The Power of
Episodic Narrative in Video Games
Dennis Lenart has worked as a game
director and cinema artist for 6 over years.
Earlier in his life, he worked on different jobs on
film sets in Los Angeles during college to gain experience.
Though I have stated I am not a keen video-gamer, I did however want to visit a variety of talks because they do not always talk about video-games or films but instead the pre-production behind it and their experimentation. It is good to understand different methods used to approach work and that is the main topic of the talk, he talks about the formulas that made Telltale Games a well-known company today.
Episodic games can be
defined as containing or consisting of a series of loosely defined media.
Serialised Episodic Content can be described as monthly periodicals such as comic books like Pickwick Club.
Popular examples today
can be Breaking Bad, The Sopranos and Lost.
The availability is a
factor that has made episodic stories slow to kick off and most were sold on
discs, this was costly to produce due to printing copies and distribution.
Telltale games was based on being able to digitally
distribute games to their audiences.
The risks on episodic
gaming they faced was:
- New business model, would they trust us?
- What happens if I can't deliver?
- Will gamers be satisfied with the length?
The benefits however would be:
- Smaller problems, smaller investments risk
- Shorter games are easier to try out, this means that feedback can be received quicker so improvements are up to date and means you're always trying to deliver the best results to the audiences
Smaller games pros:
- Less resources
- Less development time
- Lower entry price out
- Character/ environment reuse
- Continued player interest
The positives of smaller games meant that with continued player interest, the audience won't forget about the game and instead be excited for each new gaming episode, having less development time could mean that projects do not drag out for long periods of time and the audience do not have to wait long.
TellTale Games worked through many different formulas to understand what would deliver the best experience for the audience.
The first
telltale formula
The first episodic
game was Sam and Max, the formula for this game was:
- A comedy
- Composed of one-off series
- Created a single-handcrafted experience
- The characters always stay the same so audience get to understand their personality more
- Neatly wrap up each episode, so no cliffhangers
- Puzzles are the main gameplay and attraction for gamers
It was very successful
that books were later produced.
To move on from Sam and Max, new problems
appeared, they wanted to allow customers to start from any point but this meant
customers would play one or two games and move on without really being hooked. They had to decide which option would be best or how to create enough excitement for the game that audiences can start from any point and still be hooked.
The second
telltale formula
- A comedy with a bit of drama
- With episodes that are part of an arc
- A single handcrafted experience
- The characters mostly stay the same
The next two games to
test this new formula was Wallace and Gromit games. However they learnt that most of the audience did not enjoy playing Wallace and Gromit games generally.
The third
telltale formula
The test for this game
was Tales of Monkey Island, this was having a large story broken up in small
episodes.
There was a good
response from the fans with this new formula.
Changes to 3rd
formula
They got rid of any factors
that made the stories stop from developing and most fans did not respond well
to the puzzles.
The games were great
on the storytelling part but lacked the gameplay so not much difference from a
movie. The company then decided to add more gameplay since that was the whole point.
The fourth
telltale formula
- Dramatically engaging stories
- Story continues to build each episode, instead of wrapping up neatly
- Characters evolve through each episode
- Action is the main gameplay
Jurassic Park tested
out this formula, the game engine used did not allow for good quality action scenes so the quality of them was poor.
The main factors that
worked in all previous formulas was creating a single hand-crafted experience and action is the main gameplay so this is what was carried through to the other formulas.
They worked on these two factors.
The fourth formula was similar to the fifth formula, however the sixth formula proved to work the best.
The sixth
telltale formula
- A custom tailored experience
- Action is the main gameplay
The factor that made
an impact was the emotional consequence of what the characters in the gameplay
would do in complicated situations. This engaged players
on a more meaningful level and also allowed them to make their own decisions which would later influence the character and how others would view them in the game.
Leaving a gap between
each episodes helped to generate chat amongst fans, a chat screen was created
which allowed the company to receive feedback, this meant that they could understand what was working and if certain characters made a bigger impact on certain game-players. This meant that they use this to their advantage for future episodes if they wanted certain characters to be in the limelight.
The Walking Dead
episodic game series won 80 Game of the Year Awards and brought even bigger success to Telltale Games.
No comments:
Post a Comment