Writing Great Video Game Characters With Brandon Sheffield - GDC Podcast Ep. 4

this is GDC podcast episode 4 [Music] hey everybody this is your host Chris draft I'm editor-in-chief of Gamasutra I'm here with my co-host Alisa McAloon yeah how're you feeling today great thanks for asking you're feeling it you're feeling a little sick about don't fly with the head cold oh yeah you just came from South Dakota right yeah yeah the hotbed of the game industry game design college so they're great I graduated from there oh okay all right well good job so today we do have

we do have a guest he is kind of hanging out back right now you know I'm not even gonna I'm not even going to to you know avoid spoiling it's Brandon Sheffield it's me yeah a lead writer v lead writer on on lab zeros indivisible but we're not going to acknowledge him yet we're going to put him we're gonna put Brandon in a corner for now but real quick let's go over some GDC 2020 news some real quick announcements we got a mention that registration is still open it's still open hasn't closed yet so if you would like to go you should go to the website GD calm calm sort that out it's from March 16th through the 20th there is something else it is cool that happened the GDC narrative wall is up Alyssa what what exactly was that here

it was a project they hosted at GDC 2019 where they solicited contributions from developers and attendants and built that into three neat little twine projects that are now up and playable yeah and that can be found at narrative wall dot GD Kampf dot-com and lastly this is freshly-baked news fresh out of the oven newly announced and Investment Summit at GDC 2020 and that'll be a place where you can learn about how to partner with people and you know who have money to give you and also people who want to give you money they can go over there and find out how to be a wiser investor so if you're interested in you know supporting your studio or your project with Cash Money which I think that you know some

people might be check it out game funding and investment summit at GDC 2020 all right I think what do you think Alissa should we just cut to the chase I think I think so yeah yeah I mean this is Spence I don't think that I can take it anymore so you know the our next guest former editor-in-chief of game developer magazine sibling publication of gamasutra before it's unfortunate to demise a contributor on gamasutra sorry that was kind of that's kind of bleak game developer magazine was yeah wanted it it was the best game development magazine it was pretty good that ever existed and so he also a contributor on gamasutra founder of the indie studio Necker soft games which is responsible for great games like gun

house and oh dear that's de er it is a racing game where you run over deer or nagger you can choose that to you oh really yeah I hope he also worked on the highly successful releases the Street Fighter 30th Anniversary Collection SNK 40th anniversary and an upcoming samurai shodown what is it like 50th anniversary you've got to keep ramping it up yeah ramping it up the older heard the franchise of fighting games the better for Brandon frequent GDC speaker and a really great advocate for students and who want to enter the game ministry and develop careers in the game game industry and kind of the main reason he's here now is he was the lead writer on lab zeros indivisible which came out

in October this year a great game that will find out more about and here we go let's welcome Brandon Sheffield hey Brandon it's me it is you so you are the lead writer on indivisible or were its out now so your work is mostly done right mostly done is what I should say yeah it's mostly done can you tell us for listeners who aren't familiar what is indivisible and what exactly did you do on the game yeah indivisible is a it's a platforming action Metroidvania ish game with a kind of fighting game inspired battle system we did kind of make the mistake of calling it an action RPG and it it sort

of misses a lot of the core elements of an RPG like a lot of stats and leveling and equips and stuff but it does still have that kind of vibe which is why which is why we said it but it's more like a weird Metroidvania action turn-based fighting game yeah that's a lot easier - yeah it's much easier to remember that way yeah and it's got this I really like we can talk I mean I know you didn't worried directly on that battle system but you know it I like how it's just so fast-paced and it does have that kind of that immediacy like a fighting game might which means yes lems ear worked on skull girls right that's right they did skullgirls before and the battle system was very much Mike disease baby Mike Z being the the I guess the game play lead on skull girls and he's

also the creator of the engine that this whole game is made in yeah I'm terrible at the individual battle system but other people are good at it yeah that's good and so but it's made by Mike Z as he's known the rest of the world yeah Mike said yeah so the lead character is Ashna am i pronouncing that correctly yeah yeah and you did the dialogue which you know also would mean that you did a lot of the character creation and development and this option is such a strong character you can tell like what that she has had a strong vision behind her can you talk about how you began to lay the foundation for her as a character this it's an interesting one it's it's kind of a long meandering story and it's it she was less established than you might think I guess

I should I forgot to mention exactly what I did on the game and so yeah yeah I did I basically did all the writing that aside from the backer NPCs because it was it was like the highest ever game on IndieGoGo and so it had a lot of backers that put their own NPC dialogue in there so I didn't I did the basically the dialogue but the story beats were already established when I came in there was a big outline and it was all tied to specific gameplay stuff so it was an interesting challenge that we can talk about later to have to essentially write around existing story beats to try to get the results that we wanted and that's kind of in a way the story of Ana's development as well because she was originally created by the team and

they had a vision for her they had a you know she went through a lot of visual iterations but by the time I came on I knew what she looked like so I had that and when I also when I came on there was an existing script which I rewrote well actually every road is not exactly the right word been in there which I rewrote hi I just started over as what I did and one of one of the challenges that the team had with ajna was that because as she goes along she has to undergo some things that aren't fantastic and she has to make some choices that are not great and the player might not make so it was really important that she be likable and

that was the big issue before I came on was that she wasn't a likable character yeah let's talk about that because I read a blog post that you wrote that focus a lot on the importance of making this particular character likeable so what was the difference between the unlikable version versus the honestly completely likable version that ended up in the final game I would say what started out as like angsty teen which was a little more of like a coming-of-age kind of thing I opted to go toward a couple things one is humor and which I have a kind of complicated view of you know and maybe it's not complicated but I have a specific video we're going to talk about that yeah okay and and then the other thing was like so

a Merrill Cartwright is the creative director and was also the story lead she was like Audrina Audrina can be dumb she can just she can be stupid and and that's okay and so I really took that forward and made her not stupid but like it's incredibly straightforward just like she sees a goal and she goes toward it regardless of whether she knows what that goal is or how to get there or whatever she's just like here we go and I think that doing that allowed me to have a lot of fun with her without making fun of her because she's she's just like she's got that kind of tenacity of character that lets you

build a lot of things around her I guess yeah it's also she has a certain kindness to her even if she is you know her and her really good like she is kind of naive but she's also optimistic and she is kind yeah there's there's a there were kind of a couple of anime that I actually took cues from um one is azumanga daioh where there's a character called Tomo who is very energetic and always smacking people and there's a particular scene in that anime that was kind of an inspiration for rajma there's a bit where everybody all the although it's it's a bunch of schoolgirls and they're going on a class trip well not a class trip they're going on a trip to someone's summer home and Tomo when they

arrive after this long arduous journey grabs the keys and throws them into the grass because she's like wouldn't it be funny if someone grabbed the keys and threw them into the grass and everyone's like no and then she said yes wouldn't she throws it and then everybody has to spend like the next 30 minutes looking for the keys so that they can get into the house when they finally get them again she's like wouldn't it be funny if someone did it again and and said that scene was kind of partially an inspiration for for ajna and another is one called the promised Neverland I'm Alyssa I was waiting for Alyssa to pop in here go ahead I love the premise that Neverland say no I do yeah well it's it's none of the know

that spooky bits that are inspiring here it's just the the main female character in that she no matter what wants to save everybody all the time she's like every everyone around her is like let's compromise we got to do what makes the most sense to save as many people as possible and she's like no we're saving everyone even if it kills me we're saving everyone and that's that's another part that I got and kind of slotted into oddness character yeah so not only is this we character a young woman but also the whole game is inspired by the mythology of Southeast Asia so you know of course you have to be mindful of you know you know writing for young woman but you know also for a different you know something inspired by a different culture that you want to

make sure that you still you know are accurate and respectful towards how did you go about doing that well some some a lot of the work was done already in terms of that stuff because the mythology was set up by a very multicultural team so there was already a lot of thought and concern put into that and then for myself to make sure that I didn't kind of mess anything up too bad I did a lot of research like in the early part of the game you have to find this thing called the Kampf area galanga which is also known as a resurrection lily in order to recruit this character and so I did a bunch of searching to see what plants were used in kind of traditional

medicine in any of the regions that we were covering that also vaguely looks like the plant that we had and that was the one that I found that pretty much fit all those things and so any any time there was something where we needed to have a where we or an opportunity to have a cultural touch point I would try to do some research and find something that would meet that yeah hey Alyssa how's your cold conversation I'm having that interviewers I'm well aware when the person you're talking to is saying really interesting things I forget to turn my question bring up brain are I'm just like yeah no that is really interesting yeah the the the anime stuff he sounded like yeah you want oh no it's just that promise Neverland is an emotional journey and Emma's fantastic the character he was talking about and I could get a lot of that reflected in the

very little of seeing of indivisible I haven't got to play it yet I'm so behind on games but that's okay promise Neverland is an interesting one for me as a as a story exercise because I'm actually trying to not not exactly emulate but I'm trying to draw from it for the next game that I'm writing to because it has a great like cat-and-mouse tension between the various parties that are in involved in them in the mystery that's going that's unfolding and I want a really cool thing that I learned from it is that a great way to do mystery in a visual medium like this is to show you show it all these various sides that are competing you show their individual

internal dialogues and their stories within themselves so like they you know one one faction is discussing their plans and then another faction is discussing their plans so you as a viewer know more than then either one of those factions knows but at the same time both of those factions are hiding something both from you and from each other so you know as as a viewer you have more you feel like you have more information than then everybody in in the show does and that allows you to kind of speculate about what's gonna happen and try to think about how these threads could interweave but since the characters are also hiding from something from you there's a lot of potential for mystery and setups of complicated scenarios and things and I think it's really cool so I like that anime yeah and indivisible you know if

people haven't played it like there is I mean all of these things there's so many things that are internalized inside of Oz you know the whole like the premise of the game is that she accrues people and they live in her brain right yeah yeah that's yeah I guess I just wanted to clarify yeah she she absorbs everybody in that she meets into her brain and a lot of the a lot of the dumb jokes that I make in it are like I don't really like direct fourth-wall breaking because I think that's kind of weird and silly but I like having the characters be aware of how ridiculous a situation is within their the framing of their universe having one particular character rouse me often commenting on how Ozma is just essentially abducting people into her brain felt appropriate to me because I

would think that it was weird so yeah surely somebody else would as well yeah and that and that avoids you know the winking at you know into the camera yeah which you don't want to process for like writing humorous dialogue cuz it's so easy to like write a line and you're like oh this is the funniest thing in the world then it just like falls flat so like how do you go from like idea inception to actually what ends up in the game so what I tend to do is look at what I've got be it images of characters or various scenarios that have to happen and then I just start writing something and see if something interesting happens it's my kind of I had a background in writing kind of web comics for a while and that actually really helped me find my comedic voice I guess and how to

write dialogue between characters that sounded like humans were involved with it and so it's kind of a similar process where I'll I'll start from an image or an idea and then build it up from there and sometimes you know I wound up writing myself into a corner and the whole thing is just terrible and I hate it and so then I'll scrap it and rewrite it from scratch but you know once once you've got a few decent jokes in there you can recycle them with restraint as the game moves along and that that's really that actually like people love callbacks and stuff so for the people that pay attention that's really handy but you can also sometimes some of the some of the like blocks of texts that I will scrap are one where I'm recycling too much and I wind

up feeling like I'm trying to make everything a joke and and and those winds up being just just terrible yeah that's my life I just did it now so like I think we were really established that you and I have known each other for a pretty long time yeah we're good friends so I'm playing by the way this is total what is it clusion and you know yeah it's happening right now be aware everybody know but I'm playing indivisible and within the first you know five minutes of gameplay and I'm encountering NPCs the dialog I mean they read like text like like yes as far as like the personality you know is there I mean I'm pretty sure that if I was playing indivisible I'd be able to be like wait and I didn't know you know that you're working on the game I would

be like wait did Brandon yeah yeah well go ahead my I did a short talk at GDC like I don't know how many years ago of eight years ago or something like that which was about how you should make games for yourself mm-hmm because I I think I believe that if you make something that really resonates with you then and showing a perspective then people will actually like that much more and find it more interesting than if and more engaging than if you do something that's generic and for everybody so you know obviously this game is made by a lot of people and all the gorgeous art and music and everything is by a whole group of folks but the writing was something that was kind of kind of my part that I got to

own and so I was able to just be like this is this is my joke this is my style of joke that has been in my brain for some time and so now here you may have it and so it really was kind of like I was writing jokes to my friends and I think the important part of that is like say I'm making a dumb joke to you or any other person that I've known for a long time I assume that you will get it I don't feel like I need to explain it to you or whatever and I think that having a trust in the audience to get your joke is a big part of it yeah yeah it's almost like you know we're referring to these as jokes but they're not things you know they're not like jokes there is just

humorous so for example really early on in the game you run into a guy with a bunch of sticks and then he's just like I like to carry a bunch of sticks I like to build stuff with it I like to sit on fire yeah I like to set people with them and something like that that's not the exact I'm not looking at the game right now it's not a direct quote but it's just kind of that there's that kind of like oh that's like you know that's that's silly you know type thing and it's just and that kind of humor plays out through you know so much of the game that it really it makes it feel like loyalty you know there's still some heavy things that happen in the game but there are these it like really micro scenario instances where you get to meet one of the very many NPCs in this game and you just you know their personality right away which let's let's talk about that began this that there's a whole lot

of characters in this game and how do you write for all those keep track of them give them their own unique personalities well I can't say that I did the greatest job of that but I I did sort of try the with with like that sticks guy I think the like this guy one one way to get people on board with your character is to just kind of have their first sentence almost describe who they are completely and and that guy that guy the first thing he says when you click on him is oh yes bale of sticks and and of course the reason that came about is they just showed me NPCs that I needed to write for and I was like all those guys carrying sticks what if you look

what if he loves it what if that's this whole deal and you know it makes it a lot how much of that how much sorry to interrupt but how much of that is just you ask somebody who's on deadline writing on a project just like I can't think of anything else he's got sticks let's do something with sticks well yeah there's definitely some of that there's a there's a character in one of the other other regions Connell that has they sent me this character and he's looking down into this white bowl and I was like it just looks like he's staring at milk and so I made him a milk fortune teller who reads the milk to tell you what is gonna happen and it's just like so stupid but it is the very first thing that I thought of I like that though yeah and and I find that when when I'm under pressure and I have

to think of the absolute simplest or first thing that I think of and do it a lot of my better work comes from that just like a gut reaction got to do something this young and then probably can't never done yeah that's just how writers and reporters and you know just in general yeah great I feel like I mean we must so in terms of writing all these various characters it was tough because there are something like I should really know the real answer but there's something like 34 voiced characters in this video game and bunch like that yeah and you don't have this is only a minor spoiler but you don't have access to all of them all the time and so that made it a real challenge

because there's a lot of up until the very end we were still deciding who with some characters like when you could even get them and so they couldn't be part of the main scenario so I had to essentially pair the main scenario down to only the characters I knew you could get and even then there's still like eight of them which is too many to put into any one conversation so I had to limit conversations to four at the absolute max three would be a better number and obviously two is much easier but since we had so many characters I had to keep inserting them into conversations so you'd remember that they existed or so that they could have some sort of an arc and all that kind of stuff and we wound up having to relegate some of the side characters there their

whole arc only takes place during their recruit and loyalty quests that they have because there just wasn't a lot of space to put them otherwise which what imagine it is regrettable but with a voice acting like deadlines - it just added like a whole bunch more pressure on top of what's already a very time-sensitive process oh yes because of voice acting I actually had to be creative wise I had to be finished first because we had to you know record everything and implemented it in the game and all of that takes a lot of time so I had to and maybe I wasn't the very first but I had to finish up while other folks were still working away on designing stuff and implementing cutscenes and all that sort of thing so

it made me really nervous because there's no going back from voice acting there's there's no no return point because unless you can get people back in the studio which is expensive and is us not going to happen you're you're stuck with the dialog that you've got and so if anything changes then you have to find a creative ways to work around that yeah that sounds scary it's a little spooky [Laughter] [Music] earlier you mentioned you were basically handed you know all the story beats and on top of that also we didn't mention like this this is an indiegogo funded game it's a two million dollar indie go-go funded game so it was big so a lot of the backers on there they what what did they offer it was like their own dialogue or they had their own dialogue

and their own character the the rule that I made because I actually didn't I didn't edit the NPC dialogue for the for the backer characters someone else did that but the the rule that I set was that backers could not write the main characters or and any of the any of the core care any of the playable characters or even our NPCs they had to they could only do monologues for themselves yeah and then somebody added those all together and had to deal with all that stuff and then they just got put put all over the place and so if you want to see a chubby mer man or a furry cat girl or whatever they're in there and as far as the story beasts go what was that like where it's like okay this is what's gonna happen now you finish it up yeah it was interesting because there were

definitely things that I would have liked to change but was unable to and it's it's been interesting to see the results of those changes or not the changes the results how people react to those scenes like for example we had a huge huge is the wrong word long is the correct word long argument about this is not really a spoiler either because it happens in the first 10-15 minutes but there's a character called dar who kills oznas father and and he winds up being the first person that you recruit into your brain and I was against that I was like can we at least have him not be the direct killer of the father maybe it's it's under his orders or something like that but not have him be the the the one

who actively killed him because it makes it so difficult for him and ajna to be together in the same space and everyone was very adamant that he should in fact do this so you wind up with this tension of agenda carrying around her father's killer in her brain and being her only companion for the first portion of the game and so though like everyone thought that it was important for later events for that to be for that to be true and so I tried to you know write around it as best I could and so reading reactions to that part have been very interesting because some people are like Audrina took no time to grieve this makes no sense and they didn't like it and then other people are like this throws the traditional RPG narrative on its head

and is a good example of how this story seems like it's going to go down one lane of tropes but in fact goes another way so it's been interesting to to read that both of us were kind of correct yeah yeah I mean how does that make you I mean that it isn't like well what were your thoughts when you're when you're reading all all these reading the comments the other comments I would say that the majority of people's complaints I was like yeah I get that there were only a few where I was like that's not that's not quite right but I think the the ones were I didn't agree totally were the ones where they were where were they didn't de couple writing and story which I wouldn't really expect people to but a lot of people actually did they were

like I love the characters but I don't love this aspect of the story or something like that but ultimately I was really happy with the results because most people did love the whole story it seems and we made a bunch of people cry which is good that was good that's what you wanted that's that's proof now can't you know this is the answer can videogames make you cry and here we are yep we did it yeah and it's it's definitely nice to read that the game made people laugh a lot and then also made them cry and they got to feel several ranges of emotion going on in the one game so overall I'm pretty pretty happy with reading the reviews I didn't really like hearing zero punctuation review that one was kind of not so cool but otherwise I somehow

missed it yeah yeah he's very snarky about a lot of things that are like fair enough but kind of out of any one individual person's control and and thus difficult to feel like this those comments should be as biting as they were how does like reading reviews for something you put your heart and soul and your time and do us to be like horrifying I would be my personal word for it but there's some value look like how you're explaining it in reading what other people have to think and like criticism of the thing that you made how do you kind of like go about getting the useful information from reviews or kind of knowing when to be like no I can't let this get to me that that takes completely wrong yeah for I think I've found that somehow perhaps due to a long time of being a journalist and just being very online

and such I seem to have a slightly thicker skin when it comes to reading these kinds of things because if I feel like I did a pretty good job that's that's my defense against against everything else and there will be people that say that they hate it and you know that won't stop me reading the review or the the commentary cuz I'll be curious to see what they have to say about like if they say they hate the writing I'll keep reading the rest to see if they really liked something else and you know I'll often find that someone didn't like the writing but they were kept playing through the game because they liked the battle system or they compared the platforming to Celeste or they thought that the game was too pretty to stop playing or something like that and then I can share that back with the team and have them I don't know feel a little

nice about it so that's that's valuable in itself and another thing is it's worth still sifting through a lot of these just general comments because for for example I found someone on the internet who on Twitter who was making fan art of Aegina and Taurani who's kind of like her mentor character that that shows up later and Taurani is she's she's sort of modeled after a Thai deity so I you know found a word that an older Thai woman could give to it affectionately to a younger Thai woman and found this word Luke's au which is basically like my child and this person that I found on Twitter that was doing this fan art was

a Thai person and was really focusing on the use of that word and writing it in Thai along with the images that they were drawing and it was great because it felt like that person I mean I wonder how many times that person had gotten to see a time of endearment in an English language video game before and they were also validating for me that the term was used correctly because I'm always nervous when I look up something from any culture that's not my own and then try to put it into a video game in correct context and so you know it was worth sifting through tons of good bad mediocre tweets to find something like that where it's like this totally resonated with somebody and that's fantastic yeah get that connection and it's good that the word didn't end up

being like jerkface or something yeah I mean I I got it from from Thai friends so I had a reasonable amount of confidence that it was gone but yeah yeah yeah and of course like there's like there is the underlying you know concept here of all the benefits of having an inclusive team when you're when you're writing a story not just like this but you know any kind of story just get more interesting characters and a like more viewpoints on on you know different ways that people you know live yeah and I was I was a little add some trepidation around being a Caucasian dude who's writing the story I mean writing all the dialogue you know for this very diverse cast but you know I realized that having a diverse team behind you all of I mean not behind me

but um with me good safe Mike Z thinks I'm too arrogant anyway having having this group of people that not only were responsible for crafting the story and the characters visually and story beat wise in the first place but having them look at everything I wrote and you know veto stuff if it seems like it's wrong or you know just add a bit of themselves if they can or need to or want to somewhere I didn't I didn't do as much of adding of themselves as I could have because of time pressure but there was there was some of that and it that all just kind of made it so much easier to make a game that has a lot of

inclusivity a lot of different kinds of people without making it like a big deal or a big point um I read an article that someone wrote recently about how they were happy that all these characters were hanging out together and allowed to just just be there they didn't have to be like year this race and I'm this race we got to figure out how to work together yeah um people everybody was just like hey it's a new friend or I don't like that person and it didn't that didn't follow down any particular lines and it's unfortunate that that's rare but I guess it is rare and I'm happy we were able to get somewhere with that yeah I mean to be fair when you and I first met we were like you're white I'm half Filipino yeah so well we need to wrap up

here Brandon was only supposed to be on for five minutes really interesting one thing you know as I mentioned earlier you really do a lot to give young people you know the end from the information and you know that they need to you know get into the game industry or navigate through the game industry you do that you know through projects at GDC and just in general but for for writers who are trying to get into the industry you know what's what's Brandon Sheffield's tip for that yeah so I actually recently did a little talk at a group called game

heads in Oakland which is all about kind of youth of color breaking into the game industry and stuff and I mean number one tip is of course do writing do a bunch of writing and get critiques and try to do better and realize that you can always do better and like this isn't exactly game specific either but I also think it's super important for people to figure out what their own taste is and write things based on that I remember in high school I got invited to some like writers forum or something like that and I decided this was going to be a good time to challenge myself and write a sci-fi story that was out of my comfort zone and it totally fell flat

and what I learned from that experience was not that I shouldn't have written a sci-fi story or something but that I shouldn't have tried to write so far beyond my feelings in my experience and whenever you can not that people shouldn't branch out because they obviously should but if you are going to branch out you need to ground it in stuff that you know super well first so you can take the the germ of something mundane and very familiar to you and which might be familiar to other people like the particular ritual that you have for getting cereal in the morning or something like that and then we pan out from this cereal thing - were in a hellscape or whatever that it just it helps to ground the experience and helps

people to identify with it and I I find that that's a mistake that a lot of young writers make is they try to go straight for the fantasy bit without doing the here's how this relates to my life and this is why it came from me as a person rather than anyone else then in terms of game stuff people should make twine games I think that's good because twine is free and it's really easy to use and you can make visual novels with choices and things another tip that I have is if you write dialogue try to read it out loud and sound see if it sounds extra stupid because that happens to me a lot I'll write something and I'll be like is this fine and then I'll try to read it out loud or read it in my head it'll be like yeah this is a there's not something a human being would say how loudly do you recommend

reading it out loud just the top of your lungs is probably okay good I'm doing it right yeah just get on public transit and just scream it out but yeah also just right right for any any game that you can my first video game that I did any writing for was oddly enough a Capcom collection with digital Eclipse back in 2005 in digital eclipses first iteration and I was just writing some dumb quiz questions for a they had like a there's this capcom game called quiz & Dragons which had a bunch of quiz questions in it that were about Capcom and they wanted to read renew those and so I wrote some new Capcom trivia and you know that of course didn't do very much for me career-wise because I was a

definitely a footnote in that video game and very little of it had to do with me but when I next then went to someone who needed a writer I knew they needed a writer I was like hire me because I can write things and also I have one game credit and then you can see it and so having a little company called Capcom okay so having any any game credit can can really help it is fun that you know now I guess I've been doing writing in games for almost 15 years now and I can finally claim to have a million-seller and that's Street Fighter 30th anniversary and it is like there's absolutely no way that that sold a million copies because of me but I can

tell people that though and that's what matters yeah oh that's so good so well we'll wrap it up here then indivisible lab 0 it's brandon sheffield lead right around the game highly recommend it not just because he's my friend but it really it really is good it does convey so many so many emotions the battle system is so much fun and check it out and thanks a lot for joining us Brandon thank you it was enjoyable what a weird way to say that what do you mean [Music] [Music]

all right we're back for a little bit this is where we reflect on our guests reflect about them yeah this is where yeah Brandon's gone now yeah this is where we talk crap so I got I got some juicy juicy information on Brandon Sheffield now that he was gone the man has 20 game consoles connected to his television set like all at once like that's yes all at once I'm like staring at my TV in the background right now and just like you can see the cords hanging from behind the shelves and just this nightmare that if like a cat got back there they'd be stuck forever like I can't honey yeah I'm looking I'm looking at my entertainment system that has one PlayStation 4 connected to it and one Apple TV and it looks like a rat's nest so he must have some kind of system that

makes that back on the podcast just to talk about cord management yeah yeah we're gonna back on for that for the GDC we need to have GDC should have a cord management soon I think that would be well attended no but Brandon we didn't even get to talk about it he's a he's a multi-faceted person but he collects games and he is he collects old hardware and things like that so it's it's there yeah he he he knows that stuff that is an area of interest and expertise and yeah well what did you think about the conversation we have like I said I kept kind of like it's mostly the cold but I kept kind of like just zoning out and listening like I was just listening to a very good podcast conversation and forgetting to contribute but really good yes you this wasn't just a livestream like for you yeah yeah no I just come in to you through my own exclusive little interviews I can listen to and not

contribute to but I always like when we end up either in here that a couple times have been on the GDC twitch channel we're talking to like writers and stuff like that cuz I try to poke in him like okay but how do you how do you write good how do you make words great and every time it's just like oh yeah I've just I just do and it just kind of works out like that but the that was kind of the case here too where I tried to lay digging like how does how does humor work how do you make jokes funny and just he explained its process but like the thing that's not being said there is these are people with twenty fifteen years and like experience and that it's just like a practice skill over and over and over again like he was saying with um just getting your first like game credits but like all that kind of builds into experience it gives you the ability to just kind of like not overthink your jokes and just look at like the art you're given and be like oh this is a stick guy this is the milk guy and just kind of like make that a funny productive thought and that's kind of like a secret expertise I would pick yeah just yeah just get it I mean you know writers and journalists not just

those professions about anyone I don't know if there's there's a certain kind of person that can only do anything on a deadline yeah you know and I'm kind of and I'm sure that every single person that you know I have worked with in in journalism or writing or whatever they're the same way I don't want to say what yeah this case in point my other takeaway that I want to sneak in is anime is good and everyone should watch it yeah and apparently you watch anime interesting for people should go watch the promised Neverland it's on crunchyroll which is an anime viewing subscription it's like Netflix of anime but the things he was saying about characters and they're kind of shaped like I hadn't thought that deeply into it I was just consuming my media but the

way he was describing how certain characters are very driven and each the the conflict of the entire series to set up at the beginning and then it's a smaller micro internal conflicts that create the suspense and like I know I'm really interested to see what game that manifests into because just how he was describing it it was like really great so yeah it's it's something that you know where this just sounds like an interesting I haven't seen it but I haven't seen a lot of anime transformers you know count one yeah but you know that's such an interesting way to create suspense without hiding everything it's like we're going to show you everything and you know we'll be able to draw the suspense from there is what it's yeah it's just like very like character driven turns where everything feels it's there's like mystery novels you'll read where you'll get to the end you'll guess who the killer is and it's like actually it's this guy because of this thing you that was kind of obscured for you and you don't feel justified in it but the kind of turns he was talking about are

those where you don't see it coming but it still feels justified and like it fits into the overall narrative yeah thank you everybody for doing the Christmas anime i will review anime on this podcast if you let me do not yeah we can do that we'll add a segment and Melissa sponsored by subway now we have no sponsorship what were your big takeaways from the conversation now that I've blabbed on oh no no oh you're not blabbing it's I don't know a lot a lot of the stuff that Brandon you know talks about our our conversations that I've had with him about about writing and I think with him I love the advice that he had at the end about you know finding finding your

finding your voice and you know not you know I I could tell that he was trying to walk a line between you know write what you know and I'll spot you know and also you know writing like branching out you know it into new topics and just to be to be careful about that but it is it's just an interesting thing that I think that you can only figure out I mean you can watch YouTube videos you can watch you know that that talk about process you can watch Brandon's you know talk you know on GDC vault or GDC YouTube but the only way that you're gonna be able to figure that out is like writing and I know that probably is really annoying whenever any you know young writer asks for advice and the advice adjustable yes

write more but that that really is what it it is what it is I mean you just have to keep on trying and I do think that there is a point where it you know clicks or becomes more clear to you about the style like your writing style like you know if I'm sitting around and you know trying to write like philip k dick or Ray Bradbury it's not gonna go so well for me and and in fact hasn't gone well for me but that's kind of a thing I really like that idea of just kind of like figuring out you know what you like and I also liked when talking about writing the dialogue for invisible indivisible it's kind of that same idea excuse me like you know writing don't

write necessarily for other people I mean obviously writing for other people but do something that you know write something that you enjoy you know something that you enjoy you know there's gonna be somebody else out there that that it connects with so yeah there's yeah there was a lot of stuff there and you know it's kind of nice to talk to somebody that that you know about their craft because usually we're just you know but yeah yeah it's great so I think that it that about does it for this one you need to get loaded up on night it's cool it's a ear pressure so benadryl is what I have to do but I can't function as a human being after taking that so it's got to be like suffer through the workday and then just go to sleep all right yeah or you could just take it off all right well we'll figure that out later on and

thanks everybody for listening you can subscribe to us follow us on Spotify you know rate us if you love us and you know you can also find us on on GDC on gdzd g-tubes if you buy the Apple podcast thing and then what's the Android one it's just Google Play right yeah Google Play Music even though it's not music but yeah you'll find us I trust all yeah all right all right this is Chris Kraft hey thanks everyone bye [Music] [Music]

you [Music]