Storytelling Tools to Boost Your Indie Game's Narrative and Gameplay

[Music] [Applause] okay hello everybody thank you all for coming uh yeah so uh let's just start off with a couple of thanks here to get it rolling if the slides work there we go awesome firstly want to say thank you to GDC for inviting me thank you to the organizers of the Indie Summit for putting this whole thing on and finding such great speakers Kate Compton's talk last one if you saw it that was amazing um so I want to say hi I'm Mata I'm a professor as mentioned from nhtv University in the Netherlands it's an awesome place to study if you want to learn about video games in Europe you should be going there uh I'm a games developer I ran my own company called Mone for seven years as an indie developer uh I made games for myself for the web for friends and for companies like mtv2 and channel 4 uh after that I went to join people like EA and Rebellion uh working on a few different

titles for them where I was a writer narrative designer uh lead designer in the very end uh before I went off to work on other things most recently I released fragments of him last year on Xbox One and PC in collaboration with an awesome couple of guys at a studio called sassybot so uh that's an emotional storytelling kind of game uh it was nominated for the best writing in a video game by The Writers Guild of Great Britain uh where since I'm now a full member and member of the video video game committee uh I also consult and train people in narrative design I do more stuff I'm writing books about oh God anyway I basically do game stuff uh and I have done for my entire adult life so I'm going to be talking to you today uh about why understanding story structures is a useful skill for games developers and often it's actually something which is already done intuitively so that's one of the interesting things about this that a lot of stuff that I'm going to say you're can go oh yeah we we kind of already do some of that and it's a way of moving

that into kind of a conscious realm we're going to look at a reliable story storytelling structure that you can use which will help you tell stories uh and some debug questions to help you fix stories or gameplay that feels unrewarding uh there's going to be two takeaway diagrams at the very very end of this session so after I've said Thank you at the very very end there'll be two pictures which you can take a photo of and it'll give you loads of summary information about the things I've been saying today so we're going to talk about how to build those and a nice easy takeaway for you if you want to bring up a camera right at the end there this is a lot to cover so I'm going to be talking fast the key points are going to be on the screen behind me I have an English accent not all of you are native English speakers uh so if you can't uh follow too easily if you look at the screen you're going to get all the main points as we go so let's start off talking a little bit about flowing games this is something that we all understand is important we usually Express this as a diagram where we've got Challenge on one and skill on the other and if it's uh if it's got very low skill uh sorry very

high skill requirement but low challenge then a game becomes quite boring and if it's got a low low skill but High challenge then the game becomes too difficult it makes players really anxious so we decide really that we should try and keep people what's called the flow Channel now we started off thinking that this was kind of a straight line that challenge and skill should escalate in perfect relationship to each other but we've discovered really that it's kind of more fun if it if this kind of wavy wobbly line as we go along there now if you want to learn more about flow there's some great people you can read up on janova Chen Jesse shell mial 6m miali uh he was kind of guy who came up with a lot of this stuff um tricky one to search for just go Mahal and flow it will come out FY in Google um these people have done amazing work on Flow look it up now when we think about storytelling uh in tension we also can express this as a diagram and we often do so we often have tension along one side and time going along the bottom there from zero to 100% of our story

and as we go through we have kind of the the inciting incident which is that first Peak we kind have a low midpoint where things have got worse unexpectedly when we try to fix them we have that final What's called the black moment in writing where there's kind of this moment of the greatest Darkness threatens us and then we eventually overcome it which is the end of our story now it's actually generally slightly more sort of nobbly than that and I'll explain why it's a bit more nobbly than that in later on but as you can see when we could kind of compare these two ideas together we see that there's still this thing there that if a lot of 's gone along and no tension happened then it's quite boring and if there's uh really high tension and not a lot of times past then it's feels too tense it doesn't feel natural and so we can see there's kind of this combination of the two that we have these things that go in common between them um but really what does that kind of wobbly line actually represent what is this thing when we talk about games what is what is this thing going on here now when we think about this we could think about what is the story of your

game now we could kind of go well your game has things that we might call pre-authored content so this is things like events and content the storytelling the the the mechanics the world that it's in these are things that we put into our games to tell the stories of them on the other hand we've got our players awesome huge bunch of people all of them playing having fun with this kind of stuff we could call this a user generated version of the story this is their interaction with the world and it's their interpretation of the world because the world that we design might not be the world that they see because they interpret things differently based on their experiences of playing games and the world around them so between the two of these we might get different things so imagine we've got a world which has a car in it on a racetrack and it's in the middle of a city we've already got a narrative setting there we know about cars we know about cities and it starts off the race and there's this back and forth between you and a rival and then on the final Bend is coming up and the Rival is just ahead and that final corner Corner the Rival doesn't

drive particularly well and you manag to take it on the inside fantastic excitement lovely little story encapsulated in that moment there that's a tiny little story within a game and we can see that whether we think about tension in stories or whether we think of this as a flow this is basically a story The these two lines fit with this experience over here now as as developers we shaped that through the AI maybe we did rubber banding on the AI to make sure that that opponent was close on that final Bend but stupid enough to crash just as we were taken past it there we changed it with a track design to make sure that it was fun that there was going to be straights and Corners that felt exciting and built in this rhythm of a story as he played and from a player's perspective well they were using their skill their choices their their ways of controlling the corners to create that story for themselves so these two things have basically created the player experience between them this line this story that

they've created this wobbly line is basically the the place between these and ideally that's the thing that we make as games developers we create that experience we create that space for it and we help our users get to that point so how do we do this kind of stuff so flow Theory says that it's good to keep players in that flow Channel we know that that's a good place to keep them but how do we do this well there's lots of other ideas out there based on mean mechanics but storytellers have structured systems that they've been reliably using to create great audience experiences for Millennia so rather than perhaps reinvent the wheel for understanding a player experience we can learn a lot from storytellers in how they shape experiences how they guide the emotional Journey the players go on so what we're going to do here is we're going to build in a diagram which covers the basics of Storytelling we're going to have uh some a little bit of stuff about motivations we're going to have some stuff about scene structure and a lot of it is going

to be about a flow from beginning to end mostly covering from zero to 100% with a little bit more and a little bit at the end this whole diagram will be shown at the very very end of this slide so you don't need to take photos progressively as we go by the way unless you want to uh and I'm also going to be filling in some information about what happens at each juncture there so let's start off talking about motivations this is a really key part of of telling a good story so for characters these are divided between external and internal motivations an external motivation is the desire to change something in the world outside you so this is often to get richer to steal some money from a bank or become rich and famous through doing a particular thing that's a a very common external motivation it changes your status in the outside world another one is to travel you want to reach to a certain place you want to explore a new area that's a that's a change in your uh status in terms of your location forming friendships and love and relationships it's changing your

relationship status it's a status in the outside world emotions are an internal thing in some ways but how they affect the outside world is still an external motivation so it could be to date the hot guy in the office for example that could be the objective of the game or for your character so in terms of motivations here an internal motivation is a desire to change something inside the person this is usually uh term like overcoming a problem so overcome a block it's often an emotional block overcoming a sense of loneliness overcoming uh grief now revenge is an external thing because you affect revenge on the outside world overcoming grief is the inside part of that you try to overcome grief by killing people in the outside world that's how a lot of video game plots work another internal motivation is learning something new usually it's something they should have already known and you can succeed in one and fail in the other and often when you succeed in external motivation and fail an internal motivation you get a tragedy that's

Romeo and Juliet two families alike in dignity who fail to actually ever come to terms with the fact that they should stop fighting and their internal necessity to learn something new about themselves to learn that they're all the same to learn to accept their differences and their failure to do that kills their children and that's why that's a tragedy so learning something new is a huge thing of an internal change there now both of these things like I say they are about change a story is always about change a CH a story that doesn't have change from beginning to end is a very very boring story now it can just be that your character got bigger guns it's change of a kind you know and it works pretty well it really does I'm not putting down games which are just purely about mechanical advancement that's a lot of fun as well but there are other things we can do to change internally so that change must happen in some kind but how do we apply all this

kind of stuff to games well we might not think of Tetris as a game with the greatest of plots but it really does follow these kind of things pretty well it's a very very compelling player experience now if we think about this if we think about kind of the tension Arc that we go through when we're playing this it fits that flow thing it flits that tension Arc and the player has both external internal goals we have the scores as an external goal and we have that internal goal which is kind of a desire for order Tetris is driven by the thing that we like the world to be slightly neater than it is and this is a tiny place where maybe just maybe we'll succeed in making it happen and it's always a tragedy CU we always fail but I think that internal goal is a really powerful part of the lasting appeal of Tetris that sense of Desiring order and it always chasing away from us that's a very Human Experience and I think that's one of the reasons it works as such a enduring appeal for us so if you add that quickly into our diagram there we have the uh the external motivation is a looking for change usually expressed through very

direct verbs like save and find and things like that an internal is about overcoming or coming to terms with so let's move on to plot structure you've got your goals for your player character external internal motivations there now we need a well structured series of events through which change will happen the external goals are just a desire we need the plot to make that change happen so uh a plot controls the speed of progress through the through the tension Arc of the experience and so I'm going to be talking a little bit more in detail about how this plot works so start your story before the big events begin this is one thing that a lot of games fail to do properly by this I mean don't you don't start your story with you're a wizard arry you you have this whole part of meeting the dersley you have his his childhood his his normal everyday life outside of the Wizard World before you you see the you see kind of Hagrid come

in before you experience The World of Magic because the World of Magic by itself means nothing unless it's contrasted by the world of the ordinary we see this sometimes in games and when we do it's very powerful Prince of Persia sounds of time is one of my favorite storytelling games and there's got a little snatch of normality at the very beginning of it it's beautiful really lovely game so you set up your character the situation and the basic rules of this this is otherwise known as a tutorial Mission you can do it that way it's you can literally do it set it in a normal World Call of Duty sometimes does this that you train on the base before you go and shoot people who are ideologically opposed to you so you I wasn't going to do politics I said I would um so start your story before the events begin uh it's really important to build empathy with your characters if possible so we want to the character overcome the challenges ahead of us now a really great example of this I think is firewatch I think firewatch did some beautiful work with this so before we reach the lake and firewatch

which is really when the Story begins to kick off and that tension starts we know a lot about Harry we we know about his external internal motivations and The Story begins with that moment there that his external motivation is really kicked off by there's trouble in this park so we've got this internal stuff that growth that need to escape and we know at some point he's going to have to go back it's a nice setup and it makes the rest of the game powerful if we just started with that confrontation with the the teenage women uh it probably wouldn't work so well and then we have what we call the inciting incident so now your player character knows their place in the world we can start to set up the challenges for them so we increase the narrative or mechanical tension here and we add the antagonist or the enemies the risk or we we break the usual situation something which was normal and every day becomes less normal suddenly it stops working see it's in Stanley Parable the button stops going overcoming this problem is usually the external motivation of your plot

trying to find the source of that problem and and bring it back into normality is usually what drives your main character but to begin with though the player character avoids the problem the player doesn't usually go straight to attacking the problem they'll either explore their abilities explore the world they'll avoid the big issue that's facing them or they'll have some smaller battles along the way so in v v v v v v uh which I should call Spikes from now on uh so in spikes to player character has to rescue their colleagues it's a really lovely little game it reminds me a lot of Jet Set Willian it's really a lovely little game it's very very fun but to begin with basically the player wanders aimlessly really that's what you do you don't you're not setting off ah I should find everybody immediately now you go off and play and you see what the kind of puzzles are in the world now after a little while that exploration they make a choice to act with intention after while the player feels like they know the territory enough to make that Focus choice to act or there's no choice left but act you've done all the submissions

you have to go do a story one in spikes that means basically i' better use the map more if you ever play the game eventually you kind of go oh yeah I'm lost okay what is this flashing elephant um they engage with the external objective of the the story or the world that's ahead of them and that's when they really begin to kind of get into this but as they get further into it the complexity begins to increase the abilities seem less effective maybe new enemy are added which make which are more challenging new story elements show that things were not so not so simple as we thought they were to begin with and I think tetc is a masterpiece because of exactly this [Music] moment suddenly complexity has increased and suddenly we know that there's going to be difficulty ahead and we're going to have to our strategy of just piling things on top of each other is now a strategy of slipping things underneath just about quickly move down oh no suddenly the is increased and this is a storytelling moment in

itself I think the complexity has to increase to make the experience compelling otherwise it stays at this kind of flat level the tension doesn't change so that complexity can change through narrative terms mechanical terms or through both I like both if you can but you can just do it with narrative I think that's a really valid way of doing it if you're making purely narrative games so in Virginia we see divisions between the protagonists and the dreams begin to call sum of reality into question and this is a complexification of the everyday setting that we we've gone into in firewatch an extra lay of conspiracy has added is there's not just missing women there's some other stuff going on in the park and it all gets a bit oh it's cool I love that game in my game fragments of him uh Will's kind of been trying to build a a big long-term relationship and halfway through he begins to doubt whether he can stain a relationship without hurting other people it's a big doubtful moment and this is this is kind of the the low midpoint of most stories [Music]

so the first strategies and weapons are no longer enough usually in Shooters New patterns and combinations of enemies are added uh something like super star dust tends to add in new things halfway through enemies use a better targeting more bullets or homing missiles enemies begin begin to kind of get dangerous new abilities like moving faster or tracking you in Left for Dead you would not throw these things at the player as soon as they walk out the door it's just natural isn't it and that's what I mean this some of these patterns are intuitive to us we just know it wouldn't be a good idea then hope overcomes fear with some effort player finds new weapons or strategies to overcome the enemies the external change happens they get power ups or grinding this is kind of the uh the the weapon montage and the training montage in a film they find the strength they never knew they had they have that moment of internal change which I think life is strange does so well with Kate's story and the character learns to unite their skills and teams behind a single purpose it has high risks there's danger ahead now before it was just fun but now

there's danger in facing these things but it is their only hope to [Music] continue guns lots of guns and then we get to the black moment all hopes of overcoming the problem at risk the final boss is killed but it's not even its final form oh my God it's it's this kind of moment that the escalating danger seems too much and all the knowledge the relationships the strategies developed through the player character experience are needed to overcome this final challenge the final choice the heartbreaking relationships you've built along the way are all at risk now and what choice will you make about the future it's a powerful moment the black moment very very important in your story and then you end it as fast as possible people often say how long should my ending be you say you do it as quickly as you possibly can and you keep the ending neat and short wrapping up as many of the threads as you possibly can as easily as you can so let's add all of that to our diagram okay so we're going

to start off with our before it begins moment we get to our inciting incidents where we kind of have a need for change but the character kind of tries to avoid it thinks it's somebody else's problem and then they kind of get that statement of external objective yes I will face up to this yes I will use the map more and find my my colleagues they try this uh they they try these kind of things and it's not really working we get to the low midpoint they're going to have to get better they're going to have to find new ways of dealing with these kind of things training montage people begin to power up people grind as the characters a little bit more to get their high things we get some hope entering into the story maybe if I keep on doing this if I get better at this game I'll overcome these challenges then we get to this this moment of of of building up the that everybody assembles behind this one plan which is going to push us forward when reach the black moment where all is at risk and maybe just with enough skill with enough of the things that we saved along the way we can overcome and we have the final satisfying conclusion cool you have noticed there's a bit missing at the

beginning and the end there because that's a model for most stories as a player character Journey this fits most strong experiences a lot of films you see will follow this model pretty much exactly it works on an intuitive and emotional level to feel very rewarding but if you're making a thriller an actual or a horror story you might want to add an extra little bit on there horror stories in particular do this one there's an additional bit of structure you might want to consider adding at the very beginning which is called the Grabber it's a burst of action or fear that promises for future of the game and slows down before the inciting incident so it's a way to let the player character know there's going to be excitement ahead and then you give them a bit of breathing space later on an example this is the Metroid games where you end up with loads of great Powers at the beginning and then they take them away and kind of go okay let's let you build those up slowly now or the uh Goblet of Fire you get this moment of horror at the beginning and you know it's going to have another moment of horror later on and sure enough a teenager is killed in Cold Blood at the very end that's a spoilers sorry uh but

it's it's it's a way of telling us that there's going to be something coming along DSX does this with with all the abilities at the beginning takes them away slower paced bit after that Star Trek J.J Abrams you've got death you've got love you've got birth you've got sacrifice you've got amazing stuff not the first five minutes of the film um really I J.J Abrams is a master of the gravel it's a very important thing I think if you're going to do that kind of stuff in horror stories you often also have a final moment of fear at the end which called evil lurks da da so in Carri this is when the the hand comes up from beneath the Earth and grabs her this kind of thing it's the nightmares at the end of a rent Horizon but also you sometimes have this in Thrillers where the organization perhaps wasn't quite defeated so in Austin Powers Dr Evil escapes you know this is a fairly common kind of structure that we do with this or the end of Kill Zone 2 where you've killed the big boss oh my God it's brilliant the war is over you walk outside and the war's still going oh evil LS there'll be Killzone

3 so we'll just add those quickly at the beginning and the end of that structure there we [Music] go so we've described this so far this nice smooth curve in here the diagram explains the player character Journey pretty nicely there uh it could be applied literally to help write an in-game story or as a metaphorical structure to shape tension in a compelling mechanics driven experience whichever way you want to do it this kind of structure works on an emotional way so we can also sort of set it out like this this model works as a meta structure for the entire game but also you can do it on a smaller level it can repeat on a level by level basis uh with each little bit of the level contributing to kind of the uh Journey towards that external internal motivation uh this is what I did on Aliens versus Predator for example every level of that has a full story inside it as well as contributing to the full story of the game but that's too much detail for each encounter or scene so if you want to make a good scene to be to to work with that we need a little simpler shorter

guide for that basically we want to turn this into that kind of nobbly version so how do we go about doing this well we do this with scene structure that's the final part of that diagram we're going to add in there so all scenes on your level must have an objective which is the players's target goal or experience you must have conflict something that makes the objective more difficult to reach it's like uh this can be either narrative or mechanics or both some sort of conflict that makes us struggle makes it harder for us to make these things happen and then is reached by requiring change from the player or the character so they either resolve or adapt to the conflict building to the next part of the experience of the story and the story goes on with escalating tension there and you get these nice little peaks of oh I'm going to make it oh no that wasn't what I expected oh you get these little tension arcs coming all way along the way there so this was the lead character from Aliens versus Predator as a writer on this one uh one of the first objectives you get is to reset the The Colony uh powers to to make it work again the conflict is power the player successfully resets the

power but it blows the circuits Across The Colony so the colony is actually more at risk before and the character's life is more complex now notice here that the player succeeded whilst the character failed so you can still have player success as long as you signpost well done you've done the right thing your player's life Now sucks even more that's perfectly fine in fact I thoroughly encourage you to do that as often as possible because if your character's life is easy their their story is usually pretty boring ing so try and play with this kind of stuff as much as you can so another example from this might be the go might be God of War Series where the objective is to continue killing everything uh and then you have the conflict which is he gets enemies with shields which block the usual attacks and so the player has to start using new attacks to progress making the game more challenging the complexity increases for the player the character has not changed the character just wants to keep on killing everything so here we see again that we've got we've got that escalating little Peak and trough in a scene but it's working the other way

around for the for the players complexity this time so let's add that in there so we have our objective we have our conflict and we have our outcome this will be on the final slides you don't need to go and I'm going to change it now ha too late um so games are players stories so if your game feels flat then think of your your players experience as a story is a good way of debugging it think about what they're experiencing as they're going through it so here are four debug questions to ask that a game events or level feels unsatisfying and I'm going to put a diagram of this at the very end as well okay uh is the player's objective clear is there an escalating mechanical or narrative conflict or is it only repetition have we done this before does the outcome meaningfully add to the mechanics The Narrative or both and over the whole game was there change from start to finish for the player the character or both that change is a really key thing to making your

game experience feel good really really important thing so I'm just going to conclude this wrapping this all up now good designers already intuitively use story structures to create compelling and rewarding games learning to do so consciously though I think is a powerful way of understanding how we shape great experiences using stories consciously understanding this tension Arc that people go through that it is Peaks and troughs not a straight line is a really important thing to do so whether your game is narrative or mechanics oriented learning to think like a Storyteller helps you make intelligent player focused design choices I hope you found this talk interesting and useful get in touch if you want to know more uh please leave comments with review after the session I do read all the comments that you put in there those are awesome so I'm going to show those two diagrams after the next slide so I'm going to say thank you one then I'll show the two diagrams and we can all take photos and stuff like that um before that I want to just say have fun make great games and please tell some great stories and thank you so much for listening 29 minutes 15 seconds

[Music] wooho thank you right Let's do let's do the camera bit here we go there I love this bit I see about 200 cameras come up it's great I should get my my camera out and take a photo of you everybody who just took a photo hold your camera in the air awesome thank you uh okay let's do let's do the next one there we go some scen debugging questions for you just help you through there some tips about how to use them kind of what sort of things are probably causing you problems if you have to uh if you don't get a good answer to those questions for yourself cool okay do we have time for questions or do we have to wrap up right now I think we probably have a wrap-up there is a wrap-up room which is

2022 I think they said 2022 is that correct it is correct excellent everybody thank you so so much for being here I hope you enjoyed that talk thank you once again thank you thank you