Inspiration

Good Morning!

We’ve been deep at work ironing out the a few issues on the Story Writing part of the game, and are now moving our attention to getting the rest of the experience ship shape for some alpha testing action over the next month.

We’ve also started to think about how the map is going to work… our inspiration is below - stay tuned.

Alpha testing in the Inner Circle

A delicious piece of information for you all: 

We had our first playtest with an Inner Circle member very recently, and it went swimmingly.

We had a hectic weekend preceding getting it all ship-shape, a marathon of bug fixing and polish. We implemented a UI redesign for these tests and it was great to see it in use. While we may have been terrified that everything was about to break, we needn’t have feared. The whole process went smoothly - and we learned a whole bunch of places where we can improve.

We did our first test with the lucid and charming Mr Very Mean from our Inner Circle, he had the following to say:

Was very excited, but a bit nervous since I was warned that it was in an alpha state. 

All that being said, I was quite surprised how well the game worked; no breaking, so that was a huge plus. 

I was the narrator and came up with a story on the fly about a wrongly-accused man needing to escape prison before his imminent execution. Invented some characters like a traitorous wife, a jealous rival, a true love he’d meet, etc. and then planned the encounters for the first chapter. Accidentally clicked save instead of what I was supposed to and that started the game early, so only had the first chapter to play through. I started the flow of the story and it was exciting to see where Simon was taking things. We were on Skype, so I was aware of the typing and what was going on overall, but the story beats that were bounced back to me were all surprises. 

The point system is interesting and plays differently than I expected. Being able to contest/change the story contributions of another player was a nice surprise and should allow for stories to take interesting directions. The only issue I ran into is keeping in line with the way the story was planned versus how it played out. Even with such a short play through, there was a character and event I wanted to edit/add but those were stuck, so I couldn’t. I think with a longer game, the need for this would grow as you never know how a story can change or grow over the course of playing it out. I know you want to be able to deliver a consistent story and keep true to the events and stuff drawn from the beginning, but so rigid without allowing any flexibility I think will also be an issue. Trying to find a balance is important, but I think it should be addressed somehow. But that is honestly the only major issue I can see popping up. 

All in all, I was really impressed with the stage the game is at now, especially for such an early build. Cannot wait to play again! 

Naturally we’re happy as Larry. Mr V.M. chose a story of betrayal and dramatic escapes - what would you have written about?

Updates and Alpha News

Hello Everyone

We’d love to thank all of you for your patience - We’ve had a hectic couple of weeks since our Kickstarter spectacularly succeeded. That time has been spent planning our development, contacting various of our pledge supporters and of course navigating the particulars of Amazon Payments.

What’s been going on

This past week Simon has had the pleasure of dining with Jesse Schell, yes THAT Jesse Schell, infamous games designer and lecturer at Carnegie-Mellon. You can catch a little of his passion for games in his TED talk.

They talked about The Written World, how systems of play can support exceptional heroism in stories and the way the industry is shapped around these ideas in general. We’ll be using some of that advice to think about the way the Force system works, and to develop our ideas about ways in which to make this game sustainable commercial entity.

Excitingly, We’ve also met Ian Livingstone, President for Life of Eidos Interactive, co-writer and creator of the Fighting Fantasy books, Games Workshop and White Dwarf. Ian devotes a chunk of his time to assisting indie games makers such as ourselves and he has very kindly offered us a further meeting when we have the beta up and running. 

He’s given us a bit of advice as well - telling us to focus on GAMEPLAY GAMEPLAY GAMEPLAY. His words/emphasis. This has inspired us to ramp up the release schedule so we can iterate as quickly as possible, and not make too many untested game play decisions.

Development News

We’ve got a great base in our Kickstarter supporters, and we plan to talk with them as much as possible. We’ll be sending out early code to these girls and guys and asking them what they think - we’re looking forward to it!

Loads of love,
The Written World team 

Kick-Started - It’s Live!

If you can feel a slight tingle of anticipation it’s because we’ve finally launched our Kickstarter! Check us out. Watch the video here, or over on our Kickstarter page - and please let as many people as possible know about it. 

In other exciting news: We’ve been playtesting all day today - check out some of the beautiful people who turned up to play with us:

Playing At Writing part 2: Rhianna Pratchett has a chat

The rather lovely Rhianna Pratchett was kind enough to sit down with our very own Simon Fox for a chat about what happens when you fill up your games with delightful words. This is part 2 of that interview, part 1 can be found here.

Simon Fox: We’ve spoken before about the idea of building a blank slate character for players to inhabit against building a complex character - which do you feel players prefer?

Rhianna Pratchett: It actually tends to be fairly even between the players that prefer blank slates and ones that prefer a deeper character. I also think there’s space in between these extremes - Gordon Freeman has a look, he has a name, has people who know him but is more or less a blank slate. Then you have characters with depth that players shape through the game which drives player investment. 

When you’re working with blank slate characters the world and your other characters have to work a lot harder. Especially if you have a mute blank slate character which Overlord was - I think I put a lot of what I thought the player might be thinking into Gnarl’s voice who was often speaking to the player. 

From a writers perspective I think it’s more fun to have some kind of character to work with, or a good cast around your protagonist. Alyx was very strong and helped give Gordon Freeman a sense of character. 

SF: When you’re building a strong character you’re essentially asking the player to be an actor in your narrative, and the idea that they might behave inappropriately can cause problems - are there any tricks you use to encourage better behaviour from your players?

RP: There are a lot of conversations that happen behind closed doors along the lines of ‘what if a player tries to break X’. Trying to get the player to empathise with what the player character is going through, and not to break that link between them is important. If an action has repercussions, then I think it’s something the player has to do personally to hold that link strong. Allowing the player to drive action, but the player character to drive narrative is the key. Important actions should be driven by the player, important narrative by the character. Ideally the players character will never do anything idiotic that the player wouldn’t do, or anything cool that the player wants to do.

SF: What would be an example of a game play mechanic which really serves to build character?

RP: In Bioshock, when you first came aboard Rapture and you’re asked to plunge a syringe into your arm, and you do it, the player does it. At the time you don’t know why you’re doing it but the plot justifies it very well.

Arkham Asylum was great and I enjoyed hanging off gargoyles and toying with goons - It seemed to reinforce what Batman was about. He’s a great video game character because really he is a bit a psychopath. 

SF: How do you go about increasing the player’s sense of freedom?

RP:  I think it’s about making the world around them seem real and putting in those little bright flowers of narrative away from the safe path. Little things to encourage the player to explore. If you’ve got good stories or characters or interesting conversations happening - they are good ways to draw the player off and make them explore the world, giving them the sense that they have a good amount of freedom - in that voyeuristic way. Arkham Asylum had those conversations between goons that you overheard and that also gave the player a sense of power. 

SF: Can you playtest a game’s story? 

RP: It’s really hard to do. There’s this big feedback loop between writing a line and actually getting it working in the game. You have to write it, it has to pass through all the gates and checks required to approve it, it has to be recorded by - if you’re lucky - an actor, and then it has to be placed in the game. Now you have to make sure it triggers in the right place and if it’s part of an animation then it has to go along with that. It can take a long time before you can see if it’s working in place. 

Mostly it’s about having time to test. All you can do is get people in early - get writers in early. Ideally writers should be doing a lot of work before they write any dialogue - character profiles and bios and working out relationship structures and world building exercises. Really getting to know your characters before you write them is a luxury and it’s about having that time to iterate. Most game scripts get only one draft and that’s it! Even the best Hollywood screen writer doesn’t get it right first time and that’s in a linear medium. So often there is just not time for polish and iteration on scripts. 

SF: What gaming memory has really stuck with you the most?

RP: I had a lot of fun with the Dungeon Keeper games - I have these, they’re like cosy blanket games. I might even after this interview go and rummage around for my Dungeon Keeper 2 disc and try and get it to work. There are some games that just hit the spot - DK2 was one of those games for me. Even though it will probably crash once every game on Vista I still love it.

You can check out more of Rhianna’s work at here personal site.

Dev Blog: It’s all semantics

We’ve been looking into ways of measuring how to reward writers in the Written World, by thinking in terms of understanding the “quality” of the stories. So the question is - how do we take a ruler to success in story writing?

We first started looking at the most basic level - firstly checking if people have finished the story and played all their encounter cards. Then we started looking into other more subtle measures - 

• Checking the amount of words each users writes in a turn.
• Looking at The average typing speed.
• Looking at the type of language being used. 

Using this information we could infer a a level of “passion” for the story. We might later use this measure to work out how an optimum level of story engagement looks. Getting this kind of high quality data back as our users play is spectacularly interesting. Pulling together a series of quantitative data points like speed of writing and types of language used into a measure of the ‘passion’ of a writer lets us build game play objectives which support pulling a writer towards the point at which they are most engaged by their task. This is exciting stuff - we’re building an index which measures user engagement and learning how to keep people consistently in a state of flow.

Next we begin to look at the actual quality of the text itself. Using the fantastic AfterTheDeadline plugin, we can do some interesting heavy lifting on the text. We can reward correct spelling, and correct uses of grammar - going as far as penalising misused parts of speech (a/an, there/their etc), repeated words, and verbs in the wrong tense.  We can also do some more advanced checking of the tone of the speech, reducing complex phrases down to more simple ones,  and even removing redundant phrases. 

For the alpha, we’ll avoid using some of the more complex features available to us. I’m a bit worried about penalising users for mistakes without showing them why we’ve done it in the first place, so that’s one of the things we’ll address during play testing. Perhaps we will allow users to go back and make corrections to the text after it’s been written inside the flow of the story, or allow them to alter the text before it’s sent out.  Perhaps we’ll have a huge red box that appears and shouts at the user if they use too many cliches. I DON’T KNOW!!

Now let’s say we have a “passion” and a “style” index, which will allow us to measure and reward player actions in a rich way, from here we can think about how to understand each story within the context of other stories.  Using a semantic text engine, such as OpenCalais, we can start to make some incredibly rich connections to entities mentioned within the text. If you mention a location in your story, we’ll know which one and where it is in the Written World. If you write about pre-existing characters we’ll be able to tell you where else they’ve appeared, and in what way. 

If you’d like to see a demo, try copying/pasting a chapter from your favourite story here You’ll see a list of characters, locations, organisations mentioned and lots of other interesting data - We’ll be able to use the information gleaned in this way for some fascinating stuff. I put in a chapter from 1984 to see what information I could get out of it - it came out with a comprehensive list of the characters, and organisations such as the “Eastasian Government” - This is incredibly powerful because putting all the stories created through the Written World through this kind of processing, would allow us to create suggestions for themes already written about by other writers.  We want the Written World to be a  kind of “unified story”, where entities can grow in a rich and interesting manner, and we are confident with these kinds of tools we’ll be able to create it.