The Narrative Innovation Showcase 2019

[Music] welcome to the narrative summit 2019 [Music] who's here for the first time a bunch of you okay welcome for those of you who are veterans tom is not around today so we're all going to introduce ourselves very well I'm Clara Fernando Parra I'm Matthew Weiss and we are going to introduce you to the narrative innovation showcase this is a fourth year running that we're doing it as you come in please come to the front make friends you know come to the middle defrag the room a bit so that you can facilitate people coming in a bit later because we might be full so this year we're going to show you all a bunch of new games that we wanted to share with you welcome slide there's something

wrong with the slides there you go yeah it works okay we already did our introduction yes so here we go we know who yet so please remember that you'll receive some evaluations on your email please fill them out so that we know how to do we'll do well today I hope that we'll do even better every year so the goal of this showcase with this if you have not seen it before is to highlight the cutting edge of the practice of narrative design okay so this year we have a particularly striking collection of games that are very different from each other including dungeon crawlers platformers and even card games and first up we have lost words by Mark Bechtler thanks very much hi everyone I'm mark

back Claire and I'm the founder of sketchbook games and I'm here to talk to you about using words as game mechanics and this is in terms of our project lost words beyond the page which is a atmospheric puzzler game half set inside the pages of a diary and half set in a fantasy world called Astoria it's about this young girl called Izzie who's aspiring to be a writer and her gran is helping to mentor her but when her grand exile and has a stroke is he starts to use the fantasy world of Astoria that she's writing about as a means of coping with what's going on in the real world so let's take a quick look at the trailer so you can see what the game is all about so as you can see here we're running along the words and using them as platforms but you can also drag them around the screen and use them to solve

different puzzles also at some points to make choices that affect the fantasy world which we then transition into here so in the Astoria section you're not walking on the words but you are using them to interact with the world in different ways [Music] was they got this word book with you at the top left of the screen there and that allows you to carry some of the words with you so you can use them at different points throughout the level so the challenge that we've been looking to overcome has been how to use words as game mechanics to help tell an emotionally moving story but while also

remaining localizable for other languages there has been other games that have done interesting things with text including typos man ever story today I die typewriter and also letters a game that's currently in development and is on show at GDC here if you get a chance to check that out we've tried to tackle the problem in three different ways firstly by ensuring that the gameplay and story helps serve each other then by trying to use metaphors to make the gameplay more powerful and moving and also by using localization to try and allow as many people as possible to experience the game in their own language so for us we've tried to give the gameplay and story equal importance which sometimes has meant leaving a particular narrative beat on the shelf if we can find the gameplay to fit with

it or sometimes icing a really cool mechanic because it didn't work with the narrative and while it was a shame to lose those individual parts it makes the experience stronger and more cohesive as a whole so here's the most exciting thing that we realized when making the game anything that we asked the player to do is something that they will feel and so therefore it carries meaning so let's take a look at an example of this on this level in one sense you solve the simple puzzle to turn the words into platforms to get to the tear on the slider screen there to progress but there's a real meaning that we're driving it by organizing the level this way is he has aspirations she's trying to order the future so players putting the words in place and leading upwards is a way of emphasizing that narrative expression here's another example where

we see and experience how is he is over writing her memories of the past and we're making the player responsible for that they must overwrite these memories by moving across them in order to progress we're trying to put the center player in the same emotional space as Izzi so here she's worried about her memories of her gran and we're seeing them replaced with images of her gran sick in her hospital bed this level actually came about as a bit of accident of I was playing around in unity with kinematic physics and then when I jumped on the sentences they all fell away from underneath me which really surprised me and so then when we had the the narrative beat of Izzy's gran having her stroke which is an unexpected moment in the story we felt that that would actually be a really good fit of this point of the story with that particular mechanic this

narrative beat is about in version of Izzy's world and the profound confusion that her grand stroke causes and the delivery of this beat through gameplay through the letters falling away is an eloquent expression of that meaning Izzy's world is dramatically disrupted so finally was a localization system as you can see here even a single word can be quite a different length in different languages which poses quite a problem for us in the game when even changing a word by a couple of letters can break a level so when one of our original programmers started with us Audrey prophet one of her first tasks was to come up with a scaling collision box that adjusts automatically based on the length of the text because we were finding we were spending hours tuning things then we would change the words and you'd have to go back and redo it say this saved us a lot of time

another one of the programmers on the team can Bianco is the one who writes the smart localization system so this allows us to make changes on a per language basis so we can see here that we can switch between the languages on the fly and you can see some of the different problems we've got of sometimes like here in Spanish some of the draggable words are appearing over the text on the page and then in other languages like German the three draggable words aren't appearing on a single line like they should be but the system allows us to move all those around and change it per language and then save that out this is a localization spread spreadsheet here so you can see the the different languages down the bottom and if we zoom in you can see that we use different parentheses to denote different types of

words so the localizers can just move these around and then the game will automatically pick it up and so if we needed more or less interactive words in a different language or they needed to be a different place in the sentence they can easily do that so here we've got the square brackets to noting draggable word and curly brackets denote seeing a blue word that's one of our trigger words that causes something to happen when you stand on it so we can see this system in action here by dragging one of our smart sentence prefabs into the scene and then you literally just paste the text tag in and it Auto populates it with all the different types of words and so that that saves us a lot of time and it makes it a lot more doable for translating the the game to lots of different languages because with it being a word based game

it makes a big impact for people if they can play it in their own language to summarize we've used text in unusual ways to form word based gameplay through metaphors and careful planning but with puzzles that can still be translated to different languages but ours isn't the first or only way of doing this this slider wedge takes no water load I think that's gonna cut you there again so perhaps you might like to try using gameplay or metaphors or using text to provide an unusual mechanic for your next project and lost words is going to be out later this year thanks very much next yes it's tiny X short talking about boyfriend dungeon [Music]

so you might know me as the captain of kid fox games we recently announced we're also publishing Dwarf Fortress which is its own narrative innovation I'm not talking about today yeah but yeah today I'm gonna be talking my boyfriend engine who here knows about boyfriend engine most of you but not everybody so I'm just gonna give a very quick overview it is a dungeon crawler it's an action RPG where you beat up monsters and take their loot as you do trying to get deeper in the dungeon but then when you find weapons they turn into beautiful people and you date them to level them up and make them more powerful it's great but the problem is how do you actually tell this story how do you tell a story between two genres with very different narratives embedded in their mechanics dungeons are about violence they're about conflict they're about power dating is about intimacy and Trust and we honestly weren't sure other

than putting in some cute people at first how to make these things work together there have been many games in the past that have tried a few different things but we really wanted to have the most aligned story with the underlying mechanics right like that's the dream of a narrative designer so first we try to do the best practices we're like okay what are our design pillars so you're like okay romance yes fantasy yes and we thought maybe playful would help bring them together from a philosophical perspective if it's a you know consensual and safe to experiment and it's quick and surprising like all of that can kind of blend together romance and then the fantasy of becoming more powerful while also becoming more attractive and more confident and we did feel like we were getting somewhere when we came up we realized that almost every romance novel has the explicit theme of being stronger together like that sounds both like a dungeon kind of theme and a

dating kind of theme right like that's great but what do you actually do with that like you have these design pillars and that's cool I can review all my scenes and I can review all my dialogue and make sure that my characters are all emphasizing all this theme but what are the actual mechanics behind this and so like as a game designer my first instinct was to take the stuff from one half that you get you know obviously you build power in the dungeon and you build love in the dates and that's great you take them into each other um it didn't actually work that way and I'm gonna explain why so the first thing we did was we were looking at how to get money from the dungeons and then spend them on dates that makes logical sense unfortunately when you try to shoehorn in a weird escalating prices I mean it's not always this bad like sometimes it makes a little more sense but honestly the idea that when you start dating it's like here's five dollars and then okay I'm not going on date six without $300 it does end up a

bit strange like it doesn't really fit emotionally um so that was a that was a no-go but then we were thinking okay maybe we can take dates into the dungeons maybe we can somehow just just push them together and and that worked a little bit better we did end up having little hangouts you can see in our teasers where if you're running around the dungeon you'll come across these special points where you can you can learn a little bit more about the weapon you're wielding they'll like transform and be like hey what's up the problem is that this doesn't really support um full-on dates because when you're in dungeon mode emotionally you're like an adrenaline high and unless we spent a lot of time working on the pacing of the dungeons to support this you're just mentally not in the brain space to sit and read a long amount of text so having little hangouts as we call them we're great it had you remind and reminded you that your weapon was a person and they were dating you but also for the longer dates that just wasn't going to work so we still have the the main plot dates outside the dungeon when you're like in

calm reading mode so then we're thinking well maybe somehow we should figure out a way for your weapons to express themselves even during combat thankfully other games have paved the way for this so it was kind of easy when looking around to see okay like yeah your weapon can comment on the different things that you see whether it's picking up loot or attacking monsters or getting attacked or dying or whatever your weapon can be there and and having the different weapons respond in different ways to that like some some of the weapons are a little more nurturing some of them are a little more edgy yeah sorry it's hard to resist so yeah that was great we call them dungeon comments and they're they're pretty high bang for buck there and then we started thinking how do we do it the other way how do we how do we shove the the dungeons into the dating like well maybe you find new characters in the dungeon yep you find weapons they turn into people that works great okay cool that's great but what if what if dialogue choices gave you combat stats that would

make sense right like maybe when someone flirts with you it's like if you aggressively flirt back you get attack points and if you are a little bit shy you get defense points and if you're funny you get luck points all of that is very on theme like you're getting stronger together it's great the problem is that whether or not you show so we started out by showing the stats that you would definitely get an attack by doing this you definitely gonna defense by doing this and the problem is that at best people felt conflicted they think well what I really want to do is flirt back but I really need some more defense and you know you'd think that would be an interesting decision it's actually just a difficult decision and there is a difference because not all difficult decisions are interesting so for example to make this less explicit conflict we tried hiding the stats our consultant Christine love predicted this would result in actually more frustration

because what would happen is people would play through find out what stat they got and be like screw you guys I'm doing that again because I need a defense point thank you very much and they did in fact be compelled to replay it and I doubted her very briefly and did one play test and never again so we removed all the combat stats and essentially the problem was that by providing an extrinsic arbitrary reward we were absolutely undermining the value of the intrinsic reward when you want to flirt with someone you don't want the game telling you to think about something else you're the intrinsic pleasure flirting with a cute dagger is untouchable you know like you shouldn't be messing with that with your plus-one attacking your plus-one depends that is only as valuable as the game says it is and you feel a little bit helpless when the extrinsic rewards are in your face so we took that out you do actually still get some points like if you're dating the dagger generally you'll get one kind of point if you're dating this

other weapon you'll generally get a different kind of point but by divorcing it from the individual dialogue choices it feels a lot more meaningful that you are getting stronger together but not because you're saying one thing or saying a different thing it's because you're spending time and then maybe the easiest one of all was trying to think of well how do you improve combat through intimacy and that is every every plot point with a different weapon you get to love rank up and you choose your skill tree and that's great you definitely get stronger together that way so that was great and what we learned through all of these patterns was rather than taking the power from dungeons and using them in dating using love from dating and dungeons it's actually the opposite the power comes from dating and the love comes from dungeons so what ends up happening is that while you're playing one half of the game one genre of the game you are always thinking about the other half and it unites them mentally and emotionally it was infinitely more satisfying so

then we had a final problem to solve which is the marketing evil side of what if we make this game and nobody wants it originally boyfriend engine was actually about astrological signs we designed characters that would be paired and our audience on Steam who liked dungeon crawlers and dating Sims seem to want something else this was March 2017 and they all seem to have something in common it's worth noting mobile games are much healthier in this respect but are we fundamentally had a crisis of how do we make random Steam gamer number 5 less alienated by him I mean even they're not actively sexualized all the time but they're still pretty sexy and we have some lovely women but they're also a pure diversity was not going to solve the problem because at the end of the day they are not this right but we did turn up a few exceptions there were a few oddball dating Sims they were selling

equally well if not better and at the end of the day we found that people were just less ready to be alienated if they were laughing and in fact they didn't even see this as a deceptive trick if they're willing to engage in something as a joke and if it's sufficiently entertaining they'll actually stay a little bit more open-minded so what we do is we take the discomfort and you add in a little bit of absurdity and it's a little bit of a judo throw of somebody who's on the defensive so we intentionally made the premise more absurd we took we are like astrological signs not silly enough and so when the idea of weapons turning into people was there yes that is the way because when they're laughing then we have them so that's our main strategy and how to make our hybrid work even on its sometimes contentious platform like steam which has luck thank you

yeah okay next up is Alan Turner talking about when rivers were trails Columbia Alberta GRP University Alan Turner mallacoota nama sapa John T which the Kapisa not pay th Ave introduce myself in the culture to you all and address any of my relatives are out there and say thank you for being here and thank you for the starting to speak I'm here by request of a relative Elizabeth lap and say to talk about a game that she designed and directed funded by the Indian land tenure foundation with the assistance of myself as a game designer and writer and this is the assistance of a multitude of native writers and voices the game is an ecology of narratives

about a fictional character surviving a real world event its form takes inspiration from the Oregon Trail how many of you are familiar with Oregon Trail yeah okay and where they where the water tastes like wine anybody familiar with this so our result is a game called winning rivers or trails and we had a big challenge ahead of us because this is a game about native experience right it's a game about it is anyone here familiar with the allotment act no okay so the allotment act was a thing that happened in 1887 it's also called the Dawes Act and what it basically did was it took a bunch of reservation lands and realized that that land saying some of this were giving back to native peoples in other parts so we're gonna open up to settlers to come in and like reclaim this thing and and do all this adds agricultural stuff we're gonna let the new USB agricultural where everyone's gonna be happy it didn't work out that way which what we wound up having was a

bunch of Oh moved a bunch of settlers who are coming in to native territories and they were basically running chasing natives off killing the natives I'm taking that land there are processes by which if a new person died in certain ways then that land can be moved on over to a non-native person so he wanted to share that experience cause it's something you'll hear about in history books yeah but it's something that was very real experience for Anishinabe people in the area so this is the game okay and so you can see the obvious relationship with where the water tastes like wine and then we have lots of these little mini games and these these are these are survival minigames or hunting minigames or fishing minigames or travel minigames but they're all being seen for the point of view of the of the character plane so for instance with fishing and hunting you can't fish and

hunt all day long right it's you have a slim amount of resources but you actually aren't there to kind of fill your gullet with as much stuff as you can you're there to kind of work towards what's necessary for your own survival this is also a free game that's available on each IO anyone can download this oriented towards an educational market so our big challenge with when rivers or trails was how can a game with indigenous themes in sight inside how can a game with the indigenous themes include culturally informed nearly game design that is how do we make a game about natives for natives that helps you feel like you're experiencing things through a need of Linz as opposed to what normally happens are this challenge this there's a representational issue right typically what you get when you get natives in games so you get a game about native peoples you should get

something like this right we get characters like night wolf Tyler Tarak all of which are someone saying hey we included a native person there's a native character in this in this game is awesome look how cool they are look how hot she is look how hot he is they're all if everyone's hyper masculine hyper sexualized but they have this problem that the they fulfill culmination of stereotypes and called laser fantasies about what native peoples are as opposed to speaking of all toys the needed experience so what we wanted to have is that a game where we engage with and neither person you're actually engaging with unneeded persons right so this this has to be a meaningful interaction with the character where you're learning something about them as people not only in terms of like what the tribe is but how they exist in the world how they exist in relation to the people around them so there's this process that we built up which is all about listening gifting and helping that is you meet someone and culturally the inclination is somehow another to share and be

thankful for that interaction so these are some screens that they show this in process so one of the first things you'll notice in these is that we're using language and everything that we do so when you meet the character that character is speaking to you in the nisshin lobby there are some places where you meet people who are Lakota some Cree some in a few other different tribal groups and you agreed by them in their language and they talk to you on and off in the language and in English and that's and there's no if there sometimes we we translate it and sometimes we don't just to get people in the habit of actually trying to verbalize and internalized some of that language experience so there is this all there's also this process where the choices you are engaging are relevant to the community so that it's not just you walking up with a with a big inventory of stuff right your inventory doesn't matter what it's about is that you're managing abundance you come into a space and

there are people you're engaging with these lack of Bunyan's you have abundance and you give some of your acquaintances to them and it's not about the particulars of it right it's not about I have you know X number of these things and I'm gonna give you X number these things and so and then once you have done whatever give gifting to them there's typically a gifting back so when the other things we're going to include this idea that we want to recognize a person story as part of their abundance so sometimes is not just I'm giving them food you're giving them medicine it's also giving them information about where you've been who you are what your family is who you related to because sometimes the information is entertaining entertaining sometimes that information is is educational they're letting them know what's coming letting to know if there's Indian agents in the area letting them know we're animals you come across so speaking of animals we had a secondary challenger in that this is this is a game of like I says narrative ecologies with ecology is also natural ecology is mattering this you know you are as a

person someone who's been your lives have been disrupted by an invasive species right there there's another group that's come in and it's just completely terrorizing how your world works and you're moving out and you're engaging with other species and you're causing disruptions yourself so we wanted to include indigenous science in this process so it's not just talking to people it's also engaging nature but there's there's a second there just like the issue of representation I talked about before there's a second issue of when people think of indigenous peoples anything of nature this thing happens where folks start to anthem anthropomorphize the characters and it becomes all about these spare relationships and I've had people come to me and say stuff like you know I I was going down the road and a crow came and land on their own in front of me what does that mean Allen your native and like it means that you're walking down the road and the crow was going somewhere and it stopped and they could care less about you so so this so to kind of break this idea of like we're

all kinda hanging out you know in the forest hugging raccoons sing songs everything's happy we wanted to be when it's a create an education experience that they kind of didn't allow for that so what we wound up with was this this space where animals are being communicated with and honored in the same way that we dealt with humans we dealing with animals that way everything is situational and there wasn't ever really a right way to engage with things but what we did what we did not want was for you for animals be talking heads we didn't want them to be stereotypes we didn't go back in the old tropes so the the kind of interactions were created allowed for this this interesting range one thing that we're doing is making sure you're having counters with animals that aren't around anymore so these are some bighorn sheep the old bighorn sheep which were we're hunted in Rome in the area were wiped out towards the end of the of the 1800s and replaced by other bighorn

sheep they're brought in from Europe so what we have now isn't the same our Nassim animals were there also there's this idea that sometimes you would observe and listen sometimes he would help the animals sometimes you would hinder and it wasn't obvious what that what the right choice was in that situation your engagement with nature fit back into a resource called well-being which is about your relationship with your ecology in as much and much of same way that honor with humans is what your relationship with that social ecology sometimes the things you came across were funny funny moments that that were there there have an emotional salve or like all the terrible stuff is happening along the way and sometimes they're just somber and distressing moments they showed you how much help how so many things are being displaced and how unforgiving nature is so the biggest solution that we came across in trying to solve all these problems was to engage indigenous voices so the the the Indian land tenure Foundation which is a an amalgamation of

tribal groups in and on the west coast funded this but what we did was he reached out to indigenous peoples and gods in to participate in the storytelling the populate of the work we sought writers who were from the affected areas and tribes explaining the near the boundaries and invited them to write from experience of self family and tribe more importantly this collaboration was to result in something meant to give back and better the overall experience of native the kids in school we were in mining the community the communities for something we can make a profit on we were collaborating with something that would help us share our knowings and help us to be more seen in the world around us so thank you next we have Strix Beltran who's going to talk about blue blue blue be its bride okay hello good morning everyone

and thanks for joining us for the first talk of the day this is my first narrative summit talk ever so I'm very excited to share this with you oh yeah so just a quick content warning this talk includes discussion of violence to women so you are we're so good morning folks my name is strikes I'm an award-winning narrative designer for both analog and videogames and I'm currently a project narrative director at hidden paths entertainment in Seattle I'm a trained mythologist and the focus of my master's degree was on the intersection between mythology psychology and play it's fascinating stuff so today I'm going to be talking to you about Bluebeard's Bride and harnessing the power of Union death psychology to make really awesome games I'm just curious does anyone here know about Bluebeard's Bride okay there's

some people awesome you played D&D - I know it okay so what is Bluebeard's Bride Bluebeard's bride is a game that I co designed with two other women Sarah Richardson and Marissa Kelly we developed it over the course of two years and took it to Kickstarter with a $5,000 funding goal the Kickstarter raised one hundred and thirty thousand dollars the game went on to be nominated for a handful of awards and came away with in decades Grand Jury Prize in 2018 as well as winning the IGN's best art category and game of the year so we're very proud so bluebirds bride is a feminine horror tabletop role-playing game based off of the original fairy tale of a young woman who marries a mysterious man with a string of missing wives who came before her is a game about it's a game for five players and facilitator and it takes about four to six hours to play it's a one shot meaning that the game ends in a single session and you can replay it again with for a very different feel and outcomes by choosing different

characters and moves so here's the catch the players all play the same person the bride now if you're familiar with the tale Bluebeard you know that the marriage is doomed Bluebeard sets up a psychological trap for his new wife by saying she can go into any room in the castle that she wants save one and when she does he murders her and sticks her in a closet so each of these players play a character that is an aspect of the bride's psyche we call them sisters but if you are familiar with you in depth psychology you'll recognize them as complexes and we'll talk about those in a minute so together they explore Bluebeard's Castle trying to decide if it's he's a good guy or if the bride should try to get out of there and at the end they're invariably drawn to a confrontation where the final room and spoilers nothing good happens so the challenge in a game of feminine horror where all the players and have it

the same body how do we empower them to embrace each other and what scares them most the challenge is actually a really big one because this is not a game about defeating the horror there is no defeating the horror this is a game about leaning into being scared and being vulnerable and trying to survive when you have no power so how do we accomplish this with the people of various genders sitting around the table some of whom are going to take to this like fish to water and others who maybe have no lived experiences to access and most importantly how do we make this fun so archetypes and more importantly complexes because of my training we were able to apply a deep mastery of archetypes and union psychology to narrative design to get us to a place that works hopefully most of you are familiar with archetypes but I'll give you the rundown anyway archetypes are personality patterns that our minds recognize almost universally there are

the composites the pathways to understanding loaded with an entire cultures interpretation and knowledge of certain way of being archetypes I reckon employees recognizable roles in our social world the mother the sage the lover and so on you should think of archetypes like a zip file your brain can read unconsciously even if you specifically don't know what it means to be a mother engaging with a mother archetype unfolds an understanding for you that is also relatable to everyone around you in games archetypes are a means of transferring vast quantities of information to players without overburdening them for Bluebeard's bride we use our expertise to burrow down a layer deeper than simple archetypes archetypes can also represent pieces of a single person within us all as an array of archetypes averring strengths and qualities the archetypes themselves remain pure in root but there's layers

of lived experiences that kind of stick to them can I have like gum on a shoe and that's what a complex is so on top of the mother archetype you've got maybe the mother martyr who is the mother who's like I do everything for you why don't you love me some of you have experienced that right and these complexes are kind of with you throughout your life for a better or worse they are inherently imperfect if you've ever had an argument with yourself in your own head think of it as your complexes having a go at each other for bluebirds bride we picked some of the archetypes and attached complexes most relevant to women as the basis for each of our characters the mother the Virgin the witch the femme fatale and the Animus so let's take a brief look at union structure of self I know it looks really scary as a helpful starting place

for our type of work this diagram is use map of the psyche at the top is the outer world or persona and ego are closest to the surface then we move down and you see the shadow and the inner world those are the unconscious or only semi-conscious parts of ourselves you'll notice that the self contains the whole of all of these things in blue beards bride the sisters have to fluidly navigate both the inner world of the bride's mind and the outer world of the castle we specifically built mechanics into the game to accomplish this you can throw in as many paragraphs of exposition or dialogue as you want at a player but it won't stick unless a player has a way to engage or embody it directly we built specific mechanics around bringing a sister to the forefront the persona this is the rule that operates with and around the outer world a sister gets to occupy the bride's persona and use an extra set of moves oriented towards the outer world if she possesses a wedding

ring that passes around the table only one sister can have the ring at a time so as an example the Virgin currently possesses the ring so she is able to call on a castle servant for help the interaction goes badly though as a servant tries to seduce the virgin overwhelmed the virgin gives up the ring to the femme fatale and she takes over while the virgin withdrawals from the sticky mess that she got the bride into likewise their mechanics built around sublimating a sister into the shadow a place of exile deep within the psyche if a sister becomes too wounded she shatters and becoming a terrible disordered like disoriented version of herself she's no longer to make any of the moves she could before she can only help the facilitator antagonize the other sisters until the end of the game which by the way is really fun again giving players access to archetypes and complexes through ER mechanics was key to making our game work to get players to engage at the deep level of complexes

right not just archetypes we gave each sister three faces to choose from so for thinking about it structurally a sister is an archetype and the face is a complex at the start of the game each player chooses which sister to play and then one face on the sisters character sheet the face is an extra move that they can use throughout the game to reinforce the theme of their complex in the example we're looking at here the mother has three phases the bear the kingmaker and the martyr each is a specific flavor of the mother archetype and each with its own hangups the bear protects one sister at the cost of injuring another the kingmaker heals herself by giving her power over two men the the martyr hurts herself double and returned for healing another sister so an example of this in play would be a player has chosen the mother and decides to go with the martyr face during play a horror sets itself upon the witch about to enter her grievously the mother steps in and uses the martyr move to protect the

witch but gets twice as hurt in return and shatters pouf like a mother she wanted to protect her own but caustically in an unsustainable way that wasn't even asked for now she's shattered she's a pale lost image of herself forever wailing at the witch and the others that she was such a good mother she'd do anything for her babies why don't they appreciate her we took pains to ensure that each face was a recognizable extension of the archetype to wrap up we deployed archetypes and their accompanying complexes as character structures and play mechanics to evoke a specific experience feminine [ __ ] we used archetypes a shorthand convey to players complex character information and build pathways for players to more authentically occupy certain modes of being this leads to a deep shared emotional experience for players that keeps them coming back for more there are many ways you can adapt this approach to your own work you can treat

your ensemble casts like an extension of your main character think of them as complexes turned outward so again going beyond the original archetype into a complex this will create a cohesive cast that bounces out each other Spurs organic action and naturally draws out character growth or the court over the course of the game bring an archetype or complex to life by making it into an actual mechanic and build awareness for your main character and how they're moving between their inner and outer worlds how would that change gameplay and finally explore what archetypes and groupings of archetypes feel novel new fresh there's no reason to tread the same ground you can make an innovative cutting-edge game by exploring archetypes that have not historically been engaged with in games if you'd like to check the game out you can find our publishers website listed here you can find me on the web or on my site on Twitter I'm going to put a link on Twitter for a download of these slides and they have extra notes and links to articles and resources so check it out

thanks for your time today ok finally we have Dave Gilbert talking about unev odd I was gonna ask if some of you had played it but I guess that answers my question ok so hello my name is Dave Gilbert I am the founder creative director at watchit eye games we've been around since 2006 and specialized in narrative heavy adventure type games we're known for Shiva the Blackwell series Gemini true primordia Tecna Babylon shard light and others that I'm sure I'm forgetting offhand but today I'm here to talk about unev odd and for those of you who have not played it here is a quick trailer which isn't coming up just click it these are dangerous times dark forces are coming

we are not dealing with a mindless spirit bent on chaos and destruction time is closing in around us I can only hope we are not too late [Music] we stand against chaos sworn to protect the innocent from those who would do them all we're a team the wall against the darkness protectors of the mundane world supernatural threats have risen and for the first time in decades we need to fill our ranks to fight use the skills of your chosen team members to help you defeat those who work in the shadows I think your definition of impossible is about to change welcome to the UH neva ah no okay

so the quick elevator pitch is at it's an urban fantasy adventure game with the narrative structure of a party based RPG which is a boring and unsexy way of saying that I basically cribbing the old Bioware style from the mid-2000s it's basically the old style Bioware RPG narrative structure but without the combat you progress through the game vs series of missions and for each mission you have a pool of characters that you can join that can join you on your adventure and you can choose two of them at any time out of a pool of these four so this gameplay be mechanic will be familiar obviously to anyone who played nicely Old Republic or Dragon Age and Mass Effect but instead of changing your tactics in combat situations they change how you solve puzzles and get through obstacles and problems in the game world so the challenge here in creating this game was to keep the focus entirely on

these four characters they were the draw we needed to keep the focus on them every part of every mission needed to reinforce the relationship between you and them and with each other and in order to do this I really needed to have a very concrete understanding of who these characters were and not just in terms of their backstory and things like that but I needed to approach it from what I call a high and low level perspective and by high level I mean the their overall feel the the feeling I want you to get from these characters their personalities their backstories the the filter that they see the world through you go oh can use the arrow keys awesome this is Madonna for example she is aged in sores woman who is several centuries old she sees the world through a filter of what used to be there she will look at a street corner this game takes place in New York so look at a street corner and remember a tree she

used to climb that was there 200 years ago or what supernatural creatures existed do not anymore this guy his name is Eli he is a mage who came into his power very late in life he had to leave his family and career behind so he tends to look at the world through what he's lost and what he used to be Logan is a spirit medium who can talk to ghosts he is a recovering addict so he tends to look at the world through he doesn't look at everything in relation to how it can either help or hurt his recovery this is Vicki she's a disgraced police officer from a large family and she typically divides the world into law abiders and criminals very black and white so I'm obviously paraphrasing there's more of these characters than that but these are the the broad experiences and point of views that each character brings to their various conversations and interactions that they have with you they have with you various NPCs and each other I wanted to make you

feel like you are hanging out with friends and getting to know them and that's all well and good but that's just a that's just a story so I needed to also approach it from a low level perspective and by that I mean the nitty gritty details what do these characters actually do from a gameplay perspective how do they help you solve problems and help you progress through the game I knew that every mission would play out slightly differently depending on who you brought with you and every character needed to bring something different to the table I really wanted each combination to be unique and interesting so Madonna here is the agile and athletic one who can climb to places that none of the other characters can like this ledge Eli can set stuff on fire and has a power to read or look at anything that was consumed by a flame Vicki is a former cop knows every police officer in the city can get information she wouldn't get otherwise or that you wouldn't get

otherwise and Logan being a spirit medium can talk to ghosts so if you see a ghost in any scene he can talk to that ghost and you can get more information that way if you don't have Logan the ghost just kind of wails at you so my intent here was for these two tiers the high and low level to kind of work together in tandem to make every character combination unique and fun an interesting experience but at the same time I wanted you to see the potential alternate paths that you could have taken and if you didn't bring Vicky and you see a police officer you might think oh you know if I brought Vicky I could talk to that cop and things would play out a little differently and overall I think I did a good job with this not every player loved every character they were but there were no characters that were universally loved by everyone or hated by everyone and the game was very specifically designed so you can pick and choose your favorites for example if

you see a high ledge and mandanas not there you might wonder if she could have gotten up there the hope being that you don't want to replay the game and see what would happen if you took another character combination theoretically what I did not expect was that the players when the players saw a ghost and they did not have Logan they got very frustrated and very annoyed if they saw this ledge and didn't have Montana they didn't care so much they knew that there were other paths but they really wanted to talk to that ghost and so what ended up happening was they inevitably brought Logan with them on every mission thereafter so he was the probably most chosen character of them all so you know you're welcome Logan so that mean less than that I learned from all this is that it's very important to have a high level design goal mine was that I wanted you to like these characters so every

low level design decision I made was in support of that high level goal and without that I would have been lost in the weeds this gave me the direction and focus that I really needed to get through this project and get it done otherwise I would have gotten very overwhelmed with all the all the alternate paths and everything so this really helped keep me focused that high level goal of that this is what I want the game to feel like and this is what I want people to get from so I'm gonna focus on that and whenever I was lost I would just have to remember that and that would kind of steer me back to where I needed to be anyway I'm gonna close with a bit of a plug an avowed has been nominated for an IG F award this year in the category thank you in the category of excellence in narrative so if you're interested in seeing more or playing a bit of the game you can check it out on the show floor later in the week thank you very much [Applause]

all right so we had quite a big variety of games I think this might be the one session where you could hear about you know Pocahontas and young and you can see a unity editor screen too so now we're going to give you a few takeaways you know what other kinds of things that we've learned from all these very very variety games that we saw today so the first one has to do with role-playing games kind of piggybacking on what Dave was just talking about can we have role-playing game elements without combat well yeah of course RPGs have many mechanics beyond fighting we can create and maintain relationships we can have morality systems we have resource management we have character growth just to name it a few stats can also be used in expressive ways beyond how strong or

Dexter as your character is we can also use stats to keep track of how the player relates with other characters in the world of our game there's a great wealth of human dramatic and emotional mechanics players are already familiar with through our BG's there are many different ways in which to interact with the world beyond attacking it destroying it and trying to prevail and it's important to remember that even the smallest things are storytelling so the simplest classic mechanics can be leveraged for any kind of story you want to tell recontextualizing everyday mechanics can be incredibly meaningful so the simple act of moving and care or up and down and a platformer can be a rich metaphor that dramatizes emotional experience an action as simple as lying to someone can have staggering impact casual conversations between NPCs can help you get to know them better and know how they'll behave in certain situations if you use your tools cleverly it can have epic ah you can have the same epic consequence of a boss

fight but for cheaper dev cost also do your homework just because we are familiar with basic strategies of storytelling that some makers into experts on every single topic out there and just going to the Wikipedia article is not research just you know the world is bigger than Wikipedia Wikipedia it's pretty cool but that's only the starting point so you know do things like going to library they exist they're there in the world if you're writing about a place and you can afford it try to visit it you know meet the people there if you are writing about a culture talk to people belonging to that culture directly you know that's good to us or hire them as consultants if you can afford it or even writers please you know that's how we bring diversity into games carelessly applied story elements you know especially those that are drawn from deep cultural traditions can make

your game boring and derivative at best and toxic and stereotypical at worst and of course embrace being a smuggler so audiences will be open to new things if you're willing to meet them halfway but that doesn't mean you have to compromise your values so using humor to disarm people and endear them can strength and not undercut the subject-matter of your story because in addition to sort of getting people on board it also makes characters feel more human and real and resorting to the conventions of genres like urban fantasy or platformers can help us connect with audiences but also give them tough decisions to make and intimate stories that touch them part thank you very much for coming we're not going to have Q&A we don't have enough time but we all meet you at the wrap-up room down the hall if you have questions and you want to follow up with any of the speakers or ourselves thanks again [Applause]