Effective talk: How to have good hub spaces
Year of Talk: 2024
Intro:
The presentation is divided into the following 6 parts: Overview, Dialogue Planning Writing process, Pipeline, DEI, and Takeaways
Overview:
A main pillar of Star Wars is how unique each race in the universe feels, acts, and looks. The Cantina is one of the most common places where people watching the original movies can experience that uniqueness. Mos Eisley is the first one shown with a lot of this unique type of character. A similar idea was planned for the game of Jedi: Survivor to help bring the world to life.
This was done initially by creating stories that would seem to be evolving and changing throughout the game and being able to demonstrate an actual character arc sometimes irrespective of the player's direct choices.
At the same time, it was important to make unique characters that you would normally see in a cantina like this in the Star Wars Universe.
The main design pillars for the Cantina are as follows:
Reflecting World State; Where the space changes or can evolve depending on how the story changes over time.
Primary Narrative Hub (For side quests/content); As many of the planets allow for a lot of side quests or ways of acquiring unique extra content it meant that having a common location allowed for the players to feel like they didn't need to do too much tedious work switching between planets way too often.
Player-directed growth; Allowing the player to interact and be allowed to improve the area over time through various direct or indirect acts.
Area frequently visited by the player; As the cantinas were places that the player was likely to be visiting frequently to very consistently it meant that it was in the best interest of the player to make sure that it always seemed high quality.
In the final game, they were able to achieve many of these goals. This included about 18 NPCs (Outside the main cast of NPCs), and over 5000 conversation dialogues in the game. As well as more than 17 different states and permutations depending on the current game state.
It also served various side systems that helped populate the universe of Star Wars and allowed for more activities for the player to play with.
Dialogue Planning:
The cantina was planned from the start to have a rise and fall of glory throughout the game's main story. In the initial part of the game, the Cantina is meant to be seen slowing growing in popularity as more people can join and be in the Cantina. But by the later parts of the game, the player can notice a significant drop in residents inside the area as they leave to hide from the Empire that recently arrived on the planet.
A key feature is some of the initial visits to the Cantina as it helps cement the idea that as the main story progresses more people will be visiting the area and it will change over time to reflect how the world changes.
Ideally, the player would visit a few times throughout the game to see how the area can grow to a peak and then become very small by the end. But it is as equally as possible to have players that seldom visit the bar unless necessary or other players that visit it each chance they get. This meant that the devs needed to make the appropriate dialogue options for the plethora of options the player takes.
A solution for players that skip any part of the Cantina quest is by allowing for multiple “On ramps”. This helps players have an easier time getting the information they need to understand side stories that they had previously missed more easily. By also giving some of this side content the ability to be interacted outside of the bar it means players can receive other pieces of information indirectly and instead of only from the Cantina.
The question this brought was to determine how much writing is needed for all possible combinations of characters meeting up and having the player be there to witness it.
This was done by first splitting up the game based on some more general states which are typically controlled by the current story beats that Cal (The main character) is at. Also allows them to be more deterministic on what can and cannot happen in the Cantina so that the mood that can be experienced in the Cantina is similar to what the player should be experiencing.
Another way is through different engagement-based stories. Which revolve around the NPCs that can be interacted with inside the Cantina itself. Allows for people to experience the NPC's stories and how they change and interact throughout the game. It allows for a more dynamic common area which can seem like it is constantly changing over time.
The idea was that the states would take priority over everything as this normally would signify certain actions or story beats that the player would encounter throughout the game that would need to be reflected in the Cantina. The rest of the side content would take a side until the important story dialogue and information was taken care of. Allowing the player to feel like the people there were interacting with their actions while also having their own lives.
The states were divided into the five main states which lined up to the 5 acts of the games. This was then divided into smaller sub-states depending on which part of the act the player found itself. By having the sub states it allowed for the devs to have an easier time determining where they wanted to place different characters or even have a few NPC that spawned randomly. It also helps to think about ways to attract the player's attention to different parts of the location as well as better target how they wanted the dialogue between the characters to be seen.
A problem the team was encountering was finding ways to help simplify many of the character arcs. It comes to the fact that the player can skip different moments for characters that could be important for their arc and not fully understand why things appeared the way they did. So the solution they came to was to create some buckets for the different NPCs and have inflection events that would help change what buckets characters would be in. An example given is the character of Miran who at the start isn't very close to the main character and appears to be cold. Instead of trying to follow a specific storyline where the player and Miran slowly become friends, there is instead one conversation (Or inflection event) that contains some dialogue that switches how the character responds and sees you as a friend. By also preparing dialogue for each state in the game no matter the current bucket NPCs found themself in, it allows players to always find dialogue that would fit the context and current bucket.
Writing process:
For some context; the cantina writing room had around 3-6 writers that would be working in 2-week sprints. Their main goals were to brainstorm new stories, and how to break down the states into more reasonable states the player could notice. They would follow that by drafting possible character conversations that can occur based on the states they had defined and review them with the other writers.
Whenever starting work the individual writer or the entire team would determine what had been some of the broad story beats that had been occurring throughout the game. This helped determine the general mood that needed to be presented and what some of the conversation needed to revolve around. The writer would then be able to determine which areas of conversation the NPCs would talk about, that being some backstory, environment-related conversation, or other slice-of-life event.
Once the general tone and some of the NPC conversations were determined they moved to more granular conversations. This would things like more NPCs coming and going and an evolving relationship with the players and each other. By having this occur it would allow certain characters that had backstories intertwined with factions the player had interacted with to give more personal dialogue and seem more alive. This would help remind the player also of recent things that happened in case they hadn't been playing for some time.
Pipeline:
The pipeline for writing and implementation helped simplify and speed up the decision-making for the team and helped plan out when to work on certain dialogues/characters.
In the writing process, the main two systems they used were Miro and WriterDuet. Miro was the system they primarily used for whiteboard ideas and other important aspects of the story. While WriterDuet was the system used to write the screenplay for the game. For implementation, the team used Google Sheets matrixes and Heckle to manage the content they had already created.
Using the previously mentioned systems the team's process would start whiteboarding ideas and seating charts for the cantina. This would be processed by the matrix system in Google Sheets, which would determine which NPCs would likely be interacting with each other. It would also determine what state the story was in and what are certain things that the NPCs could talk about. This information would be passed to WriterDuet which allowed for a basic template to be implemented with the information so that the writers could more easily understand what they need to talk about. Any extra information that WriterDuet would need came from Miro which contained various previously brainstormed ideas for character types. Once finished the conversations would be saved/updated in the database.
Any updates to the database would also allow for the matrix that existed in the Excel sheet to be updated so that the writers had a better understanding of what dialogue still needed to be finished/worked on. Having the matrix be updated whenever a conversation is finished allowed the team to better understand what they needed to work on. At the same time, it allowed for better prioritization and planning when working in Miro.
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusive (DEI):
As part of the presentation they talked about their standard pipeline for character creation and casting as well as the pipeline they used for DEI characters.
For the standard pipeline, the art and writing team would work on a base concept for the character, which the writers would then refine the character's voice and cast someone appropriate. They would make sure to take in any ideas from people who would be likely to interact with the character to make sure everyone was satisfied. At this point, they could start their pipeline of having the voice actor reprise the character.
Meanwhile, the DEI character pipeline contains various extra steps as a way to ensure that the characters are appropriately made and cast. This is done by starting with preliminary research on the community so that both the artists and writers have all of the appropriate information. At this point, the usual initial concept is done between both of the groups to create the base character which is put through a few rounds of feedback to make sure there aren't any areas they overlooked. After this point, the team goes through multiple rounds of casting and review to allow them to find the most appropriate person for the role. Once all of the extra review and feedback is done the writing team can finally implement the character in the game and with the writing. Finally, the team would conduct a final review session with the character in the game to ensure implementation was done correctly.
The extra steps, allow for more inclusive characters to appear in the game while having their storylines be affected by what makes them unique either heavily or not. However, it does require the team to plan out the extra time needed to make sure everything is good. A lot of prework is required to make sure everyone is being represented correctly or there isn't something blatantly missing.
Takeaway:
The content turned out to be state-specific and changed depending on where in the story the player found himself. Many players seemed to enjoy interacting with the characters from the cantina. According to the team, around 70% seemed to play content found in the cantina even after finishing the main game. Even though some areas had a lot of extra content and dialogue written for them that wasn't interacted with as often the writers still believed that it was important enough to include if they would do it again.
Another important takeaway was to make sure to create a wide variety of characters for the cantina. As players are likely to be going back and forth to the area having a lot of different characters means that they won't feel like they are in a bland world but in one that is vibrant and alive.
コメント