The Secret Lives of NPCs: 'Wayward Strand'

[Music] thank you hi everyone Welcome to The Secret Lives of NPCs my name is Georgia Simmons and I'm Jason Becker and we are The Narrative co-directors of ghost pattern which is a studio that's based in nam or Melbourne in Australia thank you um so to start uh Wayward strand was made on the landsbee where we're injury and put our own people of the colon Nation uh and is set on our own country and we pay our respects to war injury and put our own Elders past and present um we also wanted to acknowledge that we're all meeting on the unseated lands of the remote alone people and to pay our respects to the ancestors elders and relatives of the Romantic Community we

encourage you to visit that link remoteish.org where you can find out more about the community as well as donate and also to form relationships with First Nation groups in your own communities as part of your game development process all right so our talk today focuses on our Studio's debut title Wayward strand which we'll tell you a bit more about in a minute in particular we'll be telling you about the process of developing our game's unique real-time narrative structure in Wayward strand no matter where the player is all NPCs are carrying out their own narratives in their own time this abundance of characters and stories creates a rich world for the players to explore yeah um like we hear Irvin Irving from players that way with strand feels transported to um it doesn't feel like you're playing through a narrative it feels like you've been kind of dropped into an alternative world uh and we think a big part of that

is how we designed and developed our NPCs their relationships and each of their Journeys through the game uh and that's why we wanted to talk about our presets we'll Begin by giving you a bit more context about the game itself as well as the team who made it we'll talk about the values of our studio and how they shape the game we'll talk a bit about the consultation we did to flesh out our characters then we'll get into some technical and design details of the tools we used for plotting the simultaneous stories of the game in talking through that process we'll explore a few snags we came across in terms of finding narrative interest in the game uh we'll then talk about how we brought the narrative to life through the realization and implementation of all aspects of the game and because this is an industry event and some of you are probably on the company dime will make sure we finish with some lessons that we learned along the way that we hope will be useful for you as well um so that's what to expect in what order and it all looks very ordered and laid out perhaps a little too much so so we wanted to show you this some of you may recognize this it's a page from the

book we're going on a bear hunt by Michael Rosen now bears are living creatures and they should never be hunted so just ignore the right hand side focus on the left hand side um it says we can't go over it we can't go under it oh no we have to go through it if it seems like we know anything about developing a real-time narrative game now just rest assured that we didn't used to we used to know nothing this is a really challenging game to make you know we couldn't go over it there were no other games that were like it enough that we could just read skin we couldn't go under it it's just not the kind of game that you can shortcut in any way we had to go through it to make this game we had to look way outside of games for inspiration we had to look to music and literature and who we were as people and our nation's history and we had to write our dialogue like it was an immersive theater show and then record it like it was a film and this meant that all the processes we'll talk about today were sort of MacGyver together with string and tape and optimism um but the only way that we were able to

do this was by going through it and we encourage you to do the same if you've got a narrative game idea and you're at the start of your Dev Journey don't wait until you know how to do it just go through it the trailer for the game in question so you're excited after all as if oh well my mistake now your job is to go to each of the patients rooms and spend some time with them you've got that yep the names Esther what's yours um Casey um Casey very original now if you'll excuse me I've got to go solve a mystery about a goat is this you oh yes that's me and the family would you like some company of course be warned I am riding up a storm at the moment you were in the wall always came and uh and myself I'm doing work experience deadly well

working up here is an experience all right now as you know my room happens to be beside the nurses station you were listening in on them got the picture we are to have a visitor something's fishy if you ask me I exhort you all to follow her every command as we prepare for tomorrow you both know the drill here regardless of what's going on patience first Dr Bouchard what are you here for time to turn me sunny side up you think I'm trying to kill you Fox Glove and slipping it down the dumb waiter death by a thousand slurps director Mr Paddy rule I have seen that you talk I will speak with him about your case how are you finding your time on the ship I hear people talk about things but

I'm not sure what they're on about that sounds a bit like the life of an older person nobody explains to us what's going on we just have to piece it together as best we can [Music] all right wow you're so nice thank you um so Wayward strand is as I said our debut title it's a narrative game set in Regional Australia in 1978 and you play as you saw as Casey who's a 14 year old girl whose mother is the head nurse of a hospital which just happens to be on an Airship that's suspended in the clouds above your small Regional town it's the summer holidays and your mum can't find anyone to look after you for a couple days so you go with her up to the hospital and she gives you the job of spending time with the patients in the Aged care Ward keeping them company and helping them out with anything that they need so that's the setup for our real-time narrative game three days as a

teenager talking to the residents of this floating Hospital getting to know them getting a brief glimpse into their lives the game's about a four hour round trip and is fully voiced by a cast of 15 superb actors many people contributed to the making of this game and we always like to highlight this we find that the best ideas are found in the space between us and as you'll hear throughout the talk Jason and I are definitely not the authors of this game especially not when it comes to the details of the stories where just the people who happen to write it down of the 33 fine people you saw on the slide before the ones on screen now formed the core team so these are the people who were along for long sections of the development Journey or who directed significant parts of its development as you may have noticed on the other slide our team does come from outside of games that's both in terms of who we are as non-binary people women people of color neurodiverse people new parents people from working class backgrounds and it's also in terms of our professional backgrounds some of us have come to video games from theater or

music or Comics or v-tubing and what this means is that although we all love to play video games we know that video games are not made by us about us or for us all that often when people like us appear in games it's often as NPCs with a few repeating lines of dialogue a quest to give and maybe a crush on the player character and this has a deep and conscious impact on the kinds of games that we feel compelled to make Wayward strand is a game that strips back player agency and gives space and power to the NPCs the gameplay is geared towards listening and caring for them rather than enacting your own desires upon them and this is deeply informed by who we are as a team and our lived experience so that's the team and this is us the narrative team so my focus was squarely on narrative including uh voice over Direction and casting and Jason does everything except art so Jason comes from a lot of programming

experience but before this game had only ever really dabbled in writing um I come from a lot of writing experience particularly in the theater but had not even really dabbled in video games I mean I played Portal 2 on my MacBook with my trackpad but um nothing that you could be considered you know actually making a digital game uh Jason and I found very quickly though that we were a really good team uh the disparity of a professional backgrounds meant that we brought different strengths to the team but we're also really deeply curious about each other's work so we were able and open to learn from each other throughout the process it's also a thing that Russell who was on that slide who mainly worked on programming throughout the game was deeply involved in the ideation of the game so a lot of the character ideas and Broad brush Strokes plots come from him as well as from Jason oh yeah uh so our initial Inspirations for Wayward strand came from like our personal relationships with older people in our lives stories that they've told or experiences that we shared with them

um and we thought that older people's lives were really interesting to explore and have players think about and to have represented within media like outside of the cookie cutaway that a lot of old people are represented as like mentors or sources of knowledge or um yeah people that give you a sword or whatever instead we wanted to prevent uh present them with full lives in in the present moment um yeah so Wayward strand takes place across three in-game days um and all characters more or less live out those three days within view of the player um this allowed us to tell stories where the rhythms of of daily life are a critical element of the stories uh unlike other media where a character has to have like a cinematic moment of realization or a moment of conflict that drives the story forward uh we could represent how stories and events uh take place more in real life so you know

messily and fits and starts where even amongst like other things that are happening in your life uh with important things sometimes taking place outside of the exciting cinematic moments um like a kind of funny example of this is for for a long time we're aiming to get uh like toilets into the game and I've had and have each of the characters schedules uh like bathroom schedule interact with each of their stories uh sorry maybe a character misses hearing a critical thing because they went to the toilet or maybe somebody excuses yourself when you're spending time with them just because nature called uh like but they could do that without any big narrative consequence sometimes um it's a way to bring in the feel of like reality uh that's quite unique to this real-time storytelling format um because if somebody's on the toilet in a movie that's because maybe it's a comedy or maybe they're about to be strangled by James Bond um shout out to objectively the best on Ruby gold and I but yeah exactly thank

you very much but you're not going to have a heartfelt environment with a character happen just after they've gone to the bathroom in a movie for no reason uh but we do have those heartfelt post bathroom moments in real life uh and that just never gets reflected in media because you have this limited linear plane on which to work and the juxtaposition uh just has a different meaning when it's been placed there for you by a director or a Creator in a deliberate way as opposed to in this kind of semi kind of uh Dynamic way that we have where if that happened it would just happen within the game it's not necessarily part of our plan yeah so I'll talk a little now about our process of consultation for fleshing out our characters our game has characters with a really broad range of lived experience so we have many Age characters of course um many of whom are experiencing chronic illness as well as queer characters a

First Nations character healthcare workers and given that the point of our game as we've been mentioning was to show the richness of these characters lives it was important to us that we engage in consultation right from the start and that we honored these relationships through to the end of our development Journey one of the first teams that we started working with on consultation was the bonnarong land Council and I'm going to focus on this consultation as a bit of a case study for how we engaged in consultation this was a really special relationship that we maintained throughout the entire life cycle of the development of the game the bonnarong land Council just for some context is the traditional owner group representing the First Peoples of the area of regional Victoria where Wayward strand is set um as soon as we agreed to make this game together we got in touch with the bonnarong land Council and we went and had a first meeting with them we opened up questions about locations where the game could be set any landmarks with cultural significance that we should be aware of as well as what kinds of Aboriginal characters we might be able to represent in the game and it was these early conversations that fueled

the development of the character of Ted who you can see on screen who is the much beloved team Cable Car operator with a secret ambition to write comic books from there we ended up Consulting with a number of people from the land Council in an ongoing way including including bonnarong Elders um and the bullet points that you see on screen are just some of the principles of how we engage in that consultation so the fact that we engage from the start ensured that we never included anything in the game without first knowing that it would be appropriate to do so this ongoing engagement also meant that our collaborators at the land Council weren't just correcting our ideas but also conceiving of their own ideas and contributing to the creative development of the game and they had real agency in terms of determining how their culture would be displayed on screen and communicated to an audience there also never came a point where we ended that relationship or sort of said that we'd kind of done enough consultation all the way through to voice over casting and direction we had input from the land Council about what that character should

sound like and we ended up being fortunate enough to cast Shane Clayton who's the son of a really well respected banarang Elder and Shane himself was also able to bring that fantastic cultural knowledge into the room um and the last point in the slide says listening before agenda it'd be great to be able to say listening without agenda but um in doing consultation it's great to sort of be honest with your scope and you know there would be no point us pretending that we weren't trying to develop a video game but whatever Vision that we had for how it would turn out that was always secondary to our listening and our relationship and to hearing what the bonnarong land Council and their various elders and representatives were saying to us and honoring that before honoring what we thought it should be like yeah um like uh yeah the fact that it we could be so responsive to the consultation or over the course of developing um it does feel like an advantage of this unique storytelling structure um uh which we'll get into the the structure a bit more soon we weren't

relying on certain interactions between characters as pillars of a single linear storyline and that meant that you know if we were making changes to particular bits of the game um uh we could do them uh without yeah kind of taking some critical bit of the Arc of the game and then like knocking out that pillar or whatever um you know we still had to consider knock-on effects of every change because every change would have this Ripple out to all of the other like story lines and characters and so forth um but yeah nothing was like load-bearing in that way yeah foreign so these are some of the other people that we consulted with throughout the game uh dementia Australia the CEO Kate swoffer lives with dementia herself and she was a fantastic consultant on the game um we also have Goldie our art director's mum happened to be a nurse in the hospital in hospitals in the 70s so she was a really great source of knowledge in terms of what that experience was like and we have a lot of team members as well who had lived

experience that fed into the game whether that was about being raised by a single mum or about their lived experience of gender or racialized Identity or class or chronic illness and of course our wonderful actors also brought so much authenticity to their characters and we were able to keep making some critical script changes through the recording process a bit of a funny story about this is I don't know if we have any German speakers in the room but we have our character Mr Price who you would have seen in the slides and at some point really early on in the development that his story is that he had this wife who he was so devoted to and she's sadly passed away now but he like remembers her a lot um and her name used to be alter and then I can see we've got a German speaker over here giving me the look I was expecting we got into recording with our actor who um we were recording remotely from Austria um and he came to that party in the script and he said Alta this is you know why is he saying this about his beloved wife and we're like oh that's her name

and he was like no so um you might be able to verify for me our actor told us that the meaning of this word which we thought was just a name is like it's kind of like calling your wife like the old ball and chain or like you know the old bag or something it's like a really disrespectful like thing to say about your wife so luckily we picked that up with him in the recording studio and we were able to change her name to Anna which is a much more you know standard Austrian or German name um and our actors brought I mean that was probably the most egregious mistake that we had but our actors brought a lot of other kind of cultural knowledge or Knowledge from their own lived experience to those characters uh so in terms of the simultaneous stories that we told throughout the game uh in many other games your NPCs might have a few looped animations to make them look like they're doing stuff but they are ultimately kind of existing to wait for you so we asked ourselves the question what would the player experience be like in a game where no one waits for you you have to keep up with them and listen to them and play in

service of them and this idea was largely inspired by immersive theater and my background as I mentioned is in theater which is why I was asked to join the team um to bring that knowledge to bear on the game so we needed to create stories enough of them with enough detail that would populate a fully realized World characterized by overlapping dialogue and confluences of action and this is the question that we started with and that we still often get asked about the game how do we guarantee a satisfying narrative Journey if we can't guarantee the narrative itself uh the first thing to say about this question is that satisfaction is a rather limiting goal in terms of what we want our player to experience our game's about a teenage girl she's on her summer holidays and her mum has dragged her along to spend time in an aged care Ward with a bunch of old people so satisfaction is not necessarily what she would be experiencing and so as nerve-wracking as it was we wanted to create an experience that left room for boredom or frustration or maybe even

anger and this was reflected back to us in a lot of the reviews we got many reviews contained a similar version of this sentiment but Emily Spindler from gameshub captured it in a really great way which we were really thrilled to see when she said this there were some small moments where I was unsure of what to do and while this did leave me wandering the Halls aimlessly for a brief time It ultimately felt like this added to the overall feeling that you really are Casey wanting to help but Unsure how and that's the exact feeling that we were trying to create is like we don't necessarily need for this to be this action-packed Rising action kind of experience we wanted the player to have moments of really deep heartfelt connection but then also moments of boredom or moments of not knowing what to do or moments of trying to figure out how to be helpful I also want to talk about the narrative shape of the game um so this is a page from Matthew Frederick's surprisingly insightful coffee table book 101 things I learned in architecture school and this page

that you see here reflects reflects how in architecture the organizing principle for a building can be expressed in a simple geometric diagram in many creative writing courses some of which some of you may have attended it's taught that there is exactly one story shape this tedious ugly boring vaguely phallic time tested and data backed hump Fray tags pyramid the action Rises there's exactly one climax sound familiar and then everything is wrapped up in a neat little bow I hope that in the year of Our Lord 2023 it's uncontroversial to say that this is like kind of played out and tired and it works in the same way that a Honda Works I.E just fine do we want to make things that are just fine what about this so you know it's a star and that's more fun let's make something fun I really think that Wayward strands organizing principle if it was anything would be this hairstyle

so where would your strength takes place over three days and at the start and end of each day you have a conversation with your mum Ruth who's the head nurse so the shape of wayward strand is all of these strands that are running parallel and just like a little Laos you can jump from strand to strand but then there are these gather points and we use these conversations with Ruth to gather the strands together and make sense of those strands for the player ultimately though there are infinite shapes that your story in your game can and should take and it's so fun and freeing and a bit freaky to consider all the Myriad ways you can break away from silly little 19th century pyramids like this loser who tried to convince you that they've been around since the time of the Pharaohs anyway rant over uh we're now going to take you on a deep dive of our process of structuring and plotting the game and bringing all those values and theories and principles that we've been speaking about so far to life so if you unbraid that ponytail from before and stick all the strands of hair up on your wall

um starting to regret this metaphor um it looks like this this is the wall of our Melbourne Studio Circa 2018 and then if you put all of that under the microscope it looks like this our plotting document is a little too big to fit on one side this is about 70 of it uh linear time runs from left to right and then each row is one of our characters and what you're looking at is all the different stuff that people are doing throughout the game so if we zoom in further say on this Chunk we can see the following these are all the things that are happening on or around 10 54 am of day one of the game even trying to get them all onto one slide like this you still can't quite make out all the text because there's just so much going on but if you really squint you'll see that most of these events have a title like Esther forgotten or the inspection and these are the names of the different stories that run throughout the game and each story takes in a number of characters so Esther forgotten centers around Esther

and an experience of chronic pain that she's having but it also fills in the nursing staff and the medical staff who are trying to treat Esther's worsening condition or the inspection is about the staff preparing for a visit from a VIP who's meant to be arriving on day three you may also be able to make out um in the tiny little text there that some of the scenes are called incidental so as we plotted the game we realized pretty quickly that we would need two distinct kinds of scenes scheduled scenes and incidental scenes so those scheduled scenes they happen at the same time on the same day regardless of where you are and what you're doing even if you can't like see them going on there happening in the background and incidental scenes are those scenes where if you happen to come across someone in some downtime you can sit with them and talk with them and interact with them in a less time bound or plot-oriented way so that was vital to situating the player within the world of the game you know if all you were going to do in this game would sit around listen to conversations and like sort of very

occasionally interject then it felt like there would be a distance between the player and their world a distance that was a little greater than what we were trying to achieve so we created these incidentals these kind of hangout scenes which mimic the fact that in real life people have their own stuff that they got getting on with and that they need to do but if you catch them in a moment of downtime then you can kind of sit and hang out with them and have a moment yeah um so yeah creating we would Strand and and plotting it out was a very experimental process for us because there aren't really very many narratives to draw from like there are games like lost Express which is helpful um but feels more like the story ultimately revolves around the hero or what he can uncover and then there's sleep no more um uh like a like an interactive theater piece where you're wandering around a a hotel and kind of all a bunch of scenes are happening and you can wander into a scene as it's halfway through going on but those stories are told in more of like a poetic and Abstract way uh where

we were going for representing the mundanity of everyday life um for the characters like in developing the characters we had some initial storylines and characters but we wanted to have them interact with each other regardless of if they had a storyline reason to uh so one of the tools we built into our development process was a what we called a character development character relationship Matrix um which looked like this uh where we put every character on like the column and on the row and then in the cell for each uh car like kind of intersection of characters uh that's how they respond to or feel about the other character um a lot of the process for defining The Narrative of the game uh was like this like trying to find ways of identifying what we were missing in our world um whether it was certain relationships that we hadn't thought about or considered yet or interactions between

characters that could happen that weren't yet plotted out um kind of like filling out all of the space where stuff could be but it wasn't yet um uh something handy that came out of mapping the characters relationships like this is that we could Define very specifically how each character feels about each other um like in this example Mr Avery Neil is a writer of self-help books who as we said Australia is a bit of himself like thinks a lot of himself uh while Ida his neighbor is a lot more reserved and polite uh sorry from Ida's perspective Neil is always interrupting her and bothering her so she has a pretty negative feeling towards him uh while from Neil's perspective perspective Ida's friendly and he's friendly so they must be friends um uh and this this um relationship Matrix like it was simple but it was also actually a really good prompt to uh consider how to summarize how each character sees themselves whether they've got a positive uh

feeling towards themselves or a neutral or a negative feeling towards themselves and all of this stuff is like very high level and lacks a lot of the Nuance that's in the game itself but it really helped particularly during the care writing process like keeping us all on the same page yeah uh oh a bump in the road at one point after we developed the initial character plots and timelines we were trying to get published with funding and so we wrote up some plot summaries for each of our characters to try to get the Publishers to understand what goes on in the game and then we stood back and looked at our plot summaries and panicked after reading over what we'd written we had to ask ourselves are our plots boring here's an example of a plot that we planned for the game centering on one of the patients either who Jason was just talking about um so it says Ida has been knitting Hugo a star for his a scarf for his birthday on Sunday a surprise gift knitted into the pattern of the scarf is Hugo's Family Crest which Ida sometimes sneaks

into Hugo's room to get a better look at when Hugo dies Ida decides she must finish off the scarf in time for his birthday on the third day of the game on day two Casey can figure this out and get the crest from Hugo's room and give it to Ida okay like it's maybe an interesting start for something but is it a whole plot but on reflection we realize that our plots weren't very interesting when laid out in this way because they were never designed to be consumed in that way they were now designed to be interesting when red from start to finish without interruption so to go back to the ponytail for a second imagine that upon your head you have just one hair growing out of the top of your head and it's really long and it goes all the way down your back but it's just the one hair that would look very different than this ponytail and our plots are the same they're designed to allow the player to discover random bits and pieces and braid things together and gather more and more strands both on each playthrough and in any given subsequent playthroughs writing out the plots in a linear

faction fashion felt reductive and didn't help us understand how the plot and characters would feel to the player as the player was discovering random bits and pieces possibly out of sequence possibly on multiple playthroughs yeah um yeah so we were feeling kind of uh again more confident especially as we built out some like demos of the game and kind of were realizing that oh yeah you know when you're actually experiencing the game these these plots are are working a lot better than they do in that way um and then a kind of another step that uh that happened in development is that we went to a workshop in early 2019 that started us on this path towards an additional lens on the games narrative structure um uh and it got us uh the idea to create what we called our dramatic narrative structures which um is up here uh bees worked similar to a schedule like the schedules that we've been working with so far but instead of the

columns being hours of the day and the rows being like each character so that we could cross reference what the characters are doing at whatever time we had one of these diagrams for each character and then we simplified the column so instead of them being like you know 10 a.m 11 A.M it was just like a morning lunch afternoon for each of the three days um and then yeah we had we had one for each character and a bunch of rows which I'll I'll go through um oh yeah but this is this is us at work on those and um uh this I guess kind of shows how not only just coming up with all the ideas but building on them together was a very like team approach um yeah so each of the rows that were on this sheet this is an example for Esther one of our non-player characters um so there would be it's a bit hard to read sorry but um there's Esther's story is the top row

so that's just this character's key scenes um then there's Esther and Casey so that's in those incidental scenes what can be going on between Esther and Casey during this window of time uh and then there's Esther's attitude so how West is feeling during this period of time um one other thing that you can see up there is it wasn't just morning uh lunch afternoon for the columns we also had an overnight column for the NPCs uh where we described what happens overnight between the days of the game for that character um and that was uh and then the player can discover that during the next day by like chatting with the NPC or overhearing things um and this is another just little thing that we did to um make the world feel bigger than just what the player can see within the game we had a different version of this dramatic narrative structure thing for Casey the player character

um because there's very little in the game that must happen for the player character like in most of the game you're really free to just wander around listening to whatever talk to whoever like um it was quite tricky but uh yeah we still found it quite handy to make one of these diagrams for the player character um oh yeah the the additional columns there are like what we call bookend scenes at the start and end of each day that uh like required scenes but then within the day um it's it's all up to the player um and Casey's Rose were Casey's attitude sorry how the Casey uh representing the Playa might be feeling during this time is she curious or comfortable or frustrated uh what is Casey's plot at this time um notes on any specific scenes that will always happen for Casey whenever that would happen but also generally what's happening between other

characters in Casey during this window is she meeting a bunch of people for the first time in this like on day one morning or is she trying to help people not being able to on day two afternoon um and then there was uh like the play of motivations and goals uh and in this way trying to guess at what a player would generally be trying to do at that point in the game on their first playthrough um and this was important because we wanted to give the play a complete freedom and a sense that they're creating their own goals but we just wanted to make sure that generally whatever they would encounter would hopefully just feed towards whatever that goal might be at that time um it was a lot of kind of like guesswork and and hope um then as the mechanics wrote are there limits on what the player can do in that time is the action on the ship moving towards a particular place as well like at lunchtime everybody goes to the

cafeteria of lunch um and are we going to try to build structural things into the script at this time like uh a carrot like each character will recommend two other characters to to talk to within the incidental scenes that you have with that character um and then uh one interesting thing is that we also had colors and Lighting on this which isn't really related to The Players um story exactly but we just wanted to make sure that they wouldn't Clash like the weather on day two is like really stole me but we so we make sure that they're on scenes with the player that happened at that time that are really like happy or whatever um yeah so with this dramatic narrative structure process by zooming out a little and not worrying about the specifics of every single scene this allowed us to Define for each character a more meaningful Arc or through line through the game um as a team as we gather around these like physical butcher's papers or A2

prints um and this is yeah this is an example of what Jordan was talking about earlier like where you know a bunch of the core team are working together on this uh and that it not only allowed us all to collaborate and come up with ideas and solve problems but it also allowed us to like share uh amongst the team exactly what each character's storyline was um and you know the existing decisions and plans and thoughts um and yeah it just we were also able to identify empty Windows of time uh during this process uh or times where for a character they might have a bunch of functional scenes but there's nothing that really changes their attitude much during that time um yeah it just like really helped us expand out quite a lot like uh what the player will come across within a particular playthrough um uh and also to take things that we

had ideas about for a character and actually make sure that they're actually included within the game um so Ted our young man is a good example of all three of these um he was a very well-defined character but during this process we realized that um sometimes he didn't have much to do like he didn't have a very active role in a lot of the existing story lines um and so we annotated on this quite a lot during this process on Ted sheet and this is a zoom in on that sheet which is semi-legible um but yeah a theme that came out of our discussions with the bunarun community was that members of the community are constantly doing things for each other helping each other um so Maize Wallen who's you know our composer and audio director had the idea that Ted is doing something for a member of his community um and then looking at the ideas here I think we combined ideas one and three

for what actually went into the game one of Ted's aunties is pregnant and so she's looking for work and then Ted's helping her find some work um uh and then after confirming this approach with our bonnarong consultation collaborators this turned into over a does over a dozen additional scenes for Ted both with Casey and with other characters and we also managed to bring in a bunch of other characters into this storyline that um that were a bit bad during some of their time periods as well um yeah another example is uh Tomy the non-verbal patient in the hospital uh and uh like as we were trying to get into her mindset and understand her and her perspective uh colonica quickly uh waywood's animation director brought up that it felt like we were relying too heavily on cliches about dementia as opposed that from popular culture as opposed to lived experience um and so that's where we organized the

consultation with Kate swaffer um who Georgia mentioned before and um yeah with Kate we just had this really lovely and kind of Frank conversation about living with dementia and from that we were able to unpick some of the harmful stereotypes that we'd accidentally built into tumi's character as well as getting just a really good insight into what living with dementia is actually like as opposed to what our assumptions were about it um yeah just one little example of this is that uh Tomy is mostly non-verbal and uh Kate like told us that actually that's you know quite rare for somebody with dementia um but often a person with dementia won't talk a lot or people will think they're non-verbal because they're just fed up with communicating with people who don't take them seriously or don't know how to communicate with them um yeah and then we were able to express

this in the game we were able to change it so that Tommy does eventually speak to another character who speaks to her in her first language um and then this is you know it isn't the player character that like figures this out and does it it's a different character because we didn't want turn me as a character to be a puzzle to be solved for the player like because that would then take away from the feeling that turn me is an active agent in her own life yeah um yeah um yeah and it was obviously it made the game a lot better like it's um all of this consultation but it also was just a really enriching process like having these conversations um was just really incredible and really lovely and uh the collaborators was super generous and it just felt like a pain is better people um yeah so after all that we had to actually write it um this is a tiny this gift is a tiny snapshot of our sane list document so

this is what you get when you plot 15 fully realized non-player characters across three real-time days and whilst we'd written some test scenes before it wasn't until we knew that we had the funding Runway to complete the game that we actually tried to get the thing written from start to finish yeah um uh it was really difficult to actually write and finish off all of it and I often remember to tweet while we were doing it from Jake Elliott one of the creators of Kentucky root zero who advised to avoid creating homework for yourself during game development and I was like oh yeah okay we've accidentally created like a thousand scenes of like complicated into or even subtext-filled scenes uh of her work for that was great yeah good job us um when we went to record voiceover we printed the script physically for the first time and it was 1500 pages um so that was a moment of panic

um so actually writing the scenes meant that we were now testing out all of these Grand narrative theories that we'd been talking about earlier and sometimes our assumption about how a scene would work just didn't actually work when written out in full or it wasn't feasible from an animation perspective you know for me as someone who's used to working with real flesh actors who are amazing I had to really get out of the habit of saying Ida finds a piece of paper and folds up a chatterbox or Esther jumps on top of her dresser and hisses like a banshee sometimes getting a particular scene to work would require significant changes from our plan for example we used to have an intercom that was on the top level of the ship there's a chef in the game who's kind of down in the bowels of the ship and there are various places in the game where you can use the intercom to interact with him we used to have one on the top level but most of the other characters interact with him through this intercom that's in the mid-level of the ship and we just could we couldn't guarantee either from a narrative perspective or a technical perspective that every time you press that button on

the top floor he wouldn't already be interacting with someone in real time down below so we had to create this whole thing that that like a sort of subplot where the intercom on the top level is broken and then there's another scene where Devin kind of explains that to you after you've tried to use it so things like that would crop up all the time uh it was also during the scene writing process as well that we really ensured there was enough Casey specific content within each character's Windows of availability so that we could ensure the player never felt that the character had nothing to speak with them about unless that was our explicit intention you know we do have characters in the game who actually don't want to interact with Casey or don't have anything to say with Casey but we needed to make sure every instance of that was intentional and that Casey wouldn't ever Rock up to a really friendly character's room and then kind of like sit twiddling her thumbs uh the dramatic narrative structure diagrams that Jason mentioned earlier were super useful throughout this time as well because they could really determine the focus of each of those Dynamic incidental scenes um because now each of those scenes

could exist to highlight or underscore a character's attitude at that time as well as relating to the scheduled scenes so once we'd finally gotten into the writing of the scenes we had to ensure that the two of us work together to keep the character's voices consistent despite having two writers working on the scripts and I think we did this in three key ways it says they're major and minor stake in characters so by this I mean that there's no character in the game that was written 50 by me and 50 by Jason because I think that would have probably led to a bit of an indecisive character voice there's also no character in the game that was written 100 by me or 100 by Jason because we felt like that would probably lead to you know each character having quite a unique voice but the tone across the game being inconsistent so instead and this is actually something that we've sort of realized after the fact it wasn't really by Design but we sort of had each of us being kind of the majority stakeholder for some of the characters minority stakeholder for other characters so for example I reckon I probably wrote most of Ida's scenes and most of Esther's scenes Eric and

Jason probably wrote most of Neil scenes most of Lily scenes and the effect that this had is that one of of us was able to set the tone and the other one of us was able to read through what that person had done and kind of Follow that tone second thing and this is a bit more kind of stock sound of writing advice we used people that we knew and based the character voice on them so Neil's voice is largely based on an old friend of Jason's a lot of Esther's turns of phrase come from my family you know I think we all or I hope that it's not just me that plays out hypothetical conversations in our heads with people that we know and when you use those voices from your mind that come from a stock of real memories it just adds a lot of depth and flavor to the game and I think the final case of the consistency of our character voices is that we had two writers but only one editor so Jason and I both wrote on the game and other team members wrote A Few scenes here or there but only Jason edited the scenes and this meant that

although we both had input throughout the process there was just the one person going through and making sure that each character was consistent in their use of language and consistent in the way that they came across uh for me I knew we were onto a good thing in terms of the consistency of these characters when we were in the recording studio one day and one of our actors had a question and I was directing the performances they said you know oh why does my character say this or like what am I feeling in this I turned to Jason who was in the room and I was like oh what was the thinking behind this line and Jason said uh you'll have to ask yourself and I sort of I'd sort of lost track of the characters and and you know they were sort of taking on their own life so I yeah had forgotten that I had actually written that scene um but we were still revising the script throughout the recording process as we've mentioned a little bit um with the input from the actors and the voiceover process was also such a time of Discovery for us the actors often showed us things about our characters that we didn't know yet and putting our trust in our actors and forming a true collaboration with them really paid off in terms of the depth of

feeling that our game was able to achieve yeah um so after we completed the VA recording process uh and that was a whole thing now what are your team uh right up there right now um uh doing a talk about the VA process uh which I think shows our team's commitment to simultaneous storytelling um anyway uh after the Viro there was another stage of revision as we were implementing like the scenes into Unity with the animations uh and at that point like all of the VR was done uh but we were able to still kind of like break a scene apart or like uh yeah just change the way that the player goes into it or all that kind of stuff um yeah make or at least some of it available depending on if certain options are set um and that kind of thing and a lot of this just came out of like play testing the game and kind of feeling out like which scenes feel too long which scenes would be better if Casey is like asking

questions to go into sections of it as opposed to um just being like a like a like a longer set section and that kind of thing yeah um yeah so after seven years of development uh we released Wayward strand in September last year how did it go um well it was definitely an experiment we were trying out a new narrative form in order to tell a story that reflected the values we were trying to instill into the game the values of subtlety of complicated narratives that don't fit into stereotypical structures and of representing characters that aren't often represented in games especially as active agents in their own lives and the feedback that we've heard in general has been great uh like uh yeah very positive but the specific things that we're hearing about the game tell us that we're going in the right direction that this style of Storytelling allows us to present characters in what feels like a like a brand new like realer feeling way

compared to all the styles of Storytelling even within the medium of games yeah all right time for some takeaways um anyone want some Chinese no I don't know that's terrible um uh there's some stuff that's not on this slide that I wanted to mention before I go through these points as well just shouting back to the earlier parts of the presentation um we really recommend that your studio uh finds some way to form some relationship with the traditional owners wherever you are um that's more relevant in some parts of the world than in other parts of the world but it's been incredibly meaningful for us and you know we've engaged in that consultation ongoing we've paid for that consultation and it's been really really a wonderful thing so we definitely encourage you to do that um so we created a game in which stripping back player agency allowed for more Dynamic vibrant and Alive NPCs and a player experience that encouraged listening and reflection which is what we were going for we did it all by

experiment we couldn't go over it we couldn't go under it we had to go through it and we strongly encourage you to do the same we started with strong values and we never compromised on those values this motivated us to make the game but those values are also structural to the game they're the muscles that operate the Machinery that we built and we proved our hypothesis that just like those individual strands of hair that would be very strange if they were growing alone at the top of your head like I was talking about before our simultaneous stories created an experience it was much more than the sum of its parts and speaking of the ponytail ponytail is a real narrative structure that everyone now knows about thank you so much for coming to our talk thank you we're very proud of this game and we're very humbled by the response it's had we're here at GDC looking for long-term Partnerships for our future projects so if you know anyone who you think might share our vision for games please put us in touch uh we'd love to see you to have a chat after the session get your

feedback answer any questions and if you see us around say hi I do believe that we also have like approx five minutes left for some questions so if anyone does have any questions please feel free to step up to is it these mics here I believe I think you were first all right um so amazing talk really inspiring really appreciated it thank you um I did have a question you mentioned how the simultaneous stories are more um together than you know for some of their parts and all that um how do you in the game encourage the player to follow through these distractions so that they do not experience the stories as a single strand taking away the value as a whole that's a great question um I think that my take on that would just be that um it would be really hard to follow the one story the whole way through and the reason that that is is that any given character that you are speaking to especially earlier on in the game

there'll always come a time where they have stuff that they need to do like a nurse might come into the room and need to kind of assist them into their wheelchair so they can go to lunch and they ask you to leave the room at that point a character might get tired and ask you to leave so they can have a nap they might even you know if you're talking to them about a specific thing like there's a thread through the game where Casey has an interest in the history of the Airship and you might be talking to someone and they'll say Oh Mr proof knows about that you should go talk to him um and so both explicitly with the characters telling you to go do other stuff but also implicitly with them having to get on with their own lives it kind of each narrative shunts you out of it pretty quickly and into other ones and it would be quite difficult to linger with the one character the whole time perfect thank you no worries uh hello uh great so look thank you I had a question about how um how in your game the does the time move on and how did that imply the way do you build the narrative and the way you you kept the the player to engage with the narrative

and all the edge case with a time-based narrative like you did thank you I've just remembered that our facilitator said that I should repeat the questions back before answering them for the purpose of recording so the question was about how time moves on in the game and how we deal with edge cases around the functioning of time and how that time mechanic interacts with the narrative I reckon this is a new question yeah so it was definitely super complicated um and uh yeah I guess we've got like you know a timer that moves forward at like I think eight times speed we changed around a bunch it was 16 times six times that we ended up on eight times and then uh all of the scenes that uh meant to play will play out when they're meant to play all of the incidental scenes have Windows where they can play or not play um and then we uh we eventually built in like a delaying system so that if a player is like halfway through a conversation with somebody one of those

incidentals and another one is meant as another scene is meant to play at that time it'll just delay uh so that the player can finish their conversation we initially wanted to not do that and then the player was always getting interrupted right when they were about to ask a question and it was like really annoying so yeah that's just it was very complicated because the the short answer yeah whatever yeah thanks uh my question uh bill piggybacks off the first one a little bit um games that um allow players to uh pursue depth or breath on a time limit um uh often have a problem where people who dabble a little and never go deep anywhere miss things and I was curious to hear uh if you had sort of wrestled with that question and if you had landed on an answer for how to deal with people who uh got a little bit of a lot of experiences and never never went super deep yeah cool yeah so the question was like how did we deal with the fact that um often in these games players might just dabble in various storylines and

get distracted and never really get like a like a full complete storyline on a particular playthrough um one part of that I think was like uh Ruth and Casey uh uh Casey's mom the head nurse uh they have like this relationship with each other uh at that um changes a lot over the course of the game especially in those bookend scenes that are at the started end of each day so that has its own arc to it and they and that comes to a resolution and so you kind of I think even on a single playthrough you get some kind of plot um but then we just embraced the chaos as well and um yeah it seemed it seemed to work surprisingly yeah foreign [Music]