The Secrets to Creating an Indie Game Franchise

[Music] okay hello everybody uh so yes i'm christy dana and i'll be talking to you about the secrets to creating an indie game franchise um but why are these secrets first of all you know why aren't the techniques to develop a franchise actually common knowledge and i mean that why aren't we all learning how to do this as part of our craft and you may be thinking well christy it's about franchises are about revenue streams but that's the business etymology the historical origins of the term which kicked in about the 16th century onwards but for us here at the narrative summit as writers as designers as narrative designers as directors we have the problem of crafting multiple art forms into a whole experience games films books

soundtracks whatever why isn't this common knowledge well it's because there's a lot of resistance to making in multiple art forms i know i've been battling these resistances for over 20 years um you've heard of the 10 000 hour rule well that's the idea that that people the idea that stuck with people is this if you hope to be any good at anything then you have to be doing one thing over and over again for a very long time and what's associated with that is the idea that you will be a jack of all trades and a master of none if you actually work in more than one so we all believe that working in multiple art forms either dilutes or corrupts your creative development rather than enhancing it that is a factor that stops us it's also the not us resistance it's the belief that each art form is so substantially different that it's

not what we actually do writers don't talk about media game devs don't talk about linear media if it's not interactive it's not us it's also the not now it's the fear that maybe your interest in more than one art form is perhaps some elaborate procrastination exercise that you shouldn't do it now you should actually focus on one art form and it's also the not you resistance it's the idea that you couldn't possibly be a polycreative a polymath of creativity someone who could create great things in more than one art form it's also the idea that a franchise is not art but i've created consulted and mentored and judged hundreds and hundreds of transmedia projects around the world and i'm i'm here to tell you that a franchise is something you can learn to craft and i'll show you how

so this is where you probably start you look at triple a franchises and think that you need to create webisodes on youtube bring out novelizations and graphic novels a feature film some merchandise and a soundtrack and maybe do an alternate reality game but you can't do those on an nd budget you can do scaled down versions like a pdf and a webisode perhaps but even then how do you decide which one to actually pursue just knowing what art forms are to are available to you is not enough the common wisdom is choose the art forms that have the most market penetration in other words that most people are actually using but the thing what's great about indies is you can decide what's best for the project rather than those constraints so step one step one is to actually start with the premise that your franchise is

um here's a book by steven pressfield who wrote the legend of bag of arts when he was 51 um the book is called nobody wants to read your um and he learned this when he was working in advertising when no one wants to read your stuff and he explains that once you start with the idea that nobody automatically wants to read your that you develop empathy you ask yourself why don't they want to read it why don't they want to play my game and with this quote here you acquire the skill that is indispensable to all artists and entrepreneurs that the ability to switch back and forth between your imagination from your own point of view as a writer developer to the point of view of your player you're thinking about what the player is thinking and experiencing at each point this approach is behind successful projects in all art forms so let's have a look at how you can action this and how this relates to franchises

here we have in hollywood there is a technique called the sequence approach that some of you will be familiar with here it was developed by frank daniel who after analyzing hundreds of successful screenplays realized it was an emerging best practice that would help us all make great screenplays frank was a screenwriter himself a playwright a novelist had a master's degree in music and a doctorate in film and he influenced generations of filmmakers in his role as the director of the australian film institute sorry the american film institute um as well as um he was head of film at usc as well as columbia and he was artistic director of robert redford's sundance institute the first artistic director and interestingly for us his sequence approach focuses on how the audience will experience the story and what the writer can do to make that experience better so just quickly what is the sequence approach so basically what it does is it take the existing structure that we all use

and you can see here with the beginning middle and end and adds shorter sequences but the emphasis here is not on the shorter sequences but that these sequences are driven by an audience question the crucial point to this approach is to think about what drives the audience interest at each point in your film what questions drive them what are they thinking about and so you are the one then that designs that interest with a ticking clock with dramatic irony um which is when we know more than the characters know and importantly with dramatic tension when we are withholding an anticipated resolution now this thinking about the audience experience what is in their mind and what they know right now and what they're expecting next is common to all successful works so for example brian upton who was the co-founder of red storm entertainment uh where he designed the original rainbow six and ghost recon

and was senior game designer at sony he talks about situational design where the nexus of play is not in the transactions it's not in the actions it's not in the interface the nexus of play is in the player's mind and he talks about the importance of designing for player anticipation okay so how does this actually work in a game let's have a look at uh what remains of edith finch so our first question is one that seems that would drive us right to the end of the game and that is what remains of edith finch like what does that actually mean and then when we actually are going through the beginning of the play we find another one that comes in very early and that is how do i get to the house the designers have strategically placed a house in the distance a weenie as we know um to get us to think about where we are to go and what we are to do and then they mention that we have a key

so the developers have us thinking what does this key open i need to find something that needs this key you see how these questions also work as objectives we have a writing approach a design approach all operating together and then if we've had these previous small questions answered to our satisfaction then it is more likely to that the players will actually continue through to the rest of the game in fact brandon sanderson our best-selling science fiction and fantasy writer talks about this technique as a promise he doesn't see it as a question but as an open bracket and a closed bracket you promise that something will happen and then you follow it through you indicate to the reader that your story will be about something and then you deliver on it now you all know this terms um into this in terms of genre you know that you promise a player if you promise to play that it's a party game it's a first person shooter it's an

open world game uh it's a horror it's a comedy whatever it is you actually have to deliver on the expectations of those genres it's a feedback loop where our players engage in a continuous reappraisal and these promises are one factor in how they decide and why we must deliver i really like the notion of a promise because it's about what the players are thinking about it's also it's also what we're signaling what we will provide and also with the word promise it implies that we have a responsibility to honour it okay so how can we use this for our franchise if we agree we all have this best practice of switching between our point of view and our players of designing for leading promises and keeping them then we have an approach that we can use across art forms in our franchise you see we can think about the questions in our players minds before they get to

the game why do our players want to play our game then why do they want to watch our webisode why do they want to read our graphic novel why do they want to listen to our soundtrack and we're not alone a study by called tima and stan ross looked at game experience models and they thought well if we really think about this from the perspective of the player there need not be any separation of the different parts of the experience the experience of the player starts before they've opened the game and continues after in the other art forms and here james earnest founder of cheap ass games former writer at wizards of the coast and former game design manager at microsoft he says if i had to pick one thing that games should have it is a reason to play uh he didn't continue saying i don't like to say hook because that implies superficiality it's not just a foot in the door it's the reason you keep coming back it's what distinguishes a hit from a

flop between two games that are empirically identical so what are these promises what are these promises for a franchise what are the promises that invite your players to play the game and then watch the film listen to the music to read the book now you already know a few here's some you experience them all the time we've got personality nostalgia spectacle and novelty to name a few i'll just do a quick shout out here uh to marigold bartlett who's the artist for all of these illustrations um that we have here okay so personalities you all know the promise of the personality or stars right it's angelina jolie playing lara croft or steven merchant voicing weasley or it's the actual characters themselves or auto directors it's the reason why ellie roth was brought in to do the animator trailer for dark souls 3. it's musician and filmmaker rob zombie being brought in to do an animated short

for assassin's creed unity it's the appeal of rami for vamp league blambly games so what is the personality promise the personality promise can be credibility assurance of credibility but it can also be the promise of being with someone who lives the life we want to live that we want to be nostalgia is something that you may be familiar with um it's the 8-bit games it's pixel games such as sword and sorcery and nidhogg the 1930s animated game cuphead what the nostalgia promise does is it delivers on positive memories it's the comfort that you feel with those memories the thing about nostalgia is if you don't have positive memories with them it won't be a promise you're after if 8-bit games are not something that you remember finally it won't appeal to you spectacle is a promise that we know too think of a transformers trailer and you get what a spectacle is about it can be many things however

that widen our eyes in some way it can be the visual beauty of the blue and green marine life of abzu or the black splatter on white in the unfinished swan or the photo realism of assassin's creed what is the promise of the spectacle it's the promise that you will experience or awe or um so related to spectacle is novelty and how and how things that aren't the status quo actually draw our attention it's pokemon go which for many introduced them to augmented reality gaming it's johan sebastian joust where you're not using screens but move controllers and dancing around each other it's keep talking and nobody explodes where instead of playing a game by yourself in a vr headset you're yelling out commands to a mate but in those sorts of games there's also a social promise operating too so it indeed it may be that the more of these promises that you actually offer

and deliver on the higher likelihood of not just player acquisition which is gaining new players but also player retention keeping your players so what are the out of the promises that your players want and you can provide in a multi-platform context why is it that they stay with your ip so here are the key uh cross art form promises the promises that help your players cross art forms they are if you like the genres of crossing art forms they are why your players go from your game to your soundtrack to your graphic novel they are the promises you signal and then need to keep so let's uh zip through a few the first one um the revealing promise it's about revealing more it's more information more characters new mechanics new stories it's a sequel it's a prequel it's anything that primarily offers a new insight it's when you get to the end of kentucky route zero

a kentucky zero episode and you want the story to continue you want to find out what happens next let's have a quick look through some examples uh the revealing promises in the card game consenticle where you're engaging in a mutually satisfy and consensual intimate encounter with an alien and you can go straight into playing the game but the kickstarter backers also have the option of a 12 page prequel where they can find out how the characters actually meet and what stands in their way so it's something that can be enjoyed before playing the game or after either setting up character motivations or giving context and then there is the game that dragon cancer that tells the true personal story of ryan green and his family as they raise their son joel who is diagnosed with terminal cancer we follow the family through the hospital treatments the playgrounds the church and then joel's afterlife when he dies at age five and what is perhaps the most

heart-wrenching prequel there is the book released almost a year to the day before his passing is titled he's not dead yet and the point of this is that these are techniques that you can action in any way and how about the hidden object game hidden folks where you can also keep playing more games on the playable t-shirt and the playable poster the point being that the revealing promise is not always about narrative the revealing promise is also meeting the interest of revealing more about the actual creation of the game the games or the games in the case of 120 years of lambie their collection includes art but also their game and audio design and studio beginnings so you may notice i've also got the reliving card reliving promise there as well because in some ways players are reliving moments from the games but if we look at fan interest in art books we see a definite leaning towards

the revealing promise more than the reliving one many say that they prefer to see more works in progress than the final art and so this is an example of how knowing these how these promises operate can help with your decisions so on to the reliving promise so the reliving promise it's about providing a dependable pleasure what and what that dependable pleasure is is determined by you and the players it's the eternal question of what stays for the same and what changes right often audio moments continue across projects it's a submarine clang that grants kirkhope took from the golden eye film and put into the game or the music and opening flying sequence over the pine trees and mountains in the twin peaks the changes can happen around those dependable pleasures an example is papers please

which gives us key moments that we know from the game i haven't got that here for some reason it's disappeared okay i'm going to skip that but you know papers please and basically it's the short film of the game with a lot of the mechanics that we see in the game also happening um in the film um here's another example brain and brains burly men at sea um some of you would have played this they promised a great reliving experience after playing through their their folktale adventure uh which you can play through again and again exploring different regions at the end of each playthrough you are given a code which is depicted in a digital book which is on the bookcase there and then you can go to their website put in the code and order a printed book version of your personal playthrough through the game but the art while the same as being in the game was different was so different in key places that i didn't feel as if i was

experiencing the key moments i wanted again so this is an example of what donald norman calls the gulf of execution where the actions that we provide do not correspond with the intentions of our users not meeting the promise but if we as creators know what our players are expecting and we so then we can nuance the emphasis between the familiar and the unfamiliar accordingly i don't know what's happening to myself okay uh another example here is kentucky route zero which has lots of interludes between all of their acts games and stories the most recent features are live action video footage of the local community television station and a digital game version of it having the same event juxtaposed in two art forms forces you to look at the differences between them in a exciting way and the creators are very aware of the player experience of these projects and rewards them with

lots of intertextual references between the two works so for instance in the live action video um the character there rita she she mentioned oh we're about to have a guest on who you may have already met referring to the fact that if you'd played the game before watching the video you would have met her there and they their references actually go quite further uh and robert yang has written a post about the fact that they also do references to player discussions uh there as well and the one thing that cardboard computer that cover computer devs also use a lot of is the inhabiting promise there are two key ways that the inhabiting promise can be met which is basically about the promise to be inside a created world inhabiting can occur by a transportation to the creative world or it can happen when the created world transports to us let me explain that a bit further um it's it's being able to explore the

alien world of pandora at the theme park or being able to enter our van gogh's in the bedroom painting um as you can see in the picture there you could actually hire out this room when the uh art institute of chicago teamed up with airbnb so you can transport away from your world and immerse yourself into the created world an example is you must be 18 or older to enter where the conceit is your excuse me you're alone at home and you heard about this thing called porn at school opportune cough so this installation that was actually set up at slam dance the nifty thing about this experience is that on the other side you can see a window there on the other side of the window that's where people were getting their photograph taken and so there were moments in the game where it suddenly takes over with all the moaning sounds of porn so you quite literally feel the embarrassment of having other people witnessing you

feeling porn which is exactly what the game is designed to do and so the key essence of the end point of the game of the game experience is then articulated in the installation so the reverse of transportation is when the created world enters your world enters the players world an example is our questions the magic circle which is a meta fictional game where you play the protagonist in an unfinished game you can wander through the unfinished world and hear the trials of the designers stuck in development hell and now the company question also have they have the usual website and their press kit but they've also created a website for the fictional developers with their own social media and their own press releases so the world actually overlaps with our own another one is jacob's game paradigm which is a surreal adventure game set in a strange post apocalyptic eastern european country

jacob has the protagonist actually existing on tinder there is a travel guide for the fictional country you can get and a book on the fictional religion there's also a floppy disk that you could buy for the game which doesn't work but there's a bit of the nostalgia promise there now i have bought the floppy disk but not the game yet and so this is an example of different art forms appealing to different people but also potentially being a conversion tool there are so many examples of the inhabiting promise the ellen wake files book that is credited to the in-game author the play in kentucky rate zero that you can buy and is credited to the in-game character the pip boy that you could actually um purchase and use in fact this inhabiting promise is such an allure that in the in upcoming sea war star wars theme park there are areas that you will only be able to get infection merchandise okay so the shaping promise the final

one here is something different we all know fan fiction and the creations that fans make in response to your creative projects if you're lucky um you have no control over that players do that if they want but when you as developers facilitate that happening in your creative projects you're working with the shaping promise it's the promise of being able to make allowing the players to make it more like them an example is mods um and recently we had one with the game masters toolkit that defiant development have offered uh for players to make their own encounters and full challenges and it's something that they said they knew that their community would want it's also figurines which can be a way for us to play out our own adventures with the characters we love and want more of like boba fett and maisie indeed you could conceivably say that

the more of these promises that you offer and deliver on the more likely you are to appeal to a range of players and keep them and i have mentioned some key ones today so when you're deciding what media you'll choose it's isn't about what the big studios do or even what art form is popular necessarily everyone may be doing graphic novels but it may not be of any interest to you personally or fit your game world the key that we've learned today is not to decide purely based on the object the media the critical aspect um that will make or break the design of your indie game franchise is to think about what your players are looking for they're looking beyond your media to something else to the revealing reliving inhabiting and shaping promises but lastly there's something even more powerful than all of these it is the ultimate multiplayer it's something that once again

operates in all art forms because it operates in all people and it's the values promise the promise of giving the player something they believe in being uh shalom schwartz in the journal of cross-cultural marketing explains how our values have been shown to influence our career choices our political persuasions our feelings of well-being and for us now what entertainment we choose to engage with and he researched the recurring values that have happened across 20 countries and has published the results which i use in my design i use this on top of theme indeed nina simone the executive director at the santa cruz museum of art and history talks about the importance of relevance and drawing visitors into museums she warns that it doesn't matter how powerful the experience is

inside the room how great your game is film tv or whatever if most people don't even choose to enter it so you have to think about why they come to you and what value they actually get and the more you start to matter to people she explains the more they will desire opportunities to actually go deeper they will come back and they will ask for more if you and i will add this that if you actually don't think about values in your design they will still be there but they will default to the values of the status quo but if you consciously think about them they may be different and will resonate with players take david riley's everything you have the game you have the 10 minute gameplay film and you have the soundtrack and you also have the alan watts recordings that were specially made for the game that you can also purchase and throughout all of them are the values of self-direction for instance and universalism

you can be introduced to the values through the film you can purchase the soundtrack to relive the game but you can also purchase the voiceover recordings of alan watts to take those words to listen to them and let them change you so creating your own indie game franchise is possible you experience lots of art forms every day as players it's time to practice it as designers resist all the forces that are holding you back the secrets have actually been right in front of us indeed if we look even further back in history beyond when the term franchise was all about commercialization and rights we find that it actually derives from the french verb for with apologies for which means to go beyond the limits of something to jump over to cross a threshold to give liberty to to make free so go forth and free the art forms that

you have inside you and make that indie franchise thank you for your time you