Punch It (Up): Writing for Star Trek in VR

[Music] sorry for the delay there all right so the year is 1993 let me set the mood one sec all right there we go the year was 1993 I'm 16 years old I'm a junior in high school the world of graphic design is insane my father who worked at IBM at the time was invited to take it tour of sitterson Hall at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill which at that time was a leading institution and Ardie of a thing called virtual reality here's what a poster looked like from around that era that is actually from UNC and that is pretty much what the 90s looked like being a high schooler I was at that time playing games every day like console Wolfenstein 3d send a kit and on this tour I got to see a lot of neat

applications for VR but the demo that I remember the most was of a molecule so you basically put on this like 14 pound helmet and you can look at the molecular structure of an organic compound and actually if we look back at this poster here that right there is what I saw in the arc and if you think that it looks like some colored spheres with a rudimentary lighting you would be correct so I probably was not as impressed with this demo as maybe I should have been at that time last forward a couple of years Nintendo brings us into the future in 1995 it looks something like this and of course inside it looks like this so fighting giant robots right back in the mid 90s we were all about fighting giant robots also I was a little less than impressed with this particular experience if we fast forward to GDC 2013 so where I had my first opportunity to try out a device called the oculus rift an early generation version does

the dk1 I believe and it looks something like that fighting giant robots so back in the mid 2010 as we're all about you know fighting giant robots this game was Hawking and I remember when I when I put the headset on my first thought was I really hope no one's taking a picture of me right now as a cool experience piloting him back it's got guns got jumped Jets I thought I was going to be fairly clever and ambushed some of my fellow demo players so I jumped up onto a roof and I did the thing that you would do if you're up on a roof going to ambush people below you which as I walked over to the edge and I looked down the reaction was immediate and sort of physical visceral fear of falling so my my reaction was of course I wanted to back up and it was at that moment that I realized that something had changed in that twenty years of promises of VR we're finally being made

good and that VR had arrived which sort of brings me to today into this lecture which is punch it up writing for Star Trek in VR and by which I mean of course these Star Trek is in VR not the writing part that probably would be cool to write in VR but we're not quite there yet so obligatory bio I am J Posey I am an expert narrative designer at Ubisoft at Red Storm Entertainment that is actually my title that's not just something I put on LinkedIn I've been there for over 12 years started in game development in 1998 so kind of old I'm also traditionally published author my fifth novel will be out this summer and actually got my start as a screenwriter doing script development for a Hollywood producer so all that is just to say I've had the opportunity to work in a lot of different media and I'm genuinely excited about VR and about the opportunity that it is affording us that the technology is open for storytelling and I think there's a lot of new

experiences out there for us to discover and I'm really looking forward to doing some of that all right so finally star trek is anybody in here actually gotten to try a demo of bridge crew yet a couple people okay good yes mr. Dan ski in the back back there very good so for those of you who haven't got a chance to check it out very quick primer you play as one of four officers on the bridge of the USS aegis which is a brand-new ship that we created in conjunction with CBS just for this game so you're up there and you're exploring sort of a poorly understood section of space called the trench and of course awesome and exciting things happen we our four officers are the helm officer who pilots the ship and manages impulse and warp travel we have the tactical officer who operates weapons shields and scanners we have our trusty engineer who distributes and reroutes power and then if it's ever necessary manages repairs and of course

we have the captain who just tells everyone what to do and if playtesting is any indication also constantly turns red alert on and off you actually see in this image the red lighting is of course because red alert is on which is probably because it hadn't been on in like 30 seconds so I wanted to take a little bit of a different approach from usual with this this talk so it's not going to be kind of the three bullet points of lessons learned it's really more of a high-level survey of some of the challenges that we ran into developing and writing specifically for VR and then some of the solutions that we came up with that being said here are three bullet points to tie all these things together so I want to talk about presents talk about franchise and talk about cooperation so each of the topics that I cover in my remaining two and a half hours are going to touch on one or more of these pillars so I'm just going to quickly define what I mean by them first off presents how many people have tried VR at all of any of the current

hardware okay good most everybody if you haven't had a chance to deck Lear definitely recommend and give it a try take advantage of the expo floor I'm sure we'll have demos out there primarily because the experience is very difficult to describe if you haven't really seen it for yourself so I've got some screen shots up here that we'll go through but they really don't do justice to the VR experience we're talk about presence and you know as game devs we talk a lot about immersion which basically is just engaging our players enough so that controllers and screens disappear and we were really engrossing our players in the created world turns out with VR that's practically free and it's much stronger in VR so we call that presence that's why I had such a strong fear reaction in Hawken and you're really no longer just seeing and hearing things but you have the sense that you're you've brought your physical body into the space with you so that

that's what I'm talk about when I talk about prisons secondly franchise Star Trek just celebrated its 50th anniversary last year so that's 50 years of TV movies books comic books video games fan fiction I don't know if you're all aware of it but Star Trek has several fans sometimes they have opinions so that was really a mountain of content for us to to kind of pour through and try to condense into this VR game so I presented some challenges but it also turned out to be a source of a lot of our solutions so I'll touch on that to franchise and finally cooperation and I know I know this picture is a little bit creepy but this was literally the only one I could find on the internet about cooperation that wasn't just a bunch of hands on top of each other so okay fine we'll use the hands that's fine so Star Trek bridge crew was really designed as a social vr game first so you can play solo but we intended it primarily and we designed it primarily as a multiplayer

game and it was really important for us to foster an environment of cooperation both for the gameplay but also for the narrative and for the franchise it just seemed appropriate for for this franchise so I would touch on that and I'm going to use these sort of three images just as Keys going forward mostly because I'm old and pictures help me remember what I'm talking about but all right so first off pacing it's not really new for narrative obviously but I wanted to touch on it because this is one of the big lessons that I learned working in VR not because it was a surprise to us we obviously knew we had to consider it but it was we just didn't know how different it was going to be in VR so as game devs we're always very concerned about keeping our players engaged there are lots of different ways to do that there's sort of the Call of Duty model expected as long as you continue moving forward you're going to see awesome things so it's kind of a thrill ride mechanic there's the more open world model of a

far cry or assassin's creed where you have a wealth of choices to choose from so this player directed but they can always open up a menu and see any number of things that they can do and obviously we never want our players to get bored so this is something that we brought a lot of our previous experience of designing more traditional games and we're always very concerned about perceived downtime so things like traveling between objectives we wanted to make sure that players always felt like they were kind of in the middle of the action but our main menu actually taught us a really important lesson so I'm going to pop up some screenshots here of our main menu and you can see just down there on the corner that is our main menu when you first load into Star Trek no bridge crew you started in an inspection shuttle you can have come out around this Space Shuttle spatial come around the space station and do this lazy orbit around the ship and that will continue for as long as you want to sit in there and of course being tabs we hop in there and we kind of loop our way around real quick and we're into the next kind of honor the next thing but as we started

taking this out to the public and started giving demos we found that players were warning spend three five seven ten minutes just sitting in the shuttle and one of our guys that ran a lot of these demos actually not once but on two separate occasions had people who had to take their headsets off to wipe tears from their eyes because they were just so emotionally you know excited and overwhelmed by this opportunity so you know and this is just our main menu right so that really really surprised us that just the emotional impact that this you know this franchise has on people and literally this is a dream come true for some people when they put that headset on and they feel like they are literally on the bridge of this starship and so that really opened our eyes to how much we needed to respect and give people breathing room to really fully experience and appreciate the experience that they were having so we kind of had to resist some of our natural urges to to pressure you put pressure on players

or to kind of distract them with other things and that also impacted how many moments of kind of narrative that we needed to to push on people because sometimes just sitting there on the bridge and looking at space as apparently enough to capture that experience of course that impacts storytelling and when I say storytelling you mean the actual mechanics that we use to deliver narrative information so there's this you know well-known and generally accepted solution in games was basically having some authority figures somewhere far away telling you everything you need to know good news is Star Trek franchise gave us a great solution for this and that was the Starfleet Admiral I'm on the viewscreen and sorry for the slight tilt actually took this while I was in a headset and of course because the headset adjusts with you I didn't realize my head was tilted slightly but anyway so the Starfleet Admiral people talking to you on the viewscreen is across pretty much all Star Trek properties at some point so that was

great for us it was kind of a good way that we could use the franchise to do something that we always do in video games bad news is in a shared virtual environment no one wants to listen to a talking head so when you have multiple people in VR in that sense that you are all there together in the shared virtual environment is so strong I think the contrast between natural human interaction and some guy on a screen talking to you he's clearly not a human is just so stark that this method of delivering information is just not as compelling or really as acceptable as it might have become in sort of traditional media no other games so this is something that we had to to really evaluate and think about in our Admiral does show up a couple of times but it's something that we've used pre sparingly and generally only for high-level information so it's kind of story information from back home that you couldn't really get any other way and it felt appropriate the way we're using it but we just couldn't rely on it as much as we might have otherwise so that left

us with a couple of needs one was to provide narrative context for missions and for for a moment-to-moment gameplay and then the other was just for directing player action so for the first point the narrative context again the Star Trek franchise really came through for us and gave us a gift and that was the captain's log so each of our missions starts with a captain's log which is really just an establishing shot the voiceover from a captain this was great for us because it really routes the experience of this game in something that's familiar and iconic from the franchise so it was a good good fit for us it also allows us to provide narrative context from missions before so it can kind of serve as a reminder of you know what you did earlier and also the results of those actions and then also of course sets up our coming mission so it kind of gives you a little idea of what you're what you're in for from a traditional game writing standpoint this isn't really a surprise right this is kind of a cinematic we've been using these forever the thing that was

interesting to me about this was that it it works in VR and actually players seem to be more receptive to narrative information in this format than they were from a guy on a screen talking to them and obviously this is anecdotal I think it's worth exploring though maybe this is due to some sort of observer effect where people have a natural sense of whether they're inhabiting a camera versus an avatar or if it's just this is a familiar framing device and so people kind of go into the oh I'm watching movie slash TV now so you know I'm kind of in a more passive mode I don't really know this was kind of a hypothesis right now but this was a good good solution for us for the narrative context I still left forests the second challenge of directing player action of making sure that players had critical mission information and here we decided to take a little bit of a risk and that was entrusting our captain's actually to help us as storytellers which is of

course meaning we're trusting a human player to actually pull information and then share that with the crew and do it in a way that contributes to the overall narrative experience so if you look here on the armrest of the captain's chair there's captain Edwards you can see some little buttons so captain actually has a UI that they can bring up all these different screens and get information and some of it is privileged information that no one else gets so not only do we have sort of outlining mission goals and requirements there also hints or optional ways to complete objectives or things that you would really have no other way to know like the you know damage radius of a warp-core breach things like that internally we sort of couched this as the captain's experience and this was sort of our way of thinking if you're a captain in Starfleet and you're responsible for an entire starship you've probably been around for a while you've probably seen some stuff so this was really our way of letting new players kind of benefit from those years

of experience that they don't actually have kind of getting that from this UI that didn't mean for us that it was up to the captain to communicate and coordinate with the crew and in some situations there's not a clearly a right answer for solving a situation so it's sort of the the classic you know do you risk your own crew members to rescue some civilians and harm's way and it's really up to the captain to make that sort of decision the good news is it seems to have paid off so from play testing and iterating that stuff it turns out that good captains people who are decisive and kind of know what they're doing make for great cruise it's been really interesting to see when captains you know we bring in for people who've never met before and you see somebody really embraced that captain's role and the other three players who don't know this guy still seem to kind of come together under that authority and really buy into the experience and it's really really cool to see that happen and as I said of course there was a bit of a risk because when you get this guy you end up with a less than

ideal experience so that was one thing that we really had to work on quite a bit a lot of this came down to we went through a lot of their iterations about what kind of information do we present to the captain how do we present it how do we write it so that it's digestible and then players can read from here and parrot that back and sound authoritative so some of that stuff has helped out and again you know that was it the interesting another interesting thing about this is I think we're requiring a lot from our captain's to pull information to go find it and sent this and share it and we as an industry have done a pretty great job of training players to be very passive things sort of like sit here and wait until we tell you exactly what to do you know hey the room you're in is on fire you should find a way to escape kind of thing so we had to go through a lot of iteration to figure out how do we train our captain players to understand that

oh wait I'm responsible for for making these calls and for driving our gameplay so we're leaning pretty heavily on our captains but it's not all that captains obviously our entire player could really participates in sort of that moment-to-moment story experience and so it was very important for us to oh sorry about the amp picture there it's very important for us to continually bring our thinking back to the cooperation of the crew and to really capture that proper experience of all of us working together in case you couldn't tell from the name really the heart of Star Trek bridge crew is the crew shocking and so we really wanted to create a narrative experience of sort of this trustworthy crew off the leash which just means that like Starfleet has already checked you guys out and yep we trust you to go off into the reaches of space and represent us and and do a good job so I also wanted to empower players with a sense of responsibility and that they were out there to do the proper things and this

is one of the reasons I think that the constant updates from Starfleet the Starfleet Admiral felt wrong because it gave you the sense that Starfleet was always watching you and you know waiting for you to make a mistake or not trusting you completely so that was another thing we had to work on and spotlighting was something that we we settled on where our mission designs really provide challenges specifically designed for one officer or more commonly for a pairing of officers to kind of give them a chance to be the hero for a particular thing so instead of every player feeling like they are the hero of this story kind of everyone's taking taking it in turn to be the hero of this moment which I think feels authentic to the franchise where you've got sort of the episode where it's you know the science off there's officers figuring things out or the engineer we're people working together so you know simple example in our game there's a mission where you start out the ship is damaged and you are being pursued by

enemy forces so it's really up to the helm officer to coordinate with the engineer to figure out sort of how much power they need you know when they should make a run for it and when they should kind of hide out and make repairs and that sort of thing so that mission is really built around that that constant back and forth between the two of them which of course leads us to overall campaign and mission design and when we sat down and did our sort of initial campaign design our campaign our canned narrative we really want with sort of a more typical structure similar to a sort of long movie plot you know our a plot and our B plot some twists and some villainous heroes and some heroic villains and that sort of thing and at the end of it when we evaluated it I realized we had Tom Clancy's a Star Trek bridge group which it was a good story but obviously was not the right story for what we were looking for and we kind of threw that out and went back to the well and when we started as a narrative team talking about you know well what is Star Trek to each of us the things that kept coming up or people are

like oh well there's this one episode where bla bla bla bla bla or that one episode when hmm you know happened and it kept coming back to that sort of that episodic approach right which again you think about the franchise that makes so much sense it was rooted in television so those led us to take kind of a flipped approach to mission design and narrative design which was kind of identifying these iconic Star Trek experiences exploration being chased by a strange entity searching for enemies and at nebula that sort of thing and building these sort of missions and and narratives around that core experience both from a gameplay in the air to standpoint and once we kind of had figured out what those experiences were that we wanted then we went and arranged them in a way that gave us a nice sort of long-term narrative arc that felt more like a season and we really had to be comfortable with the idea that not every mission had to have every Star Trek thing in it and we really wanted to focus on sort of each each mission

having a distinctive feeling and recognizing that we had to be comfortable with the idea that players were going to argue about which was the best mission based on kind of what they wanted their their personal Star Trek experience to be from mission framework standpoint we kind of settled on this three-point thing of the concern a complication of crisis and that just means that we had kind of an initial set up for why you are where you are sometimes it's something benign or exploring this area or sometimes it's oh we're trying to help this ship in distress inevitably it's there's more to it than you first imagined and usually that leads to some sort of decision point for the captain so wasn't really a formula that we followed so much as one that we played with we kind of settled on this is feeling like Star Trek to us and then we kind of adjusted those weights but that was very helpful for us obviously trying to define what makes Star Trek Star Trek as a bad idea because it's so many things to so many different people but for us one of the core ideas that we latched onto was this

idea of an interaction of experts so sort of the crew is the heart of every solution and again giving each player an opportunity to shine at some point in the mission and the thing over the campaign so we identified some iconic roles so we had our captain or helm or engineer obviously but also communications science officer medical you know any of those people that we've seen from across various properties and we selected the most that were compelling for gameplay which sometimes required us to collapse or combine roles this is one of the reasons that working with CBS was so great when we design the ship that we made it's smaller than the enterprise it's it's not a flagship obviously it's a smaller different role and so we were able to kind of work with them to figure out where it would make sense to combine roles that we see on the shows and then for example attack cloths are handled scanning for example which you know typically we think it was more of a science officer role but it

made sense for us to do that and really it was important for us to make sure that players who had never seen an episode of the show could still feel like they were expert at their role so that helped to work a lot with them making sure that the station's were very learn about that each of the actions themselves were fairly straightforward and then we got a lot of the sort of expertise that we're looking for out of the combination of actions or the coordination of actions with other people all of which required a us to develop a shared vocabulary so it was a major part of the Star Trek franchise obviously is in its sort of particular use of language so helping people communicate authentically was something that we we really had to tackle it was a challenge for us so there's sort of this feeling about Star Trek that that sounds like science there's so much jargon and technical jargon that sounds plausible

and we you know we went through a lot of transcripts and I'm gonna finish Miller with the memory alpha website we use that quite a bit to try and capture that language that we were after we recognize that players are contributing to each other's experiences so again we had to make sure that new players could sound expert could use that language even when they weren't familiar with it from the shows so love what we did was build the language that we wanted people to use directly into the UI so phasers detection range shield level that sort of thing as people reporting on things that sounds like what you'd hear on the shows and for example our warp core process is actually going to warp requires a helmet engineer to work together to do go through these sort of protocol and what we found is after a couple of of play three as people start to develop this cadence and patter as a crew of when they're hitting their marks okay I'm ready I'm ready this is ready okay hit it and that was really encouraging to us that we were

kind of hitting our marks with what we were going for there and again that coordination of the team as to the authenticity that we're looking for for the entire environment right you start to feel like a crew because it sounds like a crew so that was great sorry I'm trying to blast through these because I know we got a late start and so finally filling out the bridge obviously it's not enough just to have four people running around wearing a starship so to kind of fill out the rest of the crew make sure this advance is ready and sorry I have a shot here anything did we just lock up my slides aren't dancing there we go alright so as I said you can't play the solo so anytime you've got a partial crew if you don't have humans at one of the either helm tacular engineer it'll be taken over by what we internally called a crew bot and from a writing standpoint we wrote the vo four crew bots really in a way that

we hoped it would instruct players on how they should communicate when they are in that role so tactical offs are only every reports on tactical things like when a new enemy appears Engineers reporting on things like subsystem health and we're really using those as a way so that when players don't have a human there they're learning what it should what when they play in that role they should be reporting on secondly we had info shirts which were our communications officer who's back here and our camera-shy science officer we put them in because they were iconic roles we just couldn't find enough gameplay to support human players for that so what we did was we made them critical for narrative information and for gameplay information and use them kind of to replace the talking head so now you've got somebody on the crew who's giving you this information in a way that felt natural to to the franchise and then finally we have these guys over here our red shirts and they're actually all around the outer ring of the bridge and this is

really where we packed in a lot of that technical and scientific jargon these are the guys that when everything is normal they're reporting on how jeffrey 214 is you know and when things are bad that there's fire on deck 6 or whatever so none of this is critical information but it does give you general gamestate information and that was really where we were able to kind of pack in that jargon that we were looking for how are we doing for time how are you out to people we're pretty much out all right let me just drama turns out interpersonal drama happens pretty naturally so if you take a skilled crew and you probably apply a little pressure to them you start ending up with things like this where everybody is calling for things and you know anyway so we had to be very careful about we found that we needed to be careful about how much narrative information we were trying to push because sometimes you get these high interaction moments between crew and there wasn't any room for us to give more information into that so we had to balance that stuff out so come a very

long way all the way from here to now here and I would say that you know if this is sort of the known area of video games we on the Star Trek bridge crew team a very boldly gone forward into the future probably may be roughly about here which is to say really have no idea what's out there for VR and that's not to say anything about you know all these other places some of which aren't even on the map so I'm really excited about a lot of the tools and techniques that we're going to be discovering in VR I think we're just really just now getting started on figuring out some of the techniques we're exploring the stuff and that is time and thank you all so much appreciate it contact information hit me up on Twitter I'll take questions out there you