Design and Narrative

What makes morally challenging games engaging?

What skills are involved in making moral choices in games? And what exactly is the point of "moral meters"?

In this talk, We will present the findings of a 10-year multi-disciplinary research project investigating moral decision-making in videogames and the lessons they can provide for designing morally engaging gameplay.

Presented by: Dr Malcolm Ryan, Paul Formosa & Dr Dan Staines

Do developers want players to look for clues and feel smart before that all-important-thing happens in the game? Do they want to reward players for figuring something out before the game reveals it to them? Do they want players talking about the game online and theorizing about that super secret mystery?

Getting players engaged with finding and figuring out hints is more than just having them hear an ambient noise over there or finding a lore book dropped here. The more invested players are in the game and the more engaged their imaginations, the more likely they are to search for the clues—or revelatory trail of breadcrumbs—the team leaves for them.

Attendees will discover tools for building player engagement, which includes designing more believable characters players will get invested in (whether they love or hate those characters) and using the game’s narrative design to drop hints about those characters’ circumstances. In effect, the relationship between the investment in the characters and these hints become a language narrative designers devise to help players hunt and piece together “What happens next?” before the game reveals the answers.

This talk focuses on why players identify or empathize with characters and how that makes them more invested, and gives techniques for creating “messy,” more authentic characters and designing multi-faceted storytelling in-game that will encourage players to find answers to the game’s mysteries.

Screenwriters are used to writing dialogue for actors. Comic writers will just see their words on the page. And the game writer? The game writer can do both...

This talk is a gentle reminder that written and spoken languages are different. That you'll have to change your perspective when you switch from one way of writing to the other. That different words have different meanings. And that language will be understood differently when read vs when spoken.

Multiple examples from games and other media show will inspire the audience to think about the function and effect of their in-game dialogue. Did you realise that some grammar constructions work better on paper than spoken? And that some jokes work in audio, but not as written words? Start thinking about dialogue writing in a different way, and learn to make your choice on whether to use voiced or non-voiced dialogue early in the process.

In 64 Ways of Being, Melbourne is transformed into a playable city via a free-to-play app launching in 2020. People and place are connected at multiple locations across the city through augmented reality encounters that capture different ways of being. These experiences re-imagine Melbourne's identity as expressed through its creative, linguistic, cultural, social and urban diversity.

The game is made by a collective developing urban play encounters that reconnect people with the city as a lived experience. Blending public art, live art and game design our collaboration brings together artist gamemaker Dr Troy Innocent, live arts group one step at a time like this, and game developer Millipede working with the Watershed Pervasive Media Studio to realise Playable City Melbourne.

This talk provides practical advice on the challenges and opportunities presented during the production of an ambitious AR game that engages with creative cultures, project partners and audiences outside the traditional mobile gaming space.

Topics covered range from technical tips on situating AR in diverse urban environments, working with theatre and performance artists, engaging in meaningful cultural consultation with First Peoples, wrangling divergent stakeholders, and marketing strategies for an experience people haven't had yet.

Mini Motorways is a relaxing game about building roads to support a growing city. The game is a follow up to Mini Metro, and after 9 months of prototyping and 9 months of production, was a launch title on Apple Arcade. These three things: creating a successor to an indie hit, being a new platform’s launch title, and a very short production timeline, meant that the road to success was a bumpy one. In this talk, Tana Tanoi from Dinosaur Polo Club will go through the challenges faced during the development of Mini Motorways, covering topics like how Apple Arcade’s requirements shaped the game’s development, how quick tools were developed for a small team on a time budget, and the process of defining a brand through prototyping and iterating.

Creating an engaging experience for your players is hard, and not knowing who your players are makes this even harder. A model will be presented for Designers and Producers to simplify and clarify player behaviour, removing ambiguity to create concrete features with players' personas in mind.

This will give you the ability to cognitively organise the players' minds, allowing you to provide mechanics and interaction methods to enrich the players' experience. We will look at what player personas are and they role they play in existing games, how they have been applied in the past, and how you can craft personas for your own game experience.

Talk: Being A Game Design Tradie

Speaker: Nic Wechter

The study of "Game Theory" has developed massively as the industry has grown giving a huge well of knowledge to draw from as they slave away at trying to create the next breakout hit.

Over the years making games I've developed a unique approach to distilling ideas, mechanics and environments into gameplay that has more in common with artisan tradespeople such as carpenters and metal fabricators than it does with the more academic approach usually associated with game theory. This talk will explore these concepts.

Game Connect Asia Pacific 2019: Lighting The Way

Game Connect Asia Pacific is Australia's premier games development conference and a part of Melbourne International Games Week.

Situated in Melbourne, Australia during October, GCAP is world-renowned for its talks, collaboration, expression, networking and inclusive environment.

Video courtesy of GCAP and the Game Developers' Association of Australia.

www.gcap.com.au

Talk: Divergent thinking and iteration process: a hands-on creativity workshop

Speaker: Elaine Gusella

Since grade school we are encouraged to proceed through a very narrow set of ways to achieve an expected result. By contrast, the iteration process - highly praised in game development - occurs in a non-linear, emergent process. This workshop will help you unlock your creativity by giving you tools for problem-solving, rapid prototyping, efficient collaboration and idea-generation.

Come play through this hands-on creativity workshop to learn different brainstorm strategies and renew with your productive creativity.

Game Connect Asia Pacific 2019: Lighting The Way

Game Connect Asia Pacific is Australia's premier games development conference and a part of Melbourne International Games Week.

Situated in Melbourne, Australia during October, GCAP is world-renowned for its talks, collaboration, expression, networking and inclusive environment.

Video courtesy of GCAP and the Game Developers' Association of Australia.

www.gcap.com.au

Talk: Rapid Prototyping 101: Crucial UX Design skills for every team

Speaker: Anna Brandberg

Rapid Prototyping is a great tool to help your team think through and solve problems. Solutions come to you through sketching, feedback and multiple design iterations. By training ourselves to think fast, seek validation for our decisions through testing, and refining our UX Design processes, we can create better and more meaningful gaming experiences for our players.

By learning the process of Rapid Prototyping, you create something functional that you can test with users, and that you can then iterate on more accurately. It is a crucial part not only of the early stages of game development, but also for developing and integrating new features into existing games. It is therefore an important skill for all kinds of teams to master, not just those in pre-production, but also those working on games in live service.

Come learn how to break down effective UX Design processes into 3 stages: Prototyping, Reviewing and Refining. Find out how Rapid Prototyping helps you solve big, complex problems, quickly test the utility of your design, and thus make relevant modifications.

This talk will teach you tangible skills for how to draw useful Sketches, how to translate them into Wireframes and Clickable Prototypes - and why these are all uniquely important steps. This will be a practical demonstration of how to work in Adobe XD, and develop functional prototypes for any device (mobile, console, web, etc).

Game Connect Asia Pacific 2019: Lighting The Way

Game Connect Asia Pacific is Australia's premier games development conference and a part of Melbourne International Games Week.

Situated in Melbourne, Australia during October, GCAP is world-renowned for its talks, collaboration, expression, networking and inclusive environment.

Video courtesy of GCAP and the Game Developers' Association of Australia.

www.gcap.com.au

Talk: The Architecture of Designing story-focused Games - Lighting the Way through the Narrative

Speaker: Mel Taylor

It is widely believed that games should first and foremost be driven by their mechanics and only after this (if at all) focus on narrative design.

This talk offers a different approach and is about designing a solid and engaging story first and then designing the mechanics around it.

Designing the narrative of a game is a bit like planning a prank: You are not going to know how your “victim” will react, but you should plan for the most likely outcomes. Lighting the way through the story and guiding the player is essential for them to get the most coherent and engaging experience out of it.

This talk will give attendees tools for this design approach as well as an understanding of how to “grow” mechanics from theme, how to pace your level design to fit storytelling and using symbolism in mechanics and environmental design in order to support the game’s themes.

Game Connect Asia Pacific 2019: Lighting The Way

Game Connect Asia Pacific is Australia's premier games development conference and a part of Melbourne International Games Week.

Situated in Melbourne, Australia during October, GCAP is world-renowned for its talks, collaboration, expression, networking and inclusive environment.

Video courtesy of GCAP and the Game Developers' Association of Australia.

www.gcap.com.au

Talk: Flow Chart - How Scope Creep Happens

Speaker: Leigh Harris

Objects in Space released in March this year, three and a half years after its initial expected release date of late 2015. The game was the largest project Flat Earth Games had ever undertaken, and while the concept was likely going to blow out right from the beginning based on the concept alone, there were several key points throughout development where the team made decisions which would compound the workload and cause chaos and distress throughout development.

In this talk, Lead Designer Leigh Harris will be showing the process of scope creep through an ever-expanding flow chart.

The chart will begin with the game's core pillars, and slide by slide new elements will be added showing the decisions which were made, dependencies which were created and HUGE interconnected nature of every feature to reveal a gigantic maze of every feature needed to get this mammoth game over the line.

The end result will be a massive infographic of decisions made during development which led to a team needing to refinance four and a half times to get our dream game made.

Game Connect Asia Pacific 2019: Lighting The Way

Game Connect Asia Pacific is Australia's premier games development conference and a part of Melbourne International Games Week.

Situated in Melbourne, Australia during October, GCAP is world-renowned for its talks, collaboration, expression, networking and inclusive environment.

Video courtesy of GCAP and the Game Developers' Association of Australia.

www.gcap.com.au

Talk: The Forest Paths Method of Narrative Design

Speaker: Alexander Swords

Some paths are found. Some paths are forged. Some travellers want to be led. Others just want to explore.

The Forest Paths Method is about recognising how concepts of drama can be applied as a

theoretical framework, and then wielded as a method to develop narrative design at any part of the design process, on any scale.

This session will be an overview of the method, cover its strengths and weaknesses and then help writers and narrative designers at all levels understand how it may help them. We’ll also cover how this method can be used to recognise narrative design patterns common across genres and game types, and how this might provide a shorthand for development in the future.

Game Connect Asia Pacific 2019: Lighting The Way

Game Connect Asia Pacific is Australia's premier games development conference and a part of Melbourne International Games Week.

Situated in Melbourne, Australia during October, GCAP is world-renowned for its talks, collaboration, expression, networking and inclusive environment.

Video courtesy of GCAP and the Game Developers' Association of Australia.

www.gcap.com.au

Talk: Unpacking Game Design: Creating a game without fail states or scores

Speaker: Wren Brier

A zen game about taking items out of boxes after a move might sound extremely niche. But Unpacking by Brisbane studio Witch Beam has garnered international attention from players to industry folk alike. It’s been invited to showcases, nominated for awards and even gone viral, all in its first year of development.

The game lacks many conventional game design components: there are no scores, no time limits, no fail states, no consequences to choices, no dialogue. What’s left when all of that is taken away? How do you tell a story through such strict limitations? And why design a game like this?

This talk will cover extracting gameplay from unexpected places, finding a balance between puzzle and player expression, and how to stuff 69 household items into an isometric kitchen.

Game Connect Asia Pacific 2019: Lighting The Way

Game Connect Asia Pacific is Australia's premier games development conference and a part of Melbourne International Games Week.

Situated in Melbourne, Australia during October, GCAP is world-renowned for its talks, collaboration, expression, networking and inclusive environment.

Video courtesy of GCAP and the Game Developers' Association of Australia.

www.gcap.com.au

Talk: Visual Game Design: Keeping Teams Aligned Through Minimal Documentation

Speaker: Alex Carlyle

Keeping large teams aligned with the vision of a game is always challenging. Having spent many years creating design documents and battling to keep teams up to date with the latest direction of the game, I developed alternative methods that were faster to update and iterate and more effectively allowed team members to consume the information that they needed to make the best game they could.

I will talk about learnings from projects like LA Noire, the benefits of visual communication and creating environments that encourage teams to view and talk about the game they are creating, improving overall collaboration and alignment.

Game Connect Asia Pacific 2019: Lighting The Way

Game Connect Asia Pacific is Australia's premier games development conference and a part of Melbourne International Games Week.

Situated in Melbourne, Australia during October, GCAP is world-renowned for its talks, collaboration, expression, networking and inclusive environment.

Video courtesy of GCAP and the Game Developers' Association of Australia.

www.gcap.com.au

Talk: Subverting Genres: I Think I Rogue-Like You

Speaker: Lucy Morris

Roguelike, dating sim, RPG - every genre definition evokes certain expectations from a player of mechanic, function and content. When we dig in to a genre, examine these expectations and subvert elements of how they function, we can explore interesting mechanic innovations within sometimes tired (and unsuitable) labels for games.

Using Starcolt's first title ‘Best Friend Forever’ as an example, we'll take a look at the upsides and downsides of using genre definitions, and how we can twist and explore these to work in our advantage as game designers to create fresh, interesting experiences.

Game Connect Asia Pacific 2019: Lighting The Way

Game Connect Asia Pacific is Australia's premier games development conference and a part of Melbourne International Games Week.

Situated in Melbourne, Australia during October, GCAP is world-renowned for its talks, collaboration, expression, networking and inclusive environment.

Video courtesy of GCAP and the Game Developers' Association of Australia.

www.gcap.com.au

Talk: Puzzles to be explored but not solved: Designing ambiguous navigable worlds

Speaker: Alexander Muscat

How can we create worlds to be explored but not fully understood? This talk discusses how to design game levels for experiences of exploration and curiosity by introducing spatial ambiguity. Focusing on the design of award-winning WORLD4, a multi-view exploration game where players chart out a layered abstract world, I will describe an alternative approach level design by reframing game levels as something to be scrutinised and understood.

By presenting multiple design strategies designers can learn how to heighten player perception and vary navigation, seed uncertainty and encourage investigation, and subvert expectations to create surprise and foster interpretive readings. Through these insights attendees may build an understanding in how to enrich their own designs for exploratory and narrative player experiences.

Game Connect Asia Pacific 2019: Lighting The Way

Game Connect Asia Pacific is Australia's premier games development conference and a part of Melbourne International Games Week.

Situated in Melbourne, Australia during October, GCAP is world-renowned for its talks, collaboration, expression, networking and inclusive environment.

Video courtesy of GCAP and the Game Developers' Association of Australia.

www.gcap.com.au

Talk: Storm Boy: The Game Game Director Postmortem

Speaker: Ellen Jurik

From the first meeting with IP Holders to the multi-platform simultaneous release, “Storm Boy: The Game” had a nine-month full development cycle. To hit this goal, the team had to control scope, iterate, and make decisions fast. In this talk, Game Director Ellen Jurik will cover her approach to defining a game’s vision and how this vision is carried across to all aspects of the game. She will also discuss the process of adapting an existing IP of another media to a game, and the production and design challenges for releasing a game across eight platforms in a limited timeframe.

Game Connect Asia Pacific 2019: Lighting The Way

Game Connect Asia Pacific is Australia's premier games development conference and a part of Melbourne International Games Week.

Situated in Melbourne, Australia during October, GCAP is world-renowned for its talks, collaboration, expression, networking and inclusive environment.

Video courtesy of GCAP and the Game Developers' Association of Australia.

www.gcap.com.au