{"id":113923,"date":"2020-06-08T19:49:00","date_gmt":"2020-06-08T19:49:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gamasutra.com\/view\/news\/364369"},"modified":"2020-06-08T19:49:00","modified_gmt":"2020-06-08T19:49:00","slug":"dont-miss-making-oxenfrees-narrative-unfold-like-a-free-flowing-conversation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/2020\/06\/08\/dont-miss-making-oxenfrees-narrative-unfold-like-a-free-flowing-conversation\/","title":{"rendered":"Don’t Miss: Making Oxenfree’s narrative unfold like a free-flowing conversation"},"content":{"rendered":"

As any developer who\u2019s tried to create a game with branching narrative paths knows, producing them can become a scope management nightmare very fast. It\u2019s not impossible, as many developers continue to show us, but how can a small team manage all of that scope and scale?<\/span><\/p>\n

Oxenfree<\/em>, the coming-of-age ghost story game from developer Night School Studio<\/a>, has a few answers. The game comes from Telltale and Disney veterans including cousins and lead developers Adam Hines and Sean Krankel, who spoke to us about designing an interactive ghost story with a narrative that unfolds like an ongoing, free-flowing conversation between the player and several NPCs.<\/p>\n

Oxenfree <\/em>began as a simple idea that Hines and Krankel say they\u2019ve been tossing around for years. Could they make a game where conversation and dialogue were constantly flowing, and have the player’s contributions to that conversation shape the direction of the story? \u201cWe thought, \u2018Yeah, that sounds easy! Why hasn\u2019t anyone tried to do this?,'” Hines says. \u201cThen we started designing it and we realized why–it\u2019s very, very hard.\u201d<\/p>\n

For Hines, who was a writer on Tellltale\u2019s The Wolf Among Us<\/em> and Tales from the Borderlands<\/em>, the first difficulty wasn\u2019t really in conceptualizing the idea of branching conversations, but what those conversations could be about. <\/p>\n

Krankel says time was needed to begin making hard decisions that helped them manage what kind of story they wanted to tell and how far it could branch. \u201cThat meandering informs Adam\u2019s writing process, because each line can only last so long as the player goes from point A to point B, and how many interactable objects you introduce between those points expands the amount of dialogue that can occur.\u201d<\/p>\n

In that process, other restrictions grew as well, creating natural cages for the story\u2019s expanding possibilities. \u201cWe decided to have no cutscenes,\u201d says Krankel. \u201cWe used dialogue bubbles that grow from characters and are tethered to them visually, instead of having subtitles sitting off to the side.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cBut with no cutscenes, how do we fit multiple characters onscreen? That forced us to pull the camera back. It\u2019s a cool creative choice, but it\u2019s also the only way we can accommodate 4-5 players on screen.\u201d<\/p>\n

The game unfolds as a gaggle of teens explore a mysterious island. Krankel brings up a surprising challenge for their 2-D adventure game: the shape of the spaces that the player gets to explore. Oxenfree <\/em>is sidescrolling throughout, but whether the player moves on a 2D plane or with an illusion of 3-dimensional movement varies in different places, and that decision wound up affecting the very pace and presentation of dialogue.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe try to let players move in a Z-space as often as possible to let them have a sense of depth, but we have to fundamentally <\/span>restrict it to have some encounters make sense. In the beach scene early on, when these 4-5 characters are arguing, the conversation system gets to do 90% of the work.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cBut when you\u2019re alone with your step-brother, we were finding that Z-space was almost too open-ended. We had to go back to the idea of players moving through 2-D snakey environments, which lets chunks of conversation easily push you from point A to point B.\u201d<\/p>\n

Time is your frenemy<\/strong><\/h2>\n

For the most part, Hines and Krankel are satisfied with their management of Oxenfree\u2019s <\/em>narrative branches—but there was one element that slowed down production more than they would have liked. While voiceover, art assets, and scripting all seemed to be moving at a proper pace, they realized the game\u2019s many unique encounters would need a lot of unique animation and effects. <\/p>\n

\u201cThis game, we found, doesn\u2019t sing until all the elements are in,\u201d says Krankel. \u201cSo we didn\u2019t realize until halfway through development how many unique setups would take place on a per conversation basis. We\u2019d want the camera to behave a certain way, glitching, doing a custom effect, or even pushing in. That took way longer than we thought.\u201d<\/p>\n

But while time was their enemy in just the raw effort needed to make these animations, it became their ally in organizing the major beats of the story. As the characters fight to survive the horrors of their environment, major story thresholds are crossed with the passing of individual hours. No matter where the characters are, Hines can write specific events to fire off because he knows they\u2019ll have a certain amount of knowledge at a given in-game time. <\/island><\/p>\n

\u201cThe time thing was a good choice,\u201d Krankel says. \u201cIt does a good job framing the player’s understanding of what’s happening, even if the game isn’t linear in terms of how you experience it.\u201d<\/p>\n

The last advantage of keeping all this branching scope in line, Hines says, was it helped them dive into Oxenfree\u2019s <\/em>actual story. Though he\u2019s been interested for a while in coming-of-age tales and the tough choices teenagers face that the rest of us find trivial, the creative limitations of putting a player inside a pre-built character with their own history fueled his imagination. \u201cI think the value of these restrictions are, the player still gets to role play, but at the same time [Alex] is in a moment in her life where she\u2019s choosing who she wants to be.\u201d <\/p>\n

\u201cThe player gets to take everything in through this new lens, and it\u2019s nice to have them come in fresh and comment on her past, which can affect her relationship with other characters, and so on.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hines and Krankel point out they scoped this project from the beginning to be manageable by a relatively small team, and they encourage other designers to tackle games that fit their own strengths and weaknesses. But if you\u2019re working on a branching narrative game, and trying to keep your own tree neatly trimmed, Oxenfree <\/em>may be a good source for pruning strategies.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As any developer who\u2019s tried to create a game with branching narrative paths knows, producing them can become a scope management nightmare very fast. It\u2019s not impossible, as many developers continue to show us, but how can a small team manage all of that scope and scale? Oxenfree, the coming-of-age ghost story game from developer Night School […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":113924,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-113923","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113923","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=113923"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113923\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/113924"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=113923"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=113923"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=113923"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}