersive storytelling experiences so that's everything from the Inception and ownership of casting and writing to the content teams that work together to develop the cohesive narrative between cinematics narrative design and in-game sequences I also work with a phenomenal team of directors leads and content

developers to bring great stories to life and I hail from the Coalition Studio that is based in Vancouver Canada it's the home of the Gears of War franchise and a flagship first party studio for Xbox game studios so now that I've told you a little story about myself I want to start by introducing you to another that ends with a tricky question but first we begin where all great stories do at the beginning so storytelling in Game Dev has an almost impossible puzzle to solve we need to build worlds and stories that are rich enough to draw players in get our own Visions across excite returning Gamers and retain new ones all while delivering hopefully on time and on budget and because creativity knows no bounds it's sometimes very easy to stay in our Blue Sky stage of thinking especially when it comes to narrative because not only do we want to tell great stories we need to see them through to the end they need to feel satisfying some of them may even have branching dialogue with complex character arcs and multiple

themes and to be honest we feel incredibly attached to the stories that we make and as much of it as it's difficult to stop ourselves from listening to a great story it's equally as hard to hold ourselves back from telling one so it's true storytelling and Game Dev has a near impossible puzzle to solve and I say near impossible because it's not without a solution I'm sure all of us here are familiar with the old adage games don't because they're done they ship because they have a deadline but the first part of the tricky question is this what if we could change all that what if we could develop the stories we want with a better control of what needs to stay in what needs to be whittled down and create great stories within the scope of our games that we're immensely proud of simply put how do we tell great stories on a budget when everything is important but time and budget is limited how can we Empower developers with the support they need to approach the complex decisions of how we choose to invest our narrative bandwidth in this talk I hope to provide a foundational framework of how you can

spend your narrative dollars across the stories you develop now the simple Act of making the message methods focus focuses decision making in more productive and informed ways and this is going to be true for games of any scale and teams of any size whether it's AAA or new indie if your team is passionate about the stories that you want to tell you don't need millions of dollars or hundreds of devs to tell a great one it should be noted before I start this talk that this is not a talk on how to write a great story this is a talk on how to prioritize your great story so that it's told in the best way feasible and so why talk about this at all why is it important because a great story in its simplest form is one with a great beginning middle and end and since all games regardless of the scale of your production have budgets and deadlines when we fail to prioritize prioritize effectively delivering the beginning middle and end of our story we fail to deliver a great story altogether regardless of how we try to make up for the lost time or the Lost effort later

on in production so that brings us back to our near impossible problem how do we tell great stories on a budget well first we need to develop a framework we do this by identifying our core narrative beats clarifying our story critical path and following what I like to call the three two one approach to empower decision makers and hold ourselves accountable this framework can be Universal and works to build a strong narrative budget because all great stories start the same by first identifying our core narrative beats and our story critical path we're able to create the control center of our game's narrative so let's dive into identifying these key terms as they'll set us up for creating our approach for spreading our narrative dollars across the moments that truly matter first up core narrative beats so these are the foundational tenets of the overall story through which the story critical path is weaved these are usually the most impactful story beats that are agreed upon at a high level usually during pre-production you can think of your core narrative beats sort

of like your story pillars and while your story pillars can exist without cinematics or whatever high value narrative devices you're employing in your own game those high value narrative devices should rarely exist with outside the core narrative beats and this is usually because they're high cost meaning that they're high investment so they want you want to put them in the place that most players are likely to see them next up is our story critical path which are the moments of the game represented by missions or narrative devices that are pivotal to tying the main parts of your Narrative of the game together to put this another way these are the elements of the story that if removed would either make your overall narrative completely nonsensical or create a noticeable disconnect in your plot or gameplay these are usually objectives along a chronological path that service the core narrative beats and are sometimes referred to as the golden path all right so I like visuals let's break this down to an example that I hope we all know and love The Lion King and if you have not seen The Lion King up until this point I have to tell you that this is going to be a spoiler and I am so

sorry but I hope you have seen The Lion King or at least have red Hamlet so here oh I'm so sorry so here we see our coronerative beats that help guide the story and then the story critical path which would include missions or gameplay if the Lion King was a game that are crucial to get from one narrative beat to the next so for our core narrative beats we have the iconic opening of the circle of life with the drafts and the antelopes we have that classic image of Rafiki holding Simba up on Pride Rock we have the agonizing Mufasa falling into the Stampede all the way to us learning what it means to have no worries for the rest of our days and of course ending with Simba becoming the titular Lion King but we also have the story critical path that ties it all together for example the movie needed to establish that Simba was next in line to be king he was a little bit naive he didn't know that he needed to earn it he sort of just thought he deserved it and we need to see that why this happens and because it propels Simba's overall flea and then subsequent Pride Rock plunging into

chaos similarly Simba is need to be seen growing and learning and us as the viewers need to see that there's some sort of passage of time lastly we need to see that Simba has learned of Scar's tyrannous Reign which of course propels the narrative to his penultimate return to Pride Rock all for his confrontation for up with scar to make sense you remove these paths and there's a noticeable disconnect in the story so with the core narrative beats and our story critical path in mind let's talk about why this is important in establishing your narrative budget first it generates a high level discussion if you're working on a game and you are super excited you're eager you've heard me say coronary beats and story critical path at least a dozen times now you rush to your stakeholders and they're just like agree these are not our coronary defeats or a story critical path that is probably one of the best things that could happen because now you know what it's not you can now work onto the second step of aligning your teams on

what's most important if they say that's not what our coronated beats are we can open a dialogue and discussion of then what are they and then what are the most important links that hold it all together it's also going to keep us focused on what's important as we go through the course of production we're going to have many many things get added many many many many things get added with various Scopes and various levels of importance this is going to keep us focused on what we prioritize if something doesn't Circle back to a core narrative beat or a story critical path we can now ask ourselves how important is it really how much should I invest of course it also holds us accountable to these decisions when we're adding an additional plot or maybe we're trying to assess what needs to be cut we can again go back to what our story pullers are or our golden path and say hey if we remove this it is going to create a disconnect in our game all right so we've identified our core our core themes where do we go from here enter what I like to call the three two one approach

this is ideally three tiers of investment at least two methods of choosing what budget or investment a mission or narrative device should be and ideally one only one goal or north star that keeps decisions in context when it's time to make tough calls so let's start off with our tiers of investment these can be delineated in any clear category you want either that's high medium or low or my personal favorite gold silver bronze it includes a level of investment that can be expected within each tier and of course you guessed it they're contextualized by how they fit into the story critical path and our core narrative Beats so let's start by defining each one beginning with the goal tier so now your gold is going to be the best of the best it's where you want to spend the most time and effort but it's also in places where players are most likely to encounter or experience it it's high cost sure but it's also high value because not only is it on a story critical path but it's also representing a core narrative beat for your game so a good smell test for evaluating

whether a mission in your game should be considered a part of the core narrative beats and a story critical path is by assessing its cut impact if not having this missionary game would remove a significant story pillar then it's likely critical to the story so for missions in your campaign what qualifies as gold is simple it's the intersection between our two main themes but for other narrative devices at your disposal it's important for you to decide as a team what gold looks likes so I've added some other examples of what a hypothetical goal tier could be for reference I'm going to begin by saying high-end cinematics my personal philosophy is that high-end cinematics are always exclusively used for the gold tier because typically cinematics are the most expensive they're going to use your highest character quality highest polish of Animation highest Fidelity props and textures and a lot of resources for multi-disciplinary teams but maybe you're not employing cinematics and you have some other high-end narrative devices this could be some maybe highly polished authored and narrative sequences or animation sequences maybe it's a highly polished camera essentially this is what's going to be

the most expensive but it's also what's going to look the best and you as a team get to decide what that is as I said I like visuals so let's map this out so again we have our story critical path here in pale blue and we have our core narrative beats in purple just as with our Lion King example and so when we talk about what belongs in the gold tier what's high value what's high visibility but what's also integral to our story and of course that means it's going to receive the highest priority we're talking about a mission or narrative device on within our story that intersects both paths and that's going to look something like this it's key to note here that the core narrative beats that are the most memorable memorable also beget also exist in the end so when we're planning out how we're going to spend our narrative dollars we also have to plan for investing in those goal tier assets throughout The Narrative of our story and not just in the beginning and not just in the end this is so we can use them for all the moments that truly deserve them no matter where it is in our narrative so for mapping out the next tier we're going to move on to Silver

so medium to high visibility experiences our silver tier reflects assets that are polished but don't have the same level of cost as gold assets so what's medium to high visibility for Missions these would be things that are on the story critical path but are off our core narrative Beats another way to determine if this fits into the silver tier is to assess its cut impact so if a mission or other narrative device in your story can be considered silver tier if removing it would not remove a story pillar from your game but would tangibly lower the overall narrative experience I.E the story would still make sense but a player could tell that something is missing or worse it looks like something was cut in post and that's not where you want to be so other examples of the level of investment you can be assigning to devices that are considered silver tier are what I like to call reusing gold assets so if you have a gold asset that can be curated in some small way with minimal lift and minimal investment that is a prime target for something that can be in the silver tier category why

because you know it's already going to be polished and it's not going to take too much of your overall narrative dollars hopefully you already have some newer polished cameras that are lower cost than some of your gold tier of devices that you're using and so if that's the case you want to use them here as well I would say in this tier that new cinematics are discouraged and that's because yes cinematics are typically super super cost intensive so if you're going to put them in the silver tier they should be rare and if needed they should be small in scope that means your Tech your character count the and your complexity should be kept to a bare minimum right we're back to our visual example again we have our story critical path and our core narrative beats the gold we know is reserved for those narrative devices that intersect both because they're going to take a lot more time and effort and thus can't be everywhere in your game so if a narrative narrative device or a moment or mission is not defined as a core narrative beat but is still integral to the story it belongs on your story critical path and that's where you want your silver to your narrative devices to be and of course here we have in our

example Simba just he's too excited he can't wait to be king but also we see that there's that passage of time that's integral to connect the two key moments of the end of The Lion King together and of course that leaves us with our last tier the bronze tier is defined by low visibility missions or other narrative devices where reuse is the name of the game it is highly encouraged and ideally a lower investment is all that's required something in the bronze tier is both off your core narrative beat and off your story critical path that means it is lower visibility and of course to think about it another way we can calculate the cut impact so if cutting it would have minimal effects on your overall core narrative beats or it wouldn't remove a narrative link from the game then it probably is either considered bronze tier or a nice to have if you're thinking to yourself hey if we remove this part of the game if we move this narrative moment and players could not tell that we removed it it's likely belonging in the bronze tier all right bronze to your devices I'm just going to say it right up front

right again no cinematics they're just too costly for something that players may or may not experience throughout the course of your game again reuse is the name of the game here so you want to be using already existing narrative systems or sequences or if you have a dynamic system or narrative system you want to be using it here too and then if you're going to be employing other narrative devices maybe you have animation sequences or authored cameras minimally altered at best because again we want to be saving our narrative dollars for our silver or gold tier devices all right so you've heard me say cost and refer to cost a few times but I want to get into an example of how I tangibly calculate it so in this Venn diagram it helps to Showcase how the cost of your mission or narrative device can determine the level of investment you can expect and thus where you'll get the most value utilizing them over the narrative in your game we can consider the outer edges of each circle low cost and therefore require less of an investment and so as we move further and start combining different attributes for example building an asset or a narrative

device that takes more resources and more complexity we start to increase our cost and thus our overall investment and because we're increasing our overall investment we want to be saving that high cost device for where the players are most likely to experience it which brings us back to the moments that intersect our core narrative beats and our golden path and you can see in this example here if something say is high complexity and high time or and costs High time it's going to be mainly a silver tier asset if it costs all three it's going to be considered gold and what do we want to do with gold we want to be reserving them for the moments that matter the ones that intersect our core narrative beats and our golden path so this is what our investment would look like if we were to plot it out in a perfect world but this is game development and it's nothing short of what I like to call very perfect surprises along the course of production and so these models aren't meant to show you what has to be true or what is truly black and white in truth your investment

might not look like this your investment might look a little bit something like this which is absolutely okay these visuals are meant as a guide in order to help your team's decision making so that when you're adding a silver to your nerve device that's say off the story critical path but you're doing it with intention it's okay because you have made that intentional choice and have had those conversations of where whether or not it deserves that level of investment all right so we got our three tiers now what to develop at least two myth two methods of choosing what level of investment a mission or narrative device should be this works because it's going to simplify Decisions by bringing it back to your defined tiers this is why having three tiers is so important you want to be able to group things into either high medium or low gold silver or bronze and then assign a cost value to each when you do this ensures it ensures consistency and accountability across a wide variety of narrative devices and missions on your project because you're always bringing it back to your core to

your Investments and of course it empowers your devs to work together more autonomously because you're providing a common reference for shared resources so once you have once you know the key to narrative devices your game will employ whether it's cinematics whether it's another narrative device you want to represent them on a hierarchy so I'm going to show a sort of a quad table of what that looks like I'm going to go over each of the columns and rows so we can get a better idea of what we saw in our visual example represented in another way as a method of decision making for our devs all right so here we have one of our methods of decision making in our first column you see that I've put on top cinematics the or whatever your high cost narrative device is going to be this you want it to be your highest on the right on the left Edge you see something that says it is on the core narrative beats and the story critical path the middle row says that is off a core narrative beat but it is on a story critical path and the bottom row says it

is off both the story the story critical path and the core narrative beat and so we go down the line and say all right if we're choosing say we want to put a cinematic here we develop we ask ourselves where it belongs in the story if it's both intersecting both our coronary to beats on our story critical path it's gold if it only intersects the story critical path it's silver or it's a hey should I really be spending all my dollars on a experience that is not gold or not a story pillar and if it is intersecting neither then maybe we don't want to spend our highest value narrative device in this particular moment and then moving along to the second column we have the second narrative device you can employ so this needs to be overall typically less costly than your first narrative advice because that's going to be the highest then we move on to the next column that is going to be your least costly narrative device and so we're giving our developers options we're saying hey maybe we can't use a cinematic here but what I can get you is a lower cost gold narrative three

moment depending on the cost that you're assigning to each all right hopefully you're still with me the same can be said for Missions so this is another method for decision making that I've used in the past this one focuses predominantly around how much of a level of investment you should spend based on where the missions appear within your game and the level of visibility so from the top it says what type of mission is this we're going to go all the way to the right if it is a side mission I'm going to implore you to just go right down to bronze just save your storytelling dollars for the moments that matter but maybe it is a main mission or you simply don't know yet that's okay the decision Matrix will help you find where you need to be so is it integral to the story is it a core narrative beat yes it is do you know if it is part of the main storyline is it part of one true story pillar if it's not maybe you should be using a silver tier device if it is move forward and have faith in using your gold all right we have all that in place we

talked about our themes we have our methods for decision making but what if there is still contention what if there's more complex call to make and your stakeholders simply cannot agree well first I'm hoping that you've come to my talk the Shameless plug there and but I'm also hoping that you've aligned with your teams on the core narrative beats early on in pre-production but withstanding all of that there's still one more tool in our tool about for our approach that's going to be the one goal aka the North Star it asks us what pillars are truly unshakable it asks what must be true if all else fails and three and most importantly what is your narrative's purpose this could be a collection of the core narrative beats but it works even better if we can pick just one because this helps us focus our decision making and spend our narrative dollars in a way that services this one truth the one North Star and when all other decisions become more complex as we go throughout the course of production it reminds us of what is

truly important to us what no matter of what else needs to be true that's where you want to spend the most but that's also where we're likely to get the most bang for our buck and if everything else in our game can be near adjacent to or on the periphery of our one North Star then we know we've done something right so let's go back to the beginning where we have our core narrative beats for a lion king example it could be that your one North Star is that the audience needed to see the change from Utopia to dystopia to back again or it could be that scar must be defeated it could be that Simba needed to meet others that helped him on his journey to adopt a new mindset or it could be that Simba must grow into King at the end I would argue and let's say for example that our one North Star is that Simba must grow into King at the end in the beginning he was going to be king but let's be honest he was pretty naive about it did he really deserve it it's questionable I don't want to own a bad mouth Simba great guy but as we go through the story as we go

through the movie we see that he learns what it means to truly be king he knows what he learns what it means to make the tough calls he learns what it means to understand and accept his past and reconfront his biggest fear and now everything else in that film just needs to fall in around that one North Star so when we go back to our first tricky question how do we tell great stories on a budget I hope I've given you some tools and Frameworks to start developing that structure for your own projects but I also hope that you've learned one more thing When Everything feels important but time is limited we can ask ourselves what is the one goal or north star that must be true and that we can come back to when decisions get tough what are at least two methods of choosing what investment a mission or narrative device should be and what are at least three tiers of investment that Define the level of focus that should be devoted to the elements of our story based on where they can be found within the story critical paths and core narrative Beats so but the real question isn't how do we tell great stories on a budget but how

do we stay true to the purpose of our story and how we how can we invest to truly service it from beginning middle to end and I hope I've given you some answers to help totally answer that tricky question here today thank you so much my name is Bless America you can find me on email LinkedIn or Twitter thank you for coming to my talk believe we have some time for Q and A's questions and answers this time I'm also going to uh do what it says on this card here and remember remind everyone to fill out their evaluations of course filling out the evaluations for GDC and feedback is super important not only because it tells us how we did but it helps GDC promote new content that could be uh could be just encouraged for next year and on all talks to come so I greatly improve I greatly appreciate your feedback and also taking the time to sit with me here today

hi hi yeah absolutely so the question was if I could go back to the grid Matrix I'm just going to flip through the slide here it is a very quiet room and so I hope that means everybody has learned of coordinated beats in the story critical path hi Vanessa um I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about what escalation paths that the Coalition look like if you really are stuck on budget decisions um like is it pretty much just like up through management levels or are there multiple departments that get involved I'm curious because I deal with this a little bit of my company it can get kind of messy so I'm just kind of curious what it looks like for you yeah so the question was about the escalation paths that exist when we're up against making those tough calls if I understand that right yeah we're up

against making those tough calls what is that escalation path look like and so for me it always starts with trusting my developers and the teams that I work with I truly believe that our teams are our experts and so for me it starts firstly at somebody raising the flag that hey this is going to take more time than I thought or this is more complex than we are giving it we're giving it the correct amount of thought too sometimes we get an overall direction an overall Vision that looks great on paper sometimes it looks a little bit too good on paper and then it's up to us and our teams to really dissect how much of it how much it's going to cost and once we figure out whether or not maybe it just doesn't fit what I usually do is work with my teams to understand okay what is our good better and best scenario so the good scenario is that hey maybe we can do 70 of this or 50 of this what does that look like tangibly what does it represent and I always ask and implore others to not showcase what we want to be true but showcase how it is if the risk is a risk the best thing we can do is float it up to the top and so what I would do is I speak with my leads I speak with my directors I speak with my

production director and make sure everybody has a visibility on the risk and that we're over communicating on it I usually try to get the teams together within a breakout session to say hey this is what we are up against these are the possible solutions our team has come up with what do you think would be the best course of action and we move forward when everybody's in agreement on what solution that should be uh hi I was wondering the uh the tiers of investment of uh gold silver and bronze uh that seems really helpful uh as like breaking it down broadly but I was wondering if in the projects you've worked on if the any of the storytelling beats have just have demanded uh more granularity like okay between all of our golden moments this one is the most important does does it help to like categorize that into like say a platinum tier or like how how do you um how do you pursue uh greater granularity when you know you're stuck in a room with two

gold beats and one of them needs to be higher than the other yeah so the question was how do we how do we prioritize even within the goal tiers or even within the silver tier or bronze tiers um and you know it's not we're not wanting to strong arm anyone but usually something that I would like to employ is if we're deciding between two gold moments I ask if we had to lose one of these today which one would it be and if the answer is we can't lose either of them we go into the Y's and I think it's always important to set aside okay what is the why for gold scenario a what is the why for gold scenario B and usually when you ask people the why and like okay so that's important to our story why is it important as you go through the whys and you keep going to different levels of granularity you can find out what is the most important moment sometimes they're saying oh well I I need it to be true because this has to happen within the game but then we're actually opening a dialogue of whether or not it truly needs to happen within the game and of course if you're bringing in the historical data of you know we simply don't have time for both

of them or one of them is going to have to get less of a treatment then it comes to our decision makers on okay now that we've identified the why in our you know just a quick table of why this is important why this is important we get a sense of based on how long the list is what is truly the Platinum moment I've also worked on projects where we have what we call a wood Which is less than bronze but usually I like to stay within the three tiers because I'm just like you know how granular can we get I also want to say that it's worth noting as well is that within your native devices gold might look different for each one so if you're working on a cinematic you can say that a gold cinematic is maybe you know you're very highly polished characters but potentially if you're working on a mission Giver system that happens within the actual inside of your world and inside of your your gameplay maybe gold for you makes it look like hey we need to make sure we have a good Vista shot so within each narrative tier you need to be defining what gold looks like you can be using the same terminology between each so you're aligning on your shared resources but you should have that level of

granularity that says okay silver means this for this narrative advice and silver means something different for that narrative device but as long as it's in a place where everybody can access it and they understand the difference then I think you're in a good spot awesome hi thank you Vanessa really outstanding presentation I appreciated how methodical and just well fed out your approaches it makes a lot of sense but my question relates to if you've experienced where someone's method of decision making was I outrank you or it's a business call or I'm this video developer where even if your narrative team has consensus someone else who's in a senior position can just say well what I say goes so despite this really thoughtful work when you have these other internal management factors how have you navigated that in the past or how would you recommend navigating those Dynamics yeah yeah really good questions someone would said hey yeah I'm glad you came up with all of these great methods but we're just gonna go one way a way that doesn't represent what we've talked

about here before and for that I just want to go back if I can go back a little bit keep going there you go so when I talk about generating a high level of discussion and holding us accountable on those decisions I personally have not experienced what we're talking about here but what I like to do is when I talk about holding people accountable it's the stakeholders that's the first level of people that you want to make sure are in line with your core narrative beats and your story critical path and that's because if they are in line with it we can hold them accountable my favorite thing to do uh that I that I well I love standing out notes but I also love the fact that working from home allows us to record all meetings um so we can always remember what we said we were going to do and what we agreed upon and so one word I also make sure that we're constantly refreshing them with this knowledge it's like hey we're moving into Mission a remember we discussed that gold looks like this and because it's usually your stakeholders maybe four or five we locked eyes we agreed upon the fact that this is what we're doing before we disseminate that

information to the team we agree upon it at a higher level so that when we're going through the different tiers it's not something that's just Productions decision it's production and directions decision it's production directions and the depositions it's everyone's decision so everyone needs to be bought in in order for these methodological processes to work thank you yeah my pleasure all right we are at the end of the talk if you have other questions I will be oh oh yeah absolutely you know I should have ended on that one that's yeah oh my pleasure okay what ah we did it okay that is the end of the talk thank you again so much if anyone wants to ask any questions I believe it's is it 204 yeah 2 room 204 I'll be in there to take any other questions again I really appreciate your time this morning please enjoy the rest of your GDC also please provide any feedback it's really welcome and appreciated thanks again everybody

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