Adam Creighton, Computer and Video Gaming: AGDC: The Super Heroes' Journey: Storytelling in MARVEL ULTIMATE ALLIANCE 2

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Adam Creighton, Computer and Video Gaming (Subscribe)

Tuesday, September 15, 2009

AGDC: The Super Heroes' Journey: Storytelling in MARVEL ULTIMATE ALLIANCE 2

Taking a selfish break from the business tracks to feed my internal fanboy with "The Super Heroes' Journey: Storytelling in MARVEL ULTIMATE ALLIANCE 2", which comes out today:

"Building a strong narrative for video gaming's largest army of super heroes
requires a unique fusion of writing techniques, tools, and production
strategies. Join Lead Writer Evan Skolnick and Narrative Designer, Jonathan
Mintz, as they take a deep dive into storytelling for a modern, large-scale
Action RPG. You'll learn how they worked with the team to plan the narrative,
develop the game's characters and world, and integrate story with gameplay
They'll share best practices for creating and organizing the wealth of content
that modern games require - along with some hard-earned tips about pitfalls to
avoid."

I wanted to attend this session not just because I'm a franchise fan. I was curious how the team was going to tighten the gameplay and cutscene storytelling depending on who you pick for your teams (a challenge in the first title), while ratcheting up the mechanics (a la the fusion mechanic) and maturity level, complexity, and player choice and cost.

Secondly (and work-related), I was curious as to how the narrative design informed the tools and production pipeline (more on that later).

Evan Skolnick, lead writer, and Jonathan Mintz, Narrative Designer were the session speakers, and did a stellar job of speaking, keeping content moving, and answering questions.

Vicarious Visions had a roughly 120-person development team for the project, which took
2.5 years to make, and adapted ~~Disney's~~ Marvel's "Secret War" and "Civil War" arcs.

It sounds like VV and Marvel did a good job of adapting Marvel's "What If" trope to the stories, and have better represented the two sides of conflicts so that no one's "wrong" and the player can honestly "choose a side".

VV has done some smart stuff with handling in-game conversations, and I really dig in concept the implementation of their dialog tree.

I had a pretty good sense of what the Narrative Designer's role was, based on conversations with Jonathan after MUA1, but the team has really refined the role, and genuinely leveraged the Narrative Designer and Lead Writer roles in a collaborative division of labor whose sum was greater than the parts.

On the tools side, they created an Excel tool for the Writing Workbook, for the mission designer, lead writer, and narrative designer. More than just a project plan, this has a very slick multi-purpose XML output, used to create text-to-speech placeholder audio, VO scripts, gameplay pacing, descriptive text cues, etc. Very nice process.

They also used that data to prioritize mission scope, complexity, and features to avoid headaches (or at least as many). Coming out of a formal requirements background, I was impressed with their application of prioritization to mission structure.

Surprisingly, there was a very nice mini-post mortem as part of the presentation -- very cool, given the game shipped today.

Aside -- I also got to chat with DB Cooper, one of the best voice over professionals in the business (and one of the most accessible and gracious), and AGDC is one of the places I get to see her in person each year. She's good peoples. Even better to run into her since a con call made me miss her session (damn you, toy job that keeps me employed!).

Labels: AGDC, AGDC09, comic books, events