Thread by @emshort

At the Telltale tool talk, where Zac Litton and Carl Muckenhoupt are speaking about tooling, including challenges to visualising a dialogue with 15K lines #narrascope

#narrascope “a lot of our tool philosophy was... about getting us quickly to the 70% point, and then we could polish and edit”

#narrascope being able to edit the story extensively was critical, without committing early to motion capture or VO that couldn’t be replaced cheaply

Here we have “an artistic representation” of what the Telltale tool looked like. It could export excel spreadsheets for localisation and scripts for VO recording. #Narrascope

#Narrascope Carl talking about how moving to a more flexible dialogue system enabled the experiments that led to Walking Dead — systems that let you explore are creatively important

But then, useful structures that are discovered turn into reusable templates. #Narrascope

#NarraScope And here, an approach they didn’t implement before Telltale closed, but that organised possibilities on a per scene basis:

Zac closing with reflections on what he is working on now at his new studio: #NarraScope

#NarraScope Stacey Mason now mentioning that the Telltale tool had a red-yellow-green markup that let a narrative designer review the choices that had been written and mark which ones felt juicy vs medium vs needing replacement

#NarraScope question about whether the tools allowed viewing metrics of the project such as branching factor. Answer: yes, especially to control scope and understand likely cost of voicing dialogue and building animations. Every dialogue segment was synced to a JIRA ticket

#NarraScope Zac on how more procedural approaches or at least qualitative stats are needed as soon as you want to pay off choices from much earlier in the story. (Lines up with stats-based delayed branching design philosophy from Choice of Games.)