Working Frames

One of my favourite theories of mind (yes I do have them) is Bateson’s idea of the frame. A frame is a set conventions/rules/declarations/.. which the mind can dynamically switch on, thus giving a second (usually high prioritized) meaning to the perceptions affected by this frame. This enables us to see fictional worlds on a computer screen and allows for the intriguing interplay of play and earnestness to happen.

The “One Quest A Week” project was a working frame, a context in which I voluntarily inserted myself in order to reach certain goals (becoming a better quest designer, learning to handle work better etc.). Explicit component of “One Quest A Week”-frame was the idea of continous improvement. The idea was to not only play around with one’s own knowledge while learning, but to also evaluate and adjust the frame in which the work is happening.

This is why I’ve been changing the blog’s form (e.g. which sections appear, format of the heading) every now and then: As a sign (to my mind) that I want to stay in a flexible state of mind and in order to catalyze other changes. In the end, I can only recommend this approach – I believe it was vital for the successes this project brought me (and maybe also one of you, dear readers).

Results

Half a year ago I already wrote down a good portion of the thoughts I’d repeat here. Let it suffice to say that I’m quite happy about the range and selection of topics I’ve been able to cover; in the meantime I’m not entirely content about the amount of playable quests that were produced. This is mainly due to me not committing to an engine, so I’d avice myself and any other person to do exactly that as fast as possible.

What else? Well, I realized at some point that being able to use non-scientific sources (a lot of wikipedia) and apostrophes all over the place really is freeing when you’re coming from a place where most of your writings were for school or university. ‘Tis great.

The Future

Now that I release myself from the obligation to post here, surely fewer posts will appear. But they will – writing down thoughts from the brain helps me a lot with structuring them. And I like the idea of journaling my learning process here – in fact, I always wanted to do that but always lacked the commitment to really start. Obligations, after all, aren’t purely bad. Who would’ve thunk.

Anywhoo I’ve cleaned up the posts that were imported from Blogger and made the blog page of my site a bit prettier so – I don’t know – feel free to (re-)visit what happened the last year. There are two or three posts that weren’t posted to Twitter yet, so there’s something new to explore even for any potential regular reader from over there!

Conclusion

Closing this chapter calls for some relief to be felt, ’cause – the blog did have its stressy phases (remember that one month (this one) in which I had to write 9 instead of the usual 4-5 posts to catch up?).

Hope you all have a good time! Wish you good luck with your doings and a happy new year!

C-Can you feel it?

Approaching the end, this blog series literally got more emotional. We’re ending this on a high note: Empathy not only as a tool for good storytelling, but also as a principle.

The Empathy Principle

Good ol’ German Wikipedia differentiates three kinds of empathy:

• authentic – feeling with someone else / the same as them
• functional – understanding how someone else feels
• compassion – feeling for someone

Here we are interested in the authentic kind, more specfically: Authentic empathy towards the work’s part which most obviously drives it, carries its story at a given moment. This is usually the main character, but may be so much else: A certain movement in a scene, an object, a city, etc.

In itself, authentic empathy can be understood as resonance, vibing with something, being on the same (wave-)length.

To me this implies already what Kiingo Storytelling confirms: Empathy is key to the audience’s attachement, immersion. Check out this quote from the exquisite article I linked just before:

if we can’t empathize or identify with your story’s main character, we won’t actually care how your story turns out

Ross Hartmann, The Secret Ingredient: Empathy – Kiingo

Now to me this isn’t a requirement only but also a chance. Because, as Hartmann notes further down by quoting in turn William C. Martell

good story has some sort of a fantasy (although it doesn’t have to be a positive fantasy) that we want to explore in our life

William C. Martell, Screenwriting Tip Of The Day

Empathy as part of a principle allowing you to spread something good in the world… This, I think, is a beautiful note to end this last theory section of One Quest Design A Week on.

Quest Design Iteration: Introducing Leonora

Ocularis, so I’ve concluded, doesn’t create enough of a bond between player and avatar, whom is Leonora. Players are interested in side characters (fairies and Palli) but I didn’t feel a more than merely sympathetic connection to Leonora. I think there are a few reasons for this:

• the intro cinematic – showcasing Leonora and several quite cool scenes as a leader and strong person and lastly how she fails at the very end – is missing and merely readable in text form
• Leonora has amnesia and thus isn’t that strong at the game’s beginning (in the Kiingo article you can read how and why audience’s are easier attached to strong characters)
• the main menue emphasizes the landscape + crystals/magic and doesn’t show Leonora at all (note that the main menue creates the first impression!)
• in dialogues there is little way to express yourself (although I’ve been starting to revise this already)
• the tutorials, which add some background information on Leonora, are written in third person about here, creating a distance to the character

Having identified the problems, here are some potential solutions I came up with:

• produce the intro cinematic ( :))) ) – this also solves the second point, since after viewing the intro the audience will know that Leonora usually is not weak, but rather a quite powerful character who has fallen
  (I wish we as a society wouldn’t be drawn that much to stronger characters.. But let this be my trick to hook the player onto weakness)
• add a Warframe-like camera rail portraying Leonora, the Ocularis relic and the distant Mundus Omnium (the world we are thrown into) in the main menue when the cinematic hasn’t been played yet
• at the gameplay start: a choice to wake up instead of Leonora waking up all by herself, more ways to understand her – by interactions?
• rewriting the tutorials in first person?

I realize there is still some work to do here. A lot of my ideas hinge on the cinematic, I guess this needs implementation then. It is interesting – I can easily imagine people bonding more easily with her when her rise and fall are shown more explicitely, but on the other side – from text to cinematic there is but a change of representation, not of information. This, then, is the power of the concrete versus the abstract.

Feedback Suggestions

• Have you ever written a main character? Did you think about how the audience bonds with them?
• Do you, too, think the cinematic will do a lot of heavy lifting regarding the bond to Leonora?

Conclusion

While this surely is no last goodbye, it does be a minor one: This post concludes the core of my One Quest Design A Week project, started ca. one year ago. I’ll write a reflective post when christmas has passed, to wrap things up, but already now I can say: Doing such an enterprise has been a propeller and a heavy stone, an achievement and a failure, well – all in all, a success. I can only recommend this experience.

I’m happy to conclude the 52nd post with the things I’ve written.

Until next time – a merry merry christmas!

Attachments

Seven years ago, I started spending around 270h in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, my first major role-playing game experience. I was catched by the atmosphere, which drove me through the game. The fact that this was a new and long-enduring experience contributed heavily to the fact that I formed an attachement to the game, with me now being able to remember it nostalgically.

What do people love and cherish, despise and detest? Surface appearance and behavioral utility play relatively minor roles. Instead, what matters is the history of interaction, the associations that people have with the objects, and the memories they evoke.

Don Norman, Emotional Design: Why we love (or hate) everyday things

We see that spending time together with something is important for attachment, as are the interactions, associations.

Quests are a tool and a space to create attachements. A tool, because they are a means to structure how the player spends time with the game. A space, because they themselves open up a frame in which a small history can occur.

Let’s see how this applies to the Skyrim quest I’m building.

Skyrim – The Return of Helmdall – Implementations

For this post I tried implementing actors, locations and first dialogues from last posts quest design. This, naturally, had to happen with the Creation Kit. I had already implemented Helm standing around in Whiterun and now proceeded to add Helmdall (for both I customized appearance). Then I searched a location for the dungeon through which the Dragonborn and Helm would fight towards Helmdall, who’d have a camp somewhere inside.

This, as one might imagine, wasn’t trivial because I didn’t want to build a new dungeon and finding a spot in an existing one isn’t easily done. I decided to go with Bleak Falls Barrow, since its likely that the player has gone there at some point and because we can now add yet another layer of synergy questing to this place

Consequently, the travelling path is quite simple:

In the grave there were several suitable locations for Helmdall’s hideout, but I decided to stick to my plan and place it at the very end of the dungeon. Now, the player has to fight through everything (I hope you can reset the enemies..). Helmdall has set up camp in a small chamber behind the boss room:

So far so good. I then proceeded to trying to implement some dialogue, but it is at this point that I failed: Even though I tried following several advices in the case of strange dialogue behaviour (which was the case), I weren’t able to fix things.

Well, this blog never saw me writing that I failed, so it’s been about time I guess. What means failing, I’m wondering right now – I mean getting stuck in modding isn’t something that is particular uncommon. I believe failing is about setting yourself a goal (in my case successfully implementing dialogue) and not reaching that goal in the time frame you committed to achieving it.

Anyway, I wanted to talk about attachments! The quest I wrote – in my opinion – supports attachment to Skyrim, since it repeats its style in a new and meaningful variation. It might also be a space that creates attachments itself, if the small story around Helm and Helmdall works for players. So that’s that.

Feedback Suggestions

• What should be deemed more important for attachment, duration, interaction or association? Maybe something else?
• Do you have any ideas for writing Helm & Helmdalls personality and speech?

Conclusion

Winter is here, which did have an influence on my choice of game last and this post. But truth be told, Skyrim was on my list since the very beginning and I’m glad I got to finally do something in the Creation Kit.

Hope you’re having a good time!

Emotional Design

The exact source is Donald A. Norman, a well-known designer. His first book, “The Design of Everyday Things” focused – much like this blog did so far – on the functionality of design. One might say it considered function over emotion. To me the main reasons why I didn’t come earlier to this topic are twofold:

• I’m better at understanding functional, clearly distinguishable, mathematical etc. things
• The design discourse I’m drawing on is the same way

But now, let’s start with a simple and important first quote into this topic (so I believe, at least):

happy people are more effective in finding alternative solutions and, as a result, are tolerant of minor difficulties

Don Norman, Emotional Design: Why we love (or hate) everyday things

This tells me, as a designer, that not iterating the guidance to some feature of my more complex design towards perfection is okay – if

1. I manage that my user-audience consistently gets into a positive spirit before using it
2. There is a way to find a solution

So the lesson here is to provide the user-audience with tidbits of joy every now and then.

Skyrim – The Return of Helmdall – QDD

In a way, this very idea is what makes a generic fetch quest something special. The Witcher 3 Quest Designers had the rule of always adding a twist to a quest, which in the end is just a tool to create a feeling/emotion.

This is what I’ve done in a quest design for Skyrim.

Warrior-son Helm Helmdallsson asks the Dragonborn to go onto a quest with him and tells how his life is dedicated to the positive image his dead father, a famous figure in Skyrim’s battles. Upon fighting with Helm through the dungeon he chose they surprisingly find his father alive (there’s a reason why this is no coincidence).

Based on decisions made on the first meeting and now during the confrontation, various narrative and ludic endings are possible.

You can check out the full quest design document here:

You can see how the preparation, execution and aftermath of the twist (Helmdall is still alive) immediately give a whole new level of meaning to the ques, elevating it beyond the generic “Collect 10 roots”.

Feedback Suggestions

• Have you ever concerned yourself with anything adjacent to emotional design? Do you know any sources to dig into?
• Do you agree that twists usually improve a quest? What else might there be that allows for a stronger affective/emotional response to a design?

Conclusion

At the end of one journey, another opens up quite clearly. I feel that – regarding affections and their relation to the more functional aspects of design – I’ve only discovered the tip of an iceberg in my blog series.

But – and well that’s a joy! – the blog doesn’t have to end this year (though my frequency and determination of writing things is surely gonna change).

Have a good time!

Attention

The idea of attention shouldn’t be new to most people, and the design principle connected to that won’t be particularly revealing either. Attention is a mechanism of the human brain that manages the focus of its inner and outer senses: Where to look? What to listen to? Do I concentrate on thinking? This is relevant to video game designers, because more attention generally allows for more immersion too, if the right thing is focused.

That’s what makes the principle of preferring content attractiveness very interesting: It states that people, in general, tend to focus their attention on the content that is most attractive and loose interest, if something falls below a certain (felt) standard of attractiveness.

This idea is taken from the same video I linked last week:

Therein, Senior Cinematic Designer Paweł Ochocki and Narrative Director Igor Sarzyński remark that the degradation of attractiveness is particularly relevant for content that takes more time. So in those cases, usually extra measures have to be taken to keep the player engaged.

Ocularis: Improving Player Engagement

The longer dialogue scenes of Ocularis have had exactly this problem: They were long (usually around 8, but up to 11 lines) with max. one choice near the end and no other happenings or interaction possibilities in between.

I took a few counter-measures in a test-case to see what works:

• adding timed player choices with no impact
• providing loot to pick up while talking
• filling the scene with more framing objects
• lighting the scene in different colors, differentiating certain spots and paths

This video showcases what I added (just imagine all those things missing!):

In the future, I’d like the fairies to be more interactive (letting them move when the player runs near/through them) or at least more dynamic (different behaviours in different phases of the dialogue), redirecting attention more to this actor.

Feedback Suggestions

• What design guideline or tool can you think of to improve guiding player attention?
• Do you think the fairies in the background of the scene I showed are too distractive?

Conclusion

The idea that content attractiveness and thus player attention by default deteriorates over time, made me think about other media as well. How, for example, Twitter and Instagram encourage quick, punchy posts. Or how I myself like these short blog posts very much in favor of a longer essay.

Anyway, hope you’re having a wonderful time!

Staging

For any game with seamless camera direction (meaning e.g. no or almost no cutscenes), staging is probably one of the main tools to create cinematographic effects. To understand what I mean, let me first state that seamlessness implies no cuts or changing camera perspectives – leaving the player in control of his cinematic experience.

Now staging, if we follow the classic book Film Art, is the movement and performance of objects or living things in the space captured by the camera. This encompasses thus where and when things are arranged.

If we think of the player as an actor in the scene, then we can see that by staging things in certain ways, we may guide the player into staging themselves appropriately.

This idea has been discussed on the abovementioned stream many times, and was elaborated with more focus in the following wonderful video (I can only recommend):

Ocularis: Scenic Moments

While Ocularis is in 3rd person perspective, it does have seamless transitions between its gameplay modes – namingly exploration, combat and dialogs.

For dialogs – since free movement is still enabled there – it is important to at least show the player where they should be. That way the chance is good that they won’t strive too far away from the scene, limiting thus potential immersion breaking.

Here are some examples of how we employed the idea of staging in various dialogue moments:

In playtests it showed that doing this work alone is not enough: Having the freedom to walk (and actually standing the whole time) creates a feeling of “wanting-to-move”. The video gives some tools to work around that and I myself have some ideas too, but I haven’t come to try them out yet. Maybe in some future post

Feedback Suggestions

• What is your understanding of the term “staging”?
• Do you have any proposals of how to lock the players attention on one spot?

Conclusion

Viewing that video really got me interested, some might say hooked, in some further matters which I have not or only barely touched so far: attention, emotions, personal relationships with characters, to name a few. With some, I also don’t feel confident enough yet to write about them. But we’ll see and time will tell.

Hope you’re having a good (christmas) time!

Quest and Plot Archetypes, Genre

Given a medium, it is imminent that its rules for creation of content are – in general – set. There are of course works that push beyond what we thought were the rule-induced bounds of a medium – but the fact remains that these works too are subject to rules given by the medium – only our world view of the medium’s rules have changed.

In opposition to that, genres and plot/quest/scene/.. archetypes are extra rules or conventions a creator laid down for themselves. For example in western, the standoff scene is a classic rule scene archetype you might deploy. These things are interesting, because they allow for pretty solid creating: You usually have a probed and explored structure to follow and usually can’t do as much wrong as if when you invent your own structure.

The downside, of course, is getting into the treadmill of mainstream and uniform content.

Anyway, here is my inspiration for this particular concept: Brandon Sandersons Lectures on Writing. Lecture #2: Plot Part 1

Snaccoon: Quest Archetype

What is Snaccoon? It is a 3D puzzle-platformer in which you’re playing a cute racoon who is determined to collect as much snacks as possible. For this game quests are planned, but before I can start designing single quests, I need to figure out how quests in this game work – a quest archetype is needed.

Here we see that these things can be useful in general: As a guideline for bigger teams or even yourself only, ensuring a consistent experience for the player. It also helps fostering a certain style you want to see in your work – for example in Snaccoon I opted for both a tracking shot and an arrival moment to keep a cinematic feel and dedicate a place for non-avatar-centric exposition, which would allow us to shed some more light on the city, the place, the NPCs, specific art assets … Here is how I noted the structure (in german):

Feedback Suggestions

• What quest/plot archetypes can you think of?
• Do you understand the archetype I wrote?
• Do you know of a better (or more structured) notation?

Conclusion

Once again, Sanderson has served us well. What I like about him in particular is how grounded his ideas are in actual writing. Knowledge from practicing.

Hope you’re having a good time!

Time is short and I enjoy writing these small but kinda punchy posts, so no in-depth philosophical inquiry about that topic (though if you want to read such a thing (in german), then look here).

Pacing

There have been posts on this blog mentioning and even defining the term pacing. Much of this influenced the seminary paper I linked above from which I’ll cite my most recent understanding:

Pacing is the arrangement of game-aesthetic features relative to the arrangement of other perceptual content.

This is a generous definition. Under the right curcumstances (meaning how you define game etc.) it encompasses things such as the relation of colors on the screen to goals you make up in your head. But more importantly and most interestingly, we can look at something like the intensity over time. That’s quite helpful, because entertainment relies a lot on providing you with different paces, intensities, variations – and pacing is the term to talk about these things.

But onwards to today’s inspirational link: Katarina Gyllenbäck’s blog, which very much drove to dive deeper into this topic.

Ocularis: Morhind’s Sword

This time I’ve returned to doing a preproduction part of quest design: Writing a quest design document for a section of Ocularis’ future story.

It prominently features a pacing graph:

You might see here that I’ve been employing a certain pattern: An overall growing curve with small reliefs and finally a big relief. This kind of pattern is not unusual and explained per instance in Jesse Schell’s The Art of Game Design.

If you want to take a look at the entire QDD (which is inspired by one of my own posts), look here:

Feedback Suggestions

• Do you agree with how broad I defined pacing?
• Do you miss anything (e.g. a section with particular info) in my QDD?

Conclusion

It’s december now, so the day of final conclusions is nearing. I’m wondering how I’ll spend my last posts during this project (the blog itself might continue), so if you’ve got some suggestions – don’t hesitate to give them to me

Any-way, hope you’re having a nice pre-christmas time!

Coordination and Polishing

If you understand quests as chains/trees/graphs of events and goals and the quest designer as the one responsible for such an entire experience, then seeing a coordinating aspect to that role is not far fetched. After all, it is not the quest designer who provides character models, locations, cutscenes or visual effects to name but a few, but the other, adjacent departments. That is why I find one point in CD Projekt RED’s description of the job particularly sensible:

Integrating delivered assets (like gameplay elements, locations, characters, dialogue etc.) into a seamless, engaging and unique experience.

CD Projekt RED, “Intern Quest Designer – Job Description” Link

Besides ordering and managing all kinds of assets, the integration of those assets is key. And most often, integration is not plug-and-play, but a lot of tiny adjustments and feedback rounds/iterations need to be done. This is why I consider polishing the second aspect to this whole matter.

But now on to the practical stuff!

Ocularis Prototype Stories: The Cursed Lute

I’ve made another quest prototype, this time focusing on some more supplemental “assets”, like a soundtrack from freesound.org, postprocessing boxes placed in the world, overal color tint and visual effects.

As you can see, I’ve employed some audiovisual techniques to create this unique atmosphere. In the following playthrough you’ll notice how the dialogue adds an extra layer to that – I’ll admit I’d really like to hear our Ocularis-Voice Actors speak that With some more design elements and a lot of polish this might well turn into a cool mysterious quest. I think.

Feedback Suggestions

• What game development role is dependent on Quest Designers? Who waits for a quest design to be done to be able to continue himself?
• What visual effect would you remove/modify/add?

Conclusion

I have no regrets turning that chromatic aberration so high. Love it. Hope you do too and will now be using it much more often!

Until then, have a good time!

Open World Quest Design

Quests, by their very nature, are in tendency more linear in style since they are based on dependencies between events/goals (at least in my conception). And even though quests with small depth and/or great width are possible (e.g. quest hubs), the story-style quest is more widespread.

But how do both types and perhaps also the differentiation into side/main quests fit into an open world, where exploration and diverse spaces are dominant?

This talk tries to answer aspects of these question: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rs-SKSbx-4k

A major learning from this video is about how the main stories jumps from major hub to major hub in the various districts of the open world – giving the player always a strong center to return to and simplifying access to those local districts. There one might find local sidequests expanding on the main themes, branching out from it.

Ocularis: Wilderness

While Ocularis doesn’t have a quest system or any UI way of communicating predefined goals, it of course does have an ending and a sensible way of traversing the map. In the tutorial (see the last post) this isn’t really a problem because the level is very small and linear. But when we arrive in the area we call Wilderness, things get different. This map should illustrate why:

On the left end you can see the cave level and its exit. The rest of the landscape so far is the Wilderness, a small open world area. The difference is of course the size and the nonlinearity of movement: There are several crossings and ways to get from one place to another. So which quests without quest system can be found here and how do they work?

The idea for all quests/dialogues is for them to be as voluntary as possible while also offering a nice coherent story if one decides to go through them. Thus only information that is needed to understand and experience the core goal and gameplay is provided without opt-out. These moments happen at choke points in the level: The beginning, where dialogues were forced through fall damage, the transition from orange to green forest, where no other passage is possible, and at the gate to the as-of-yet non existent mountain pass.

However there are some “tricks” that might lead the player into pursuing more than a barebones playthrough.

1. Story sometimes happens on-location, when a player has cleared a place from enemies or entered a certain area. There might be a dialog between avatar and NPC, or a monologue or simple environmental storytelling.
2. There are hubs for experiencing story content: At the two crosses avatar Leonora and the NPCs joining her group set up camp around a larger bonfire. It is here, that the player can pursue optional main story talks.
3. Exploring the world reflects in the “quest hubs”: If you enter e.g. the graveyard on the bottom left, you’ll get a chance to talk about it at a camp fire.
4. There are lots of higher view points allowing you to see the scope of explorable places which might potentially feature story content or be discussed at the hub.
5. Having specifically modelled, fully voiced 3D characters and a more than barebones dialog system might reduce the feeling of a “low-quality, dismissable” narrative.

One question surely remains, because – this open world quest design until now mainly depends on the player’s drive to explore and some very few enforced encounters. How will players with more need for guidance get around? What if some interesting places, places to visit as a quest of seeing them, are not obvious enough? This is a level design problem on the one hand, but can also be understood in quest design terms: Who gives the player the quest to visit the small valley between orange level and sea at the foot of the mountains?

I’m not entirely sure yet how to solve this problem without taking away too much of the un-guided style is was very much intended, but here are some ideas.

1. A map with the player position where the player can set markers
2. A mechanic where she can let avatar Leonora speak of some possible goals
3. A minimap showing side paths more distinctly than the 3D environment

Options 1 and 2 seem the best to me – I’d really like to preserve the player autonomy in her exploration.

Suggestions for Feedback

• What other principle for organizing a story in an open world can you think of?
• Do you intuitively think the main story is too far stretched in Ocularis?

Conclusion

The Ocularis blog post series continues and who knows, maybe I’ll find another topic that is interesting to discuss regarding its quest design. This one, surely, was one of my favourites! It combines two of my most beloved aspects/figurations findable in video games: Open worlds and quests.

I hope you’re having a good time!