Johannes

No more news for a while!

I bet this is it. Gotta show that ROI right away

There are people burning out to get Steven Universe skins into each metaverse, pouring themselves into the live-service Dora the Explorer/Paw Patrol team-up, sleeping under desks so the Teletubbies extraction shooter drops a disappointing Open Alpha this quarter. But at least the Sun Baby is smiling

😂 skill issue!

Severance is making me feel ooey gooey things but first, get it together Mark, that snake is not your Helly!

Cool, lots of stuff to think about and read thank you!

Lua can feel maximum cowboy at times but we've found if you approach it in a disciplined, codery way and standardise how the data is handled then stuff starts to look really neat, almost like templating in real languages. Also if done just right, it's so dang readable and approachable for non coders

That's awesome, I'm taking notes! Also have to have a look at Subcutanean.

So when something is "special/static" does that mean it's authored and the procedural elements sort of adorn it? Is it the spine of the story? Is it the opening?

I usually land on the "single source of truth" side of any tooling or tracking debate. With even a handful branches I'd need to see it in a flow chart to understand it and then suddenly we have two truths. I love yours for linear dialogue but scared to imagine it for branching or variable tracking

Oh ok that sounds nice. I was imagining our sprawling lua systems in blueprints but thankfully it sounds like you wouldn't do that. We often find we lose a lot of flexibility when stuff moves into code. Have you ever felt that?

Congrats guy! Three years of killing it

😂

Does it cover the deep societal and economic effects of late-stage vampirism too?

Oh nice tooling AND writing. Best of both worlds!

Sounds pretty sweet! What about for branching content? God help us we had a branching text adventure in a DLC recently which was written in a linear format and had to be parsed by someone with a very specific brain

Hell yeah, TNDs unite! Not to be confused with the Teenage Mutant Narrative Designers

Sounds familiar though I wish we'd do more tooling! I'm always thinking about ways to prototype things which make converting to usable/alpha easy, but we seem to love doing everything 9 times in 9 different ways here so it doesn't matter!

The thought of debugging complex systems in Blueprints is giving me palpitations. Is there a point at which you say "enough! this needs to be in code"?

More of Inkle man than an articy freak?

God's work! If you can get writers to work in-engine consistently then you've done more than I may ever achieve

Honestly fascinating, the narrative needs of such an inconceivably large game. Procedural stuff intrigues and frightens me in equal measure though, it must be such a tightrope walk, too many guardrails and it feels samey, too few and it's incoherent. How have you guys found the sweetspot?

Tagging all the tech narrative people I could find on bsky (I think there might be just 9 of us!)
@notcrucial.bsky.social
@thrownerror.bsky.social
@falconnights.bsky.social
@liamrharwood.com
@harleigh.bsky.social
@brianmakesgames.com
@charliekinglake.bsky.social
@yasterazz.bsky.social

But probably the most important thing we do is be the in-betweeners. Onboarding designers so they can implement on their own, being the go-to for other departments when narrative system is acting up, quickly prototyping a new narrative gameplay feature, or designing boring or more technical features

Technical narrative folks! We're just a baby discipline but I'd love to learn about what your day-to-days are. At Remedy we're almost entirely in Lua, writing systems to handle dialogue, convos, narrative anims, in-world media & narrative item dioramas. Plus TONS of dialogue implementation.