GCAP 2022: Ambition

Narrative Design is the art of telling stories using all of the tools available. In this Q&A, we’ll look at some under-utilised aspects of bringing game worlds and characters to life, and discuss how to maintain a coherent creative vision throughout the course of your game from beginning to end.

Listen and discuss with Gamelofters Catherine Booth, Bradley Hennessey, and Cass McDonnell; as they share their knowledge and understandings in the industry as neurodivergent game devs. Combining this with some takeaway culture and workflow tips, we hope to further conversations around building inclusive, accessible and productive game studios with neurodiversity in mind. This panellist will share their experience with Gameloft Brisbane's Studio Manager Dylan Miklashek.

There are so many complex challenges in games engineering, this panel brings together an incredible group of games engineers who collectively have decades of experience. Drawing on their experiences in the trenches they will discuss a range of advanced engineering topics like data architecture, live service tools and more.

We’ll be generating and integrating sounds based on audience requests using FMOD to a Unity project live.
The goal is to cover how to rapidly prototype, integrate and iterate sounds within both FMOD and Unity, as well as demonstrating a workflow for rapid audio generation.

This talk provides an overview of the analytics we need when measuring story in narrative games. This is the accumulation of what we have learned through trial and error over many years.

As part of this talk we will explain the processes we designed and use to generate data from multiple media platforms. This data is what we use to inform narrative beats and themes, as well as turn the information into usable formats for designers and writers. This talk will include a tutorial on the process of handling the data in excel as well as how to present it in a reader friendly format.

After a brief introduction to the relevance of transmedia in games, we will explain the convergence of narrative structure and beats of existing IP across media to game formats. Expanding on this we will discuss creative solutions in data analysis for optimization, retention and monetization. We will also cover how to derive narrative metrics from existing data in games that don't measure narrative analytics.

More than 80% of gamers use subtitles. But how do we make sure subtitles are great?

This session will explore what greats subtitles mean in 2022 and beyond.

From our regular professional use of and research into text-presentation in games, we’ll present how and why people use subtitles when gaming, how developers can improve both the user experience and accessibility of subtitles, and why you should bother.

Specifically, together, we’ll look at:

- what subtitles are, how they work, and how people use them
- how to tune your subtitles for the ways in which people use them
- designing good subtitles, from font, to colour, to contrast
- subtitles for accessibility, and subtitles for preference and convenience
- great subtitles vs. mediocre subtitles (“Control” is the gold standard, but we can do even better)
- subtitles in games vs. subtitles in linear media, what we can learn from other other
- closed captions or subtitles? What’s the difference?
- subtitling sound effects, not just dialogue

By the end of the session, attendees will better understand the world of subtitles, and be equipped with concrete recommendations they can take away to implement in their own games and projects, whether they’re just starting a project, or need to retrofit the subtitles in their existing games.

This session will be more design- and accessibility-focused than technical, but we’ll be discussing some technical possibilities when it comes to developing good subtitles, even though it’s not the focus.

This session is a deep dive into how we: designed an intuitive sliding-puzzle game based on nonograms (a popular logic puzzle); generated and curated levels for the game; and created an Endless Mode which creates levels on the fly.

We talk about the difficulties and gotchas of using level generation, and some of the processes we undertook to tests, rate, traige, and curate generated levels. We touch upon some of the features (eg. level sharing) left behind, and conclude with how the puzzle design for our next title has been influenced by what we've learnt.

Writers! Has this ever happened to you? *greyscale footage of a writer at their computer being frustrated at having to either plan out hundreds of possible plot threads to get a player-controlled story from one state to another, and then looking to camera with an exaggerated annoyed expression*

Or, players! Has this ever happened to you? *greyscale footage of a player frustrated that their game’s story can’t be very reactive to the actions they take due to the enormous amount of writing that would be needed, and then looking to camera with an exaggerated annoyed expression*

Why not try automated story planning tools, a cool new experimental technique to let computers do some of the work involved in building a story that’s both narratively plausible while also under the control of the narrative designer! *colour footage of players and writers looking happy and giving an exaggerated thumbs-up*

In this talk, we’ll look at automated story planners, which are tools that help writers produce story steps, and can help NPCs take plausible actions to get the story towards a target game state. It won’t write your story for you, but it can help make your story richer!

If you can’t see the whole puzzle, how do you know when a piece is missing? Game Design is often about creating something from nothing and filling a void to solve a problem, but finding the missing piece isn’t always easy. Brainstorming game ideas can feel futile and frustrating, gameplay loops elusive, concepts abandoned half-baked, or something just straight up feels missing. How do we get to the bottom of these problems? How do we figure out what’s missing from a loop? This talk is about using the idea of daisy chains and our ABC’s as a method of approaching, understanding, creating, and troubleshooting game design. This is all in order to reach a practical and actionable outcome, improve design thinking, and making filling in the missing piece of the puzzle as easy as ABC.

Video game stories can suffer when they fall back on stock characters in the service of creating a familiar experience for the player. In this session, I will talk about how the narrative team at Studio Drydock developed an authentic, diverse ensemble cast that powered our witchy farming sim past genre clichés to create a world that feels alive.

We all might disagree on how much challenge is the perfect amount, but even fans of masochistically difficult games will agree: losing because you made the wrong decision has the potential to be fun, but losing because you could not win a tactile struggle with the controller is the stuff of rage quitting. Players with impaired vision, limited motor control, dyslexia, or any number of other challenges might find simple parts of your game to be frustratingly complex. The odds of such players enjoying your game are vanishingly small… unless you develop your game around their needs in the first place!

Thinking about players with hands, eyes, minds, schedules, and distractions different than your own is neither free, nor easy, but it can open up your games to a wider audience of potential enthusiasts.

This talk will cover ideas on how to use accessibility as a baseline of success and chief design constraint, as well as best practices for making sure usability is an ongoing component of development and not a last-minute addition. We’ll look at some games that stand out as being playable by a wide range of players due to ease-of-use, inclusive controls, or other nods to accessibility, as well as lessons and reflections on the speaker’s efforts to create a game with accessibility as a core goal.

The success of games depends on their Player Experience and building the best Player Experience relies on understanding your players. Games User Research is integral to understanding players and how to build the best product for them. Research is more than just testing prototypes at the end of the development cycle, it should be embedded throughout the game development cycle.
Come along to learn some tips and tricks on getting started, choosing the right methods and tools for all types of teams.

Game companies need solid technical writing, just like any other software and customer-oriented business. It's crucial for the team and for the players.
We helped a large mobile game company with millions of players to apply a standardised technical writing method to their knowledge articles. The results? Higher player retention with clear in-play community content, accurate FAQ's and fast technical solutions. They have an efficient and scalable team support solution with well-structured, plain language content that allows them to find answers fast.

In a culture that is driven by efficiency and performance, we often devalue actions and characteristics that contradict those notions. This internalised-culture will often make us feel guilty to linger, self conscious to play or anxious to try new things. It can limit how we engage and narrow our perception.

In this talk Duncan highlights one of these undervalued and under recognised characteristics, playfulness.
He believes playfulness is a powerful concept that promotes creativity, open-mindedness and confidence. He's exploring what it means to be playful, how we inspire playfulness in others and how we can help cultivate a culture that promotes and celebrates playfulness.

Duncan defines playfulness as acting volitionally to make the most of a situation. Doing what you are wanting to do while at the same time pushing the boundaries and exploring new opportunities. With a focus on games, Duncan considers how we might inspire this type of engagement in our players and how that influences how our players engage outside the game too. To engage players in a way that frees them of guilt, fear and anxiety to ultimately cultivate a culture that is less judgemental, less anxious and more autonomous.