Session: How To Supercharge Narrative Design When Building Lasting IP - Bendik Stang.

[Music] so our next session now is going to be from Bendix stank uh from snow castle games talking about how to supercharge narrative design and when building a lasting IP so can I get a round of applause as you welcome onto [Applause] stage there if you need great yeah I'm bendick um I'm a founder of a studio snow castle games u based in Oso Norway uh I've been doing this since 2009 so 15 years now um and on the side I'm doing a PhD for fun

um and it's same reason I'm making games it's because it's great fun or it's supposed to be fun at least uh and um yeah I'm God and as God I want you to have a sense of free will but also I've decided your destiny and I want to impose that Destiny without you feeling uh the lack the loss of Free Will um as a game designer it's fairly similar um and this is um going through a game um where you feel you can do whatever you you like and you have the free will to do affect things and then enjoying a good story is really rare and I'll get to that um this talk is about my research Arch and a lot of the

thought process going through it I'm not going to give you solutions to everything uh cuz I'm not done um but there's some interesting thoughts that have made a lot of sense to me and helped me develop me myself as a game developer and a Storyteller um and um yeah I'll share these thoughts with you now so back in 2018 I was playing uh one of my favorite games Red Dead Redemption 2 um and I lost my myself in that world I was a Dennison of the Wild Wild West I was going to be like a cowboy and explore this fantastic world with these great stories um and I really really enjoyed it until I sat back and felt deceived and I didn't understand why and nobody else I talked to understood why because this is one of the greatest greatest games ever and I still believe it is but I felt deceived and this is why I started my PhD kind of

looking into that question um and the problem was I started playing and I got into the world and it felt real it felt like I could do anything but then after a while cracks appeared in that kind of Illusion uh and I realized that these narrative quest lines I could join were more like Joy rides in a theme park and nothing I really did matter at the end of the day it was great storytelling but the world stayed static I had a little Camp I could maybe build a little bit out but it's a huge world and it never changed and I couldn't do anything to change it um and for me that was that was it uh I lost kind of my touch with the game and and moved on but this was uh what made me start to think how I can make a better experience

for a player and I want both I want to be able to create my own story but I also want to enjoy the stories written by by great authors or designers um and I want them combined but it's yeah it's very rare you can get that so I started looking at other games and analyze them um and there's Red Dead um it has a large open world and has a lot of great narrative it's pretty advanced in terms of you can go hunting and watch nature but um the world is static same goes for uh Horizon sidon another game I loved by the way um but you don't you feel like you're part of a narrative Journey but not actually part of the world properly um and another large open world game uh where I also really enjoyed it

but it's pretty much the same then on the other side you have games like Minecraft it's all about your journey you you design everything by interacting with the world but there's no narrative by the author in the game but it's great um and Animal Crossing does have a little bit narrative but it's also a lot about you making your own story in this world uh and finally one of um my favorite games that I played a lot with my kids Animal Crossing this is more like a life simulator so it has quite a lot of interactive narrative with the NPCs it's not very deep necessarily but you do affect the world you build your farm you you cut down the trees and all sorts of things like that so that has a lot of interesting things this is a peculiar one for me because it is very linear in a way although you do walk through a very large landscape but but you do also affect it and you have

other players who can kind of affect things and leave trails or things for you in the game and that yeah it was a bit different from the other ones but in general uh you have either a world that is static where you deliver narratives or you have Dynamic worlds you can change but there's more or less a complete lack of author narratives um and it's kind of logical when you think about it because if you design a lot of narrative you need to be able to deliver that in some through some mechanic and if the player can change all the mechanics then how do you go about delivering your narrative um so I then realized I had two problems to solve to deliver this uh sense to the player I wanted and I had to make a world that is

dynamic and I had to figure out a way to apply these stories that I wanted to make in this shifting landscape and on the first one we're we're given tools uh through the game engines um to make static worlds that's the tools we're given so unless you make your own engine like Minecraft you're pretty stuck with the tools you're given and then you end up making something that looks pretty but kind of does the same thing over and over again um and so I need to design a tool or an augmentation to my game engine so that it can change at runtime and it becomes Dynamic that's was like a one and I'm an engineer so that's the easiest problem for me to fix in a way um and the one I started tackling and while also analyzing various forms of narratives and how I maybe could combine

uh or destructure stories into components that I can then assemble again through various means but because the worlds are static the way our engines give us we tend to develop games that we consume because back in the days you would just move to the right and then you would just run and run and run until you got to the end of the level um and these days it's kind of the same you have these big worlds that seems super open but you typically end up consuming everything there is to do in one part and then you move on to the next part and then when that's done you move on and so on so you're still kind of as a player consuming the game World um very seldomly go go back to uh where you started and things have

changed um so that's another reason I think making a dynamic world where you come back and and see things changed can add some value that you normally wouldn't see and give you a new Fresh experience so here's a um a little teaser trailer for for a game we put on paulse but it's the first um kind of Showcase of the dynamic system um so there's the desert

so this is BB uh it's an insect that pollinates flowers and the whole world then has a full Dynamic ecosystem with flowers being pollinated and growing fruits animal eating the fruit fruits pooping out seeds that grows into new plants um and tackle that one problem it's we have a working prototype for this and then moving on to the other one but before I do that it's like why am I doing this I'm making games right and what's the most important thing in in making games back when I started this journey in 2018 I had lots of argu arguments with my lead game designer um because game play trumps everything everything we make in our games we should focus on uh supporting the game play and I disagree cuz I actually don't make games I make um

experiences uh because I mean you can make games but the more open world games where you have the narratives that I'm looking for those are more like an experienced in a game and so I would argue there's more to it than just the game play that's the most important thing and we we spend a lot of time arguing this and using GTA as an example um if you take driving and and shooting out of GTA you would argue then there's nothing left and I kind of agree but then I don't because if you put that driving and shooting into a desert you have a fairly mediocre madmax game because the driving isn't fantastic and the shooting isn't fantastic so what is it that makes GTA so amazing what's left when you remove these things is as vibrant like believable game city world uh and if you

Traverse it you will see things happening and while you're there you actually feel like it's almost real at least to the level that you can really lean into all the stories and and the missions you can get and so in my mind I would then argue that the systemic world of the city of of um uh GTA is in a way similar to the EOS system I proposed and I developed in a nature scenario um because it's systemic so a systemic world that de develops and lives on in the game world no matter what you do that's kind of where you can get this feeling that this is real um and so yes there's three things now I want to do I want to make sure that I have good gam playay uh because it is important uh I want the narrative and I want the game world and all these three things uh they

are equally important to me so the games I looked at they have a lot of these things but maybe less on the systemic Game World less focus on that world and it is a Monumental task to make like this everything perfect uh game with a systemic world because although this is for me like the perfect game but making that systemic Game World requires is so much and I managed to do this part I even started thinking about that part um but yeah that's absolutely my my dream scenario is to make a game like this or and even play a game so hoping someone else in here might get inspired and and make some games like this um and so yeah um back to the initial uh statement I want the players to be able to make their own

stories and I want to make um my stories applicable in that scenario um so yes any [Applause] questionsly uh big round of applause and thank you it was really interesting and and you said you did a PhD to like analyze this and study it so I can't imagine the amount of work it's really much fun into that cuz it's a massive topic um I guess if there are any questions from your audience please raise your hand um but in the meantime I just thought I'd ask so in terms of like as a developer I feel like you know this is something which you might need like decades worth of experience before you can implement it but is this something which is accessible to start implementing as like a new developer to experiment with a all so because I can't patent it uh I'm keeping it quiet until we've deployed at least one game with it yeah uh but it's um

it's a lot of work and we have a prototype I haven't made a game with it so it's going to be a lot of uh extra work to to add this world that is different but I also believe it's worth it because it will feel very different from the other games amazing and and the title you shared earlier um which I think the production you said was paused for now um are you able to tell us anything more about that or just the experience of it because it looked very wholesome and sweet and I'm just really interested yeah no I think I'll I'll have to keep that quiet for now but hopefully this year I'll be able to talk more about it amazing all right we've got a couple questions from the audience um I yeah we'll start there and then we'll work our way over hi um thank you for the talk I was wondering if there are any narratives that you feel lend themselves more to a game where you've uh created uh a sort of Custom Modified game engine or is it something that any narrative can benefit from I think pretty much any narrative could be

deployed into a dynamic World um but I have yet to prove it uh I've been looking at um the morphology of folk tales where you going you have different characters with very specific rule uh um not rules but jobs or purposes in the story and you can it doesn't really matter if it's person A or B as long as they fulfill that role um so if you choose to kill have the characters in The Game World I can still kind of use some of the other ones to tell the story how existentially terrifying exactly um we've got time for one more I believe there was a lady over on the left thank you thank you uh so two things first of all where can we find your PhD no it's not done yet uh do you have any of your work available it's a really cool topic and I'd love to read more more about it

uh and then the second question is we have seen a lot of discussion in systematic uh environment systematic Animal Behavior Uh could you elaborate a bit more on systematic cultures however since you mentioned it on the graph so that would be simulating uh human behavior um and uh I haven't done this yet but I heard of somebody adding some of this new AI to a city of NPCs and they would start uh interacting with each other and one of them was was to run for mayor and started like um pitching to the other citizens in this virtual simulation and so something like that seems very plausible and I would go about it probably something like that but um yes it's it's outside my scope of research thank you amazing and can we get another round of applause thank you so much