Raid on Rise: Narrative Creation on Rise of The Tomb Raider

[Music] hi everyone thank you for joining us for the riot radon were high his panel we're gonna be going over a little bit about the process and the challenges we faced when creating the narrative for rise of the Tomb Raider before I begin this is critically important we're gonna be talking frankly and openly about the story there will be spoilers we will say elements about the ending and I am deadly serious we are going to spoil this game so before we begin let me introduce our panel real quick we have Noah Hughes who is our creative director Rhianna Pratchett our lead writer John Stafford it's our lead narrative designer we have tor who is our performance director his real name I swear and Jeff Adams who's our lead story designer and I'm Cameron Tsui I'm a narrative designer lead story artists Cameron Tsui I'm a narrative designer and I drew the short straw so I'll be moderating the panel today now we come from a diverse background of games some of the samples of our past

history are up there but we've all come together for this game now this talk we're going to talk about how we go about creating stories at Crystal Dynamics how we work across disciplines now this team up here is the the main narrative team that is in charge and responsible for the implementation of the story but the real story is created by everybody across the entire studio in every department now a quick note we sort of look at this as a arrayed in an MMO fashion we all come from very diverse backgrounds we have very diverse skills and we really wanted to trust each other's strengths in this process and so we each had unique roles and we're gonna be talking a little bit about that as we go through our process now we're going to talk a little bit how we get from this the very beginning of our first ideas on the page and our first beginnings of sketching out the rough framework of a story to my dearest Cara I often think about a film I have brought up on our family's name

Croft what is it even me when I was young it was just my father and I in his last year's he was obsessed with myths about immortality I may have found the next piece to the puzzle but I named Trinity of course no one believed him including me okay we're gonna cover very briefly the Crystal Dynamics story pillars these are the underpinning philosophies and ideas that we use when creating any narrative at our studio then we're going to talk a little bit about what we learned from the prior Tomb Raider game in 2013 of which Rihanna John and Noah are veterans of Tor Jeff and myself are new to the party and then finally we're gonna talk a little bit about our process and the eight steps that we go from starting our

very earliest discussions of themes to the very final finished products we're gonna walk you through using examples and illustrate how this works and hopefully you'll be able to take some of our process or some of our takeaways and create your own unique and fulfilling narratives now Crystal Dynamics uses a high-level framework when approaching a narrative and we're gonna call them the story pillars we're gonna discuss the four key ones right now and we developed all stories for games and our studio using these as a guide imma turn it over to Noah here is going to talk a little bit about our story pillars thanks Kim the first thing to note is we do apply a three-act structure so it ends up being very long act two in the middle but those transitions from act 1 to act 2 and from act 2 act 3 or what you'd expect from that structure but beyond that to put our characters at the center we sort of commit to the idea of the character arc being the backbone of that story so we'll take our point of view character in this case Lara and make sure that she's different at the end of

the story then at the beginning of the story and she has an internal conflict which forces her to ultimately change in order to be successful and that's of course in addition to an external conflict so we have basically this transition of a character that comes to a head in the climax where both these external and internal conflicts get resolved so that's just a sense of how we place our characters at the center of our story structure hi everybody can you hear me or do I need to get closer I'm always worried no one can hear me in the back I'm John so we have a very collaborative approach at Crystal Dynamics for us it's really important that the entire team is involved in the story everyone across the team so everyone participates we recognize that good ideas can come from anywhere so we're always looking out for the good ideas because that might lead to something great in your game so you need to include your team everybody is involved in story at Crystal so that's how we approach story just a note also we we don't subscribe to this idea of a genius in a box like no one we don't

send a writer or a story person off to the mountain to chisel the tablets that come down and delivah store deliver story to the team we it's it's not that we don't have vision we just have a collaborative vision in the way we approach story so that's important to us um we also strive for relatable human heroes in a grounded world so this in particular was important with the 2013 reboot because one of our goals was to take Lara Croft who had become almost an icon more than a person and really start to peel back those layers and understand who she was as a character so we take that philosophy into each of our stories and saying what would it really be like to be thrust into this situation and we try to put that position of Lara being closer to URI and going on that journey like her similarly we include a lot of maybe supernatural and over-the-top elements but we we try to do that in a way that makes you believe that they could be real so in a lot of cases that means a ramp of the supernatural and

before we ever reveal that big reveal we're gonna try to get you there we're gonna try to make you believe that this really could be possible somewhere in the darkest corners of the world so basically taking those human heroes and thrusting them into this grounded experience for us makes it more relatable so feeding back into that idea of collaboration we we consider the world a character in our games you know we approach building levels when we approach the sound and music and the stuff that you find in the environment in the art everything we think about that as a deep character it's layered it has roots and we want it to speak to the main narrative that we're trying to tell so everything we do in the game in the game world is is kind of supporting our main narrative so that's a big pillar for us we're always concentrating on making the world to tell the story yeah hi I'm Thor I'm the probably the latest member of the narrative team and I was coming in

to Crystal at the busiest time of the project when kind of pants on fire everybody was just running around trying to make things work and yeah I guess you could say the raid was kind of at a challenge place and I came from a different background from a sister studio and Copenhagen doing hitman games and the way that crystal did it was kind of different it was a very ambitious narrative team and I mean up from the center was the cinematic story liked it one hour of of cinematics where every second counts and around that was the whole kind of supporting narrative of the like Don was talking about it the world as a character like this the layers of history in the world all the secondary characters all the documents and everything is in a rich tapestry of stories that all needed to be put in the right place at the right time and fit in with main narrative but the big front center having a main character like Laura where literally everything that

goes on in the story is revolving around her and her as a personality every every piece of story is an opportunity to build up her as a character and and give her more depth that was a really big challenge coming into and also seeing how yeah how the narrative team was structured in a way to kind of support a character like that we were very lucky to have tor join us our pants absolutely we're on fire and he was a cold bucket of water to dip them in so we're gonna talk a little bit about Tomb Raider 13 yes Rihanna would you like to talk about we learned hi Rihanna I'm the the lead writer on rise and I was the lead writer on the previous game as well so I have spent about five years with with John and Noah and guys being my polygamous work husbands and we consider our story to be a work in progress and we xx better with every iteration and believe me there are a lot of iterations I think there's one scene that got 47 rewrites I am not even

kidding and we listen to our players and our post-mortems and our testing feedback for the first game and we decided to try and make some improvements the narrative moving on to rise so I'm just going to talk to you a little bit about those so the first one was I think bring back the two yeah so bring it back to tomb and that was one of the big feedbacks for on the first game that people want to see more tombs and one of the reasons we didn't have too many tombs and it was because she was on the road to being the Tomb Raider she wasn't Tomb Raider yet and so that meant that the raiding she did was more kind of accidental so this time it was more purposeful tomb raiding but it's actually more than just mechanics and more than just level design it's about her character as well and the fact that she is she glimpsed something in the first game which really

sort of propels onwards into the second game and makes it more much more deliberate tomb raiding because she's after information she's after answers so we wanted that the next chapter to really respect what had come before at the same time we couldn't be too beholden to everything in the first story because we didn't want a lien eight players that maybe hadn't played the first game or a completely forgotten what we did because they skip cutscenes and made writers cry everywhere so so rice was very much a continuation of Lara's art which started in the first game so one of the other things we want you to address is you know that we had far too many characters really in the first game and we really wanted to have fewer characters in this one so we can sort of realize them better so we pared down our cast quite a lot in you know we have a very limited cinematic canvas we have about 60 minutes of cinematics in the game and that the same for the first one as well so that's not really a of space when you consider it's like half a maybe to two-thirds of a movie to

kind of showcase all your characters so we had fewer characters and we tried to make them more meaningful in the world and within Lara's story um one of the big things we wanted to do was make the player's actions match the characters and tensions and balancing that that level between player character and player is always really really difficult in game so we wanted to up the the player and Lara and flare synchronicity in other words so we we gave Lara more agency in her path and a laser focus so the first game she's very reactive to things that are happening to her in in rise she's proactive she's kind of out there she's going after the adventure she's making a choice and as part of that choice yet again she has two kills to survive and we've was trying to embrace that style of gameplay a little bit in her character and though this

time around we have to kind of up the level of nastiness in the enemies they're up to no good they're gonna kill her you know she she's very much in a mode very focused on what she's doing and you know she's she's much more able to meet fire with fire than she was in the first game so you're making the enemies more violent making her you know not not killing innocent and giving her a bit of a moral compass really helped with that sort of player synchronicity so using those learnings from 2013's Tomb Raider as well as our Crystal Dynamics story pillars I'm going to talk a little bit about our process and sort of eight basic steps hopefully you'll see how those story pillars and those learnings that we attempted to bring into rise of the Tomb Raider really informed our decision-making throughout the whole process so Noah what is the very beginning of our process yeah it starts with some high concept discussion so we know we want to tell the next chapter in Lara's story and one of the

text techniques we use to sort of build that foundation for Lara especially her internal conflict and her journey as a character as is this controlling idea so what that does is suggest that there's a key value at stake and some action is going to change that value in particular to give our example we made the statement we become who we are meant to be when we let go of who we are supposed to be so this is not only thematic but it defines the actions that Lara takes and and ultimately the result of that is the forging of her identity so identity is is what's at stake in this story and Laura comes into it with this notion that she is a Discoverer that she is going to find something great and bring it back to the world and that is going to make the world a better place but over the course of the story she has to confront what her actions will result in and ultimately through doing that will redefine her relationship with these ancient secrets that she's pursuing this

is also a theme that runs through other facets of the game so in a lot of ways the story becomes sort of a debate over this facet of the human condition that should you fulfill your destiny as you believed it was or should you let go of that and sort of jump and and become that new person and that's something that we see not only in Lara that are additional characters the remnants who are defined as protectors of this secret and by the end of that they have to change their relationship and ultimately in doing so sort of move forward as a people so this is a theme that helps guide us through even as we go through many iterations which we'll talk about we sort of have this notion of what our story is is really about yeah and with that you know we can start doing research on the plot and in our case it's the myth what is larung after we know what kind of drive so we know the kind of debate she's going to have in her character arc so you know we were looking at myths that had you know danger as well as

benefit to humanity so that the that choice that she makes there's a bit of a gray area there it's kind of like the atom you know that you can make an atom bomb we can create in limitless energy this idea that you know what she's going after will cause a debate for her and since she kind of encountered an immortality myth in the first game like this kind of crazy soul-sucking Jeff clean we assume that she's going to be interested in that idea of immortality so we started looking at immortality myths these are some of the ones we discarded out of hand not out of hand we did some research but you know there was known as our Fountain of Youth and Garden of Eden for various reasons these didn't really work for us so we landed on two myths that we kind of mashed together the city velocity of catastrophes sort of unknown in popular culture at least in the West we had this guy on the team from Russia who was like oh my grandmother used to tell me the story so it's it's quite popular in the East but it's basically this Atlantis of the East City that sinks into a lake and

disappears and and it was a great setting for us because we could build tombs out of this it has connections to history and the other myth that was important for us was this myth of Koshchei the deathless who was another obscure Russian myth maybe not so obscure to some people but this myth is about a man who takes his soul puts it in an object and attains immortality and so that gave us a nice MacGuffin for a lard to go after what is this object but it also gave us another interesting character and we actually didn't use Koshchei the actual name we just based our character Jacob on him this idea that you know Jacob has something to lose as well something that he has to debate in his arc so by the end when he gives up his immortality he becomes who he's meant to be which is dead and the immortality myths also give us a nice lens to look at Laura's relationship with her father absolutely yes yes forgot about that note but yes so we we basically mirrored that on her father as well because that's a primary

motivator for Laura and she's she's not only trying to find this this this ancient secret and prove it to the world she's also kind of trying to live up to her father so far after we'd sort of established the the high concept there's time to sort of move on to the treatment and Audrey was asked similar to what you might find in a movie treatment they're sort of halfway between a traditional movie treatment is something that's very game specific so the treatment was about nailing down the broad strokes Laura's are looking at all the characters we spent a lot we spend a lot of time focusing on the carrot there wants their needs which are offering different things and how does the the gameplay in the story clash with those wants and needs and how are they tie into everyone else and so we are sort of putting that together with the broad strokes with the arc and that was largely myself and Jon and Noah and some special guests from Square Enix HQ just really sitting in a room kind of hashing

everything out and then kind of me just sitting and pulling everything together into a document which helped guide the first perfection process and from that we could sort of start putting together a skeleton of the script sorry and from those I could do more of an outline and as I said we looked at the characters first and foremost and because we had fewer characters to deal with we could make them count we could spend a lot of time focusing on how their particular journeys intersected and how they affected one another so yeah I went back and I looked over all the documents that we were done at a time because you you produce so much and you iterate so much it's very difficult to remember where you came from but a lot of our ideas that we were doing at this stage made it through to the endgame in some form but one of the ones I missed in particular was when we blew up UCL's archeology

Department which terrified and excited me an equal measure and that was in the script for a while but that was kind of one of the ones like I sort of miss a little bit yeah okay so once we have a treatment and we've got our bedrock of controlling idea we go into what we call our meta scripting phase and that's what we call it I don't know if we can coin that term but we do a lot of exercises to start bringing the story into a state where we can start making a game and the first thing we do is is we create a giant word document which is sort of a description of every cinematic scene and all the descriptions of gameplay in just one sort of written document from top to top to bottom and it's about a hundred pages this is kind of the first place that narrative in game play kind of shake hands they have a stake in this I'm working with our narrative leads or our game design leads and we basically put together a high-level skeleton of yeah this is a story from getting and how it

interfaces with gameplay we can start looking at pacing start looking at how much time we're talking about between scenes it's great to plan things out but then you should also plan for to change because it's gonna change and then from the meta script we start creating vite documents and these are they can be considered your standard level design documents but for us what's important is these are written experientially so they're to help the team imagine and visualize the experience they can be inspired to build and inspire to create so these aren't their kind of blueprints but they're also inspiration pieces for the team we give them to a large group of team responsible for bringing the levels to life and we expect these to come back to us as leads or as a narrative team with changes or ideas because like I said the team all the entire team is involved in the story and we want them to do that so this is a guide for them to be creative and to be to engage in the story and as you mentioned this is the first time that the story and gameplay are put side by side and they really are never decoupled

after that we always look right in holistic experience in concert so another exercise for us is we we take all the major character arcs and plot threads and break them down into their component parts and hashtag them and throw them up on a board we usually start with just post it board and then it goes digital so the team can access it on the network but this allows us to track everything that's happening in the story and this is both a proactive and reactive exercise so you know we do it initially it's liable to change along the process and we update it as we go through but it's a tool for us to start looking at tension emotional pacing of log jams of ideas we might see a scene has 10 hashtags and we realize that's going to be a monster scene that has to have a lot of the stuff and it's also a way to inform Rihanna myself the people who are writing the scenes what's happening as a an example of how we use this and to I think great effect for a

while in our game we were noticing on our board the dad hashtag which you saw on the last one the dad hashtag because her dad is important to her the arc of her mirroring her father is is very much part of her motivation and then for about two hours to three hours in the beginning the game it was gone it wasn't anywhere it was an in-game it wasn't in any scenes she talked about him that first scene and then there's this gulf and people were we were worried people were just gonna lose that thread so we came up with this mechanic to bring in game we called it our dictaphone mechanic that dictaphone is that thing there my dad had one oh if you guys have any idea what this is but it's a tape recorder where you raise your hand if you've you know anyways she picks us up large kind of a letter you've made maybe notice she doesn't even have a phone we did that deliberately we don't give her a phone because it just opens a whole world of mechanics we don't want to deal with like Twitter we don't want her to tweet I found the tomb maybe we'll do that but I don't know so she we kind of

think of her as a Luddite she has this thing she's walking around the environment we hear dad talking from the past they're connected it's on the sticks it's in her inventory it's a mechanic so that uptick was great it was like cool and we we found that with our hashtag board we use that as like we need to put something here and it kind of got everyone thinking about like what are they you know instead of just having her say dad and it's cinematic which she does we also have something in game and we actually probably used it too much at some point the team was like seems to shut up about that it was like dad let's talk yeah and then that leads us to another purpose of the meta script is is to basically give me a road map going into the first draft of the script so I you know I write the script more or less like a movie script so it sent usually in chronological order which certainly isn't the case for all games but it's always been for the Tomb Raider ones so I get to see that the pacing and the tone and the gameplay and how sort of everything is folding and together so that's when we really start getting the

big beeps down on paper and it's really important to give writers time in space to do this because so many things are worked out on the page you can you know write all of the explanations you like this when you get into the scene and get your hands dirty then you start seeing what's working once so another step in the process we did with Rhys was was get it tested out with our actors early on so we had we took the version of the script that we had down to LA and did a table read with our actors down there and that was really useful for you know see how everything sounded getting feedback from the actors doing some edits on the fly as well and in some cases we actually miked up the actors and used their Vieira's kind of test vo in the game because it you know it sounded a lot better than you're getting the other people are studio to do it so it was it was really useful and of course getting feedback from the actors themselves because we we use Camila again for Lara and obviously she was very much more in tune with the

character this time around you know she was definitely had a lower motor she was really great at giving us feedback on how she felt the character was developing then as an added bonus we can also record those table reads yeah so Jeff while this process is going on with the script one of the things that's really important is keeping the team informed of the story as it goes through Jeff we found was pretty invaluable in this process Jeff talked a little bit about how we kept the the team appraised of all of our changes absolutely could everyone hear me I think I got too close last time so yeah during this phase while the story is developing the standard practice was usually to send out some emails to the team kind of keeping them abreast of what was changing in the story so everyone knew that but at this time it was important for us to also get that thing a graphical representation of what we were building so far up so that the team would just see it on a day-to-day basis and so we would create things like on the Left we have a character board Laura

being the centreline and every branching character coming off of that line showing some form of a relationship to her and their relationships to each other this was great to get the team talking about the characters that were the stars of this game and this would encourage a lot of feedback coming from the floor and would allow us to be able to at any time have a conversation about how the story was progressing that everyone was on the same page and we noticed when we put these up in high traffic areas we had people immediately coming over and asking us questions talking about the story and engaging with it absolutely and as a matter of fact or even mention around his first day you saw this board in the hallway yeah I was very excited coming in to Crystal for the first day seeing this and yeah hey these guys know what they're doing they hold everything mapped out and and realizing how yeah it was their workplace I say it was actually fun to see this cuz you put these up on the floor and people are walking around asking you know they're intern getting their coffee and they're hanging around and they're talking about hey I didn't know that I'm gonna go over and talk to these guys and get some work no tell me what I think yeah I mean it's always

about the strategy for getting your team involved I mean I hate hesitate to say that people don't like to read but you know when you've got chunks and chunk huge amounts of written text there's there's ways to get people involved that don't involve handing them a hundred pages of text thing it's like people well on your team will absolutely engage with that but figuring out ways to engage with your team and getting people involved you know look go for those shortcuts find an artists and get things into pretty pictures and you were good to go and the more people got involved the more they were actually giving us feedback and getting us great ideas that we probably never would have come up with yeah and one thing also is that I'm real quickly go back the graph on the right was pretty imperative to help illustrate plot thread issues that people were having a hard time getting their head wrapped around so we found it if we would illustrate it and kind of break it down to its core pieces we could identify where things were working well and sometimes where things were kind of getting mashed together so it helped feed back into the writing team

their ability to be able to kind of streamline the story absolutely previously John talked a little bit about the world as a character it's one of our major pillars now the main story obviously focuses on Laura but when we talk about the world as a character we often talk about something called supporting or secondary narrative this includes everything outside of Lara this is and overheard enemy conversations this is collectible relics and documents this is the history and the layers in the game all of these support Lara's story but they also flesh out the world and give us a variety of other lenses to look through we talk a lot about canvas for narrative in the sense that everything in the game is a potential to tell some aspect of the story even an animation cycle tells something in about how that character is acting secondary native is a great place that we can sort of spread our wings and play in a little bit wider margin the main story obviously focuses on Lara but when we talk about the world we talk about first layers of history and this is something we do through a pretty exhaustive research process once we had our initial myth of Kitaj and we knew that we were focusing focusing on

Russian and Siberian history that allowed us to make what we call layers of history now the first layer obviously is Lara and the current story with Trinity but just beneath that about 50 years prior we have a Soviet cold war-era layer and then beneath that we have the lair of the remnant living off the land prior to that there's the lair of the Mongol invasion and the Golden Age of Kitaj before that and then even beneath that there's a layer of ancient history now that ancient history doesn't so much support the main narrative if it gives Lara a chance to say and think smart things about archaeology which helps put another lens on her character obviously the world is telling a story and always we want to be aware of all the layers of history in every area from this amount of research we would create exhaustive documentation sometimes we create short stories from the point of view of certain characters that would give a sense of a tone for that area of history that we wanted to explore on the right there you'll see a fairly detailed history of the birth of our immortal prophet Jacob starting with exactly

where he was born and what he did as a child now none of this stuff actually made it into the game but it created a very solid bedrock of real research that we could connect his life to gave us things to to hook on to we talked a lot about plausible Google ability when we talk about using history which is that we want to include things that people can latch on to go right to the internet and look up and at least there's a sense of veracity that we have connected a real-world thing and then adapted it for a video game and it's the funny thing is when we were working on the project we would try to Google certain things and we couldnt get an answer so we'd walk over to cam and we'd ask him and he would pretty much had the answer almost every time so after a while we're like like Google it just camp it yeah unfortunately Jeff I was just smiling and googling it under the he types faster and he could do without looking I'm just like so obviously you may not be working on a project that is a historical fiction grounded archeology adventure but it is important that you have a sense of internal consistency and logic to your world and I think research

is the place where we create that solid bedrock that we can all go back to and make sure we're on solid ground bringing these connections into context is an interesting story is during the the creation of the game we knew that we wanted to have an enemy near the end of the game that we had called internally the deathless ones that were an immortal army that could not be killed now in my research I discovered that right around the time that we have our immortal prophet leaving the city of Constantinople there is also an elite Imperial Guard called the a fan of toy that vanished from the historical record with the death of one Emperor and the ascendancy of the Emperor basil the first interestingly the word a fan a toy in Greek literally means without death so once I realized that we had a missing army with the exact same name as our army that we were going to put in the game it was obviously a no-brainer to combine those two things it gave us a historical record that we could base those characters on the real historical of Thanet Oh were the sons of noble houses so they were resplendent in very non-functional golden armor so we used

that as a part of an aesthetic guide in the creation of those characters grounding that found a foundation and plausible Google ability being able to leave the game and look that up in the real world was something we always strove towards and now secondary narrative I don't want to say that it just explores the margins of the world we also can use secondary narrative to really clearly focus back on Lara and where she is so we wanted to find a place where there was sort of low engagement gameplay that we could deliver a lot more of Lara's internal voice Rina do want to talk a little bit about the camp site Diaries and how we use those yeah I mean this is something that we carried over from from the first game Lara can kind of sit down at a campsite and it would be a quieter more thoughtful moment by where she'd just be digesting kind of what's what's going on and how she feels about it and what's coming up and they prove popular in the first game so we carried those over and there are really great way of getting into Laura's head so I did a lot of the in Laura's head based

stuff so these were campsite diaries there was therapy sessions and there was also Laura's father's diaries so I did the they were split into two so there are additional writer Phil Phillip galette he did the father's work diaries and I did the kind of more personal Diaries to Laura when she was a kid and those were really quite fruitful for me as a writer because initially I was a little bit concerned about the father plotline and I was I didn't warm to it I mean I prayed about it I didn't warm to it initially but you know sometimes you have to work through things and find peace with it and I did that by pulling on real world influences and my relationship with my own father and I even channeled that literally into one of the diaries my father passed away from Alzheimer's last year and in one of the interviews he talked about the

memory he didn't want to lose and that was that the the day that the night I was born and so I took that memory and I sort of merged it with Laura's father's memories of her when she was born and even though that is totally Mary suing it really helped me to kind of find some peace with the narrative and you know getting inside Laura's head and her father's head and just it all started working for me when I discovered that and I just wanted to mention one thing about this from a gameplay perspective what's happening in campsites is the player is upgrading equipment and doing you know we say low-impact and get our low engagement gameplay it's it's not combat it's not you're not completely you're your attention isn't completely on the screen so you can split it a little bit and this is a good place where we can deliver narrative content as well as gameplay we know the players doing something there they're going to be engaged so it's kind of a nice way to hit both narrative and gameplay at the same time yeah identifying that space as a really good canvas early on for narrative was was a really good thing the important thing

about supporting narrative is that everything in your game that is not your main story should be supporting and can supporting your narrative your combat vo overheard conversations between enemies or NPCs even the placement of objects in the environment are telling a story for a player who's engaged and looking for those connections alright Jeff so at this point we've got all this great narrative content that's been built we've got scenes that we can start working on and the rubber hits the road and it's time to get this in front of players and so translating words to images becomes a very important part of the process now we use these in for multiple purposes we would use them obviously for performance shoots at digital domain but we would also use them on the floor for gameplay scenarios but specific the narrative cinematics is where a bulk of my work went into and what we found is that the expressive nature of a drawing for users was a lot more efficient for conveying what our

intent was for the final cinematic then just proxy models that were posed you can give a hint of atmosphere you can give a hint of the anguish that a player is going through and you don't have to task the character team with a lot of work to create temporary rigs that are just gonna be thrown away for the final and so by putting a scene like this one here which is rock bottom which was originally meant to be the the opening cinematic for the game we were able to quickly run through scenarios based on the scene directives here originally Lara was meant to be on a tube she's meant to be on the train and having a very traumatic dream when all of a sudden she's awakened and she's all of a sudden surrounded by all these people that are looking at her like she's not quite all there and this was satisfying one of the hashtags that the narrative team had established which is to basically establish a rock bottom portion of Lara's Ark so far if you know she's been through a lot in the last game she's been going around the world trying to find answers and now she's

come back to London and she's trying to get back into a normal life and she's having a hard time fitting in so we ran through several iterations of this on paper and at some point we you were like oK we've changed things around we're ready to get this into an animated form and that's when the table reads came in really handy as well as some of our internal talent help kind of make that a reality I'll kick it back over to camp for that yeah just as Jeff mentioned that an expressive drawing is a lot better at communicating and emotionality of a scene than a posed model what we discovered really rapidly was that when we recorded tempo for these scenes and for in-game is that if we were just recording somebody reading the words verbatim off the piece of paper a lot of the focus was on a performance that we knew was not good and that didn't allow us to focus on the words in the context in the game so we were incredibly fortunate at Crystal Dynamics to have more than two but two very incredibly talented actors who also had real jobs in the studio as well and who were always willing to come in and do rapid iterations of VO with sort of intense

direction I think is Megan here we have one of our stars here yeah yeah come on you have an excellent voice for is available for casting and media lifesaver so yeah I mean I just wanted to clarify mean like the important thing is to get as close to as final as possible on screen for your players to react to and that includes emotionality so we were pushing these guys to try to be pretty emotional in their vo and you know we we would go through cycles where we would just do it fast with straight reads and it just wasn't working so it's worth the extra effort I guarantee you if you can get it to a state where it's almost representative of what you get of what you're trying for then that's going to save you a lot of time on the back end yeah we even had processes of auditioning people internally in the studio yeah that was we didn't tell them they were auditions we just didn't use the bad takes but it was very important having rapid iteration of really high quality vo especially with the folks

that wrote the dialogue being there we will to give the exact context now the scene we're going to show you ironically enough has no dialogue in it so great segue and we're not really paying apologize for that but rock bottom is such a great scene to talk about because I think this was one of our most heavily iterated on scenes 57 times 47 times and so it's just such a great case study for not you know the process but also the endurance of the team and the team as a whole at the studio so we finally ended up taking Laura off the tube stop and we condensed that story to take place between the tube stop and her apartment and it was very important here to basically put the player in the driver's seat with Laura and really make them feel like they were seeing creepy-crawlies coming out of the shadows on this street you can see how high-quality these animatics that jeff was able to put together very quickly are at establishing a tone a sense of motion and the aesthetics yeah I mean our audio guys knocked it out to anywhere they would go in and they would

score this with music and with great sound effects and you know these were intended for the team but also to go in front of users you know we did this intentionally we'll get into that point soon but the whole point of this is so that we can start testing our story and testing narrative is very difficult but when you actually have visuals it's a lot easier and absolutely that's the the testing stuff is so important because for a long time we stayed with this version and we thought it was going to happen and after several plates has we started to realize that a shuffling of the intro was important so when you play the game you'll notice that we start directly into the action on a mountain and then we come to this about I think about 20 minutes in yeah I mean we basically had a six-minute block of cinematics at the front end of the game and anybody who's worked on a game here knows that's just a complete non-starter you know people are gonna pick up your controller they want to play your game so we wanted to get people on the sticks as soon as possible and just even in the middle of the game six minutes as a kind of a non-starter so we needed to cut it down and we just start condensing this lets take moments from scenes and

condense them so in this scene here we took that moment and condensed it into another scene to get the same effect so we basically moved everything off the street and moved into Laura's apartment and we were able to satisfy some other hashtags that you didn't see in the original animatic but that took place in the apartment we were able put into one setting and just get the player right into the action the meat of the matter by tracking those themes and hashtags and concepts and metadata we knew it was important about those so it was we had the documentation for knowing what we needed to say in this scene even as we drastically rewrote and we staged it absolutely and one thing I didn't mention earlier too is before we even start drawing anything I mean we're I mean I'm going and I'm talking to these these guys on a daily basis and before I even will make a drawing sometimes I'm offering feedback because I'm seeing in my head how things might play out so we're distilling and we're we're honing and eventually we land up with something that we we feel is the intent of what the scene needs to express and just to add to that I I use the original

rock-bottom scene in the comics as well so that all the thinking about it did not go wasted because I kind of used it in there and was folded in some of the characters in the game to it so you know even stuff that falls by the wayside you could find other uses for that that makes my comic book fan heart happy and talking a bit about iterations and and feedback loops and we were in a game like this story is very important in channeling the player through the game itself and standing up the story is it's very central part of that so Jeff was doing a lot of that work but it was very iterative it was changing weekly or even daily and we were very lucky to have a very strong focus on testing this with real users so having and having a commitment from the team to always have the story stood up so we could show it on a weekly basis for for real users and

getting results back from that and and and as Jeff was speaking to I mean it's one of the most central parts of course is to deliver on the kind of the emotionality of the story that people can relate to the characters they understand their journey they're interested invested in them which is super hard to get across in an animatic state with two or three different temporal actors that are hacked together in the scene to kind of just get the scene across so you're asking a lot for from the users were actually giving improper feedback but on the flip side of that if just as pure functionality of the story understanding what's going on from one seemed to the next and tracking these hashtags that John was talking about is the most useful we got out of a user test for a long time it's like seeing the different threads going true and one of the things people had a problem with was tracking what we have a hashtag called the hashtag robot army

which literally was the kind of the code word for and the kind of enemy the Trinity our enemy through the game the villains and what were the what was their project and having it as a mystery story it was kind of we tried to kind of raise the stakes and just giving the player a little but little information throughout the project throughout the game so they wouldn't get again the stakes wouldn't be raised - too high too quickly and but we would lose track of it and people wouldn't really get it and we have to kind of shuffle scenes around to try to or invent new scenes or new little beats that would support the arcs of these different stories robot army was internally facing obviously yeah terminator and meetings we were incredibly jealous of franchises that have things like robot armies because everyone gets a robot army everybody that's a pretty high stake and we had a very nuanced complicated villain who you know essentially they were going to make

an immoral robot army and kill everybody eventually but you know we were trying to track that in a way that didn't just drop that on people's laps in the first five minutes so yeah robot army robot army and then it's worth noting that there's some we were fond of those internal conflicts and the internal stakes but one of the things that happens is the story starts not working at some point if the external stakes aren't there and that's for us for an action-adventure genre where you are for example killing people than if you're just conflicted internally and you're dealing with that by by killing fools then that's but it's it's less relatable than trying to understand that that these people are actually going to do very bad things if you don't stop them so there becomes some amount of pressure to layer in those external stakes in addition to those internal stakes early enough to drive the motivation of the players beyond just the characterization itself jumping into the yes this process is just as chaotic

as it looks I should probably start by saying if your story's anything like ours it will be very broken until it's not and I would emphasize the playtesting part of this and the things that Jeff was able to do put putting the words to pictures and getting performances that were what we would say is above the bar because the problem is if you have an extremely bad performance or no moving pictures oftentimes what players are seeing isn't actually landing with them so what you need to do in this in these previous steps is get the story to a point where people where you can trust the feedback because what you'll find is you'll get a play test feedback and it's like kids don't understand this at all and you'll go oh well that's just because it's not a final cinematic well it's going to be really expensive to change once it is a final cinematic so you have to find that cheaper representation of story so you can start testing it sooner and you can trust the results and then we started to go oh you know what actually we really

do have a problem we need a more presence of the father or a greater presence of the external threat so this is then how we start finding canvases to speak to these things so then now you're really in a loop where an important part of this is having someone like John so our narrative lead becomes the writer room he runs that sort of center there and what that allows us to do is he can take feedback from from myself from a creative direction level he can work work with cam in the secondary narrative stuff working with Rihanna who's external so he becomes a bridge for her into the project and vice versa are additional consultants so having someone like John at the center of it who's basically able to run this crazy process get that feedback in stand up a new version of the scene Jessica sadly draw again for the 47th times well Megan's going to read it again for the 47th time and eventually you start getting the results you want from the story ow my hand hurts thinking about it

yeah which leads to the actual performances and like like Noah was saying is that this is where it gets really expensive and really tough to change things so having that very agile process up to the point where we go to the set and shoot it and even like we try to be prepared we tried to say okay we have to be two days early because of everybody's schedules and stuff to deliver all the scripts to deliver it boards so we have them on set so the actors can be prepared but there were times we would come to the set with new boards from Jeff that he'd been drawing all night stick him on the walls okay sorry we change it again the actors would be cool with it it would take a little more time to rehearse it on stage but we were very very fortunate to have Camilla Luddington as our our star that was very well calibrated from the previous game and like Brianna was saying she was part of the table read she was she was part of how to say

putting the words to Lara how she would react in the different situations and the other actors on set would kind of key off her she would be kind of a lynchpin for the performance in the big moments of the story and but we did have reshoots of some of the scenes we had to go back when we came back we found out it didn't work out in the user tests and so we would continuously kind of making this kind of puzzle of what are we shooting what are we kind of picking up in different ways true vo or true the performances and sometimes having to even recast actors because it didn't work I mean he we're trying to make a very relatable world with kind of grounded characters and sometimes with with the Biot sessions it would be hard to find actors that would be kind of differently calibrated for different kinds of games to get that voice that was more kind of in sync with with the rest of the direction of the

game so sometimes we would bring people back and say okay all that kind of bad guy voice just please just get rid of it and just do your own voice and they would be actually better tour was critical in that he was able to be in most of the vo sessions and since he had such a strong understanding of the story was able to provide all that context for the actors which is key because you can have a very well-written line and a very good actor and if they deliver it in the wrong context or in the wrong tone it the scene completely falls flat so we were very lucky to have tor in that position now we try to obviously minimize those recasting and reshoots by following this process and rigorously iterating but those things are gonna happen and it was important that we embrace them and we're agile and willing to make those changes when we needed to yeah if you do your job right and you get to the end of this then those those reshoots are minimal obviously not everyone's working on these giant projects but you know I still think that the benefit of having you know a firm idea of your story before you start doing whatever version of the final

assets it's going to help you and speaking about finally we had a we were lucky enough to have extremely talented cinematics team that was located in Montreal led by debut bear who helped bring all of this together and the package that you actually see when you when you play the game and tour was talking about recasting and sometimes we would have to make changes even after reshoots were done and at that time we had the animators up there and they were they were very diligent and very passionate about making sure that every detail on Lara's face and in her actions was communicated correctly and so as much as we have all this great motion capture technology and performance capture technology there's still an animator that's sitting there and is hand King certain things in order to bring it all together and so we're just extremely fortunate to be working with them up there and I just might get a big shout out to them all right so we've talked about our core story pillars of Crystal Dynamics the learnings we took from to 2013's Tomb Raider reboot and a

little bit about our process so here's our sort of key takeaways we'd like you to take from this talk the very important thing is that your process is key create and embrace that process whatever the project obviously your process isn't going to look exactly like ours but adapt or create one from the ground up and stick to it and you're going to be able to make yourself a roadmap to get there in the end cultivate feedback from every area of the team don't hold anything too precious everybody's feedback is important and you need to be able to defend your ideas if you can't defend them then they're not worth keeping on the page you can't have a thin skin you got to let everybody speak their mind bluntly however they're gonna speak it and take that to heart and then finally be inclusive the entire team has a stake in the story everything in the game tells a story I said that we're the team responsible for the ultimate presentation of the narrative in rise of the Tomb Raider but in reality the entire team is the narrative team we are all telling the story of Lara and the world at the same time so thank you guys very much for coming I think we have a

few moments for questions and then we'll be able to be in the wrap-up area afterwards we have five minutes does anybody want to step up and ask a question there we go right to the mic hi so I'm a I'm on one person team for a game I'm small game I'm working on and I would know like what you would suggest for the like the feedback the inclusive part because if I'm a one-person team I don't really have a lot of people to give to ask for feedback so I'm just curious on what you would recommend for that absolutely um well I think I my recommendation would be to seek feedback from people that you know and you trust and people who are going to be honest to you if at all possible get it in front of people who aren't gamers if we're gonna bring a different viewpoint to it I think some of the most interesting story advice I got was from environment artists we're telling you about the placement of objects that I didn't even think about so being able to find somebody who's maybe has a unique viewpoint you really have to seek that out if you're on the team of Walker absolutely anybody else you like that answer huh yeah I would also recommend just making sure to track your feedback don't just have a casual conversation

and then just you kind of retain it by you know asking the document where they can keep an excel sheet or whatever you whatever tools you use to track it but always go back and evaluate and make sure that you're marking those things off the list as you're developing yeah absolutely and even if you don't agree with the feedback you should understand it and then put it down in on end internalize it thank you of course Hey hi there so you talked about receiving feedback from the whole team I was wondering at what points in the process you got feedback because you know sometimes early on small teams are good and how you bring people in John you want to take that mm-hmm well I try to seek feedback at every step even in that early phase I would tend to have meetings every week where I would anybody on the team could come and I would do an overview of the story and and I'm all about taking the feedback and assessing it but I you know like I don't feel like excluding is something that is ever going to be helpful I can separate the ideas that

I'm getting from people that we're getting from people and still hold on to our vision and still have that small team I mean I understand what you're saying but I do stink think even and you know you want the whole team to be with you and you're gonna have a team no no matter how small your team is at the beginning they're you know they're gonna be with you to the end and they you want them to carry the vision with you and always be able you don't you don't want people on your team you want them challenging you but you don't want them off the same page you want you all want to be kind of carrying the vision together so I think it's important that at every step and it blossoms when you get it in the game so we talked about standing it up for user tests it's actually also there's the small group who will give you feedback on the page but as soon as it's on the screen and even before we would do moving pictures sometimes we just put slates up there so that people understood the story beef that was going to be there and all of a sudden everyone is now playing their game with the story in it and having all kinds of ideas of how it could be better or what they're not understanding yet so just dropping it in is an explosion of

feedback and you know I would say it's it's definitely not a comfortable feeling I mean it was insanely frustrating as a writer and as a story person to get that constantly like you feel like you're under attack but you just kind of have to let it all come in and you know it's broken at that point yeah this is early enough that it is not your perfect version and you're and you have to stand there and hear about how you know it's broken but occasionally you'll hear about how you don't know it's broken yet also and those are the precious ones yeah it does make you really robust for writing for any other entertainment medium because you are just writing in a headwind of feedback but yeah it is is really good for kind of thickening your skin and you know it became very important to us to to open open the process earlier and that was something that we took from from rise so we can identify problems earlier in the process and and smooth things out because we didn't always do that with the first game and that was something that we definitely carried through opening up early you know their problems will be there those

problems will be there so let's get to them early and sort them out early and I think that really helped okay I think we're gonna be available for more questions in the wrap-up area after this but everybody thank you so much for coming I'm supposed to remind you to fill out an evaluation of some sort but please do that thank you again [Applause]