GDC 09: Writing for handheld - A Dr. Awesome Reflection

This was my first GDC and an awesome experience.  Thanks to everyone who said hello, see you all next year, but hopefully sooner!

There were a lot of great talks, but the most interesting one for me was a presentation by Evan Skolnick titled “Pocket Fiction: Writing for Handheld Games”.

The five points that Evan focused on:

• Control Scope
• Keep it simple
• Make it snappy
• Give impatient players the same experience
• Stay off the critical path

To summarize the talk, handheld gamers don’t play games the same way as console or pc gamers.  They are on the go.  They have their focus split.

Because of that, when iPhone gamers play games, they are looking for a quick, rewarding experience in small chunks.  How does that affect a game writing and the potential to tell a story?  Using Evan’s points, I submit my reflections based on what I learned from writing Dr. Awesome.

Control Scope

In Dr. Awesome, my only goal was to have the dialogue drive users back into the game play.  I think in that sense, it was well executed.

Dr. Osbourne would pressure you into the operating room.  Dr. Madison’s condescending tone would make you try again after failing a mission.  The nurse was always worried, and you wanted to make her feel better (by curing more patients).

Keep It Simple

It would have been really interesting to create an epic soap opera story that involved elaborate detail for all the characters.  There were limitations though.  For example, since we were inserting names into the dialogue, it was very difficult to even use pronouns.  I did not know if a patient was male or female.

It also was out of scope of the simple goal of getting uses to play the next level.

Make It Snappy

One of Evan’s points in making things snappy is willingness to cut dialogue.  It was painful to cut the dialogue that I spent so much effort writing.  We cut all the dialogue events between each operation before a patient is cured.  Almost all dialogue lines were re-written and re-ordered in order to trim it down to fit in 2 to 4 panels.

Overall, it was a good exercise in keeping things snappy.  The end result was dialogue that flowed much more smoothly and directed players back into the core game experience.

Give Impatient Players a Chance at the Same Experience

In Evan’s talk, he mentioned that in games where dialogue can only be skipped panel-by-panel, there’s an opportunity to tell a story in a silent comic book kind of way.

Since Dr. Awesome is also set up panel by panel, we took advantage of telling a story in images by having all characters drawn with a range of emotions.  Even if users weren’t reading the dialogue, the moods of the characters could be felt.  If Dr. Osbourne was happy, then something good happened.  If the nurse was alarmed, something bad resulted.

We could have gone further though and failed to tell a story using only images.  Even something as simple as a flat lined EKG would relay to users that an operation failed.  These assets would have been easy to insert next to the characters, allowing users who choose not to read to understand the situation.

Stay Off The Critical Path

Since the hand held game experience is not a fully immersive experience, it poses a high risk if the narrative contains any information relevant to progression in the game.

For the most part, Dr. Awesome executed this well.  Though, there were a few secondary elements that either were only relayed through dialogue or had somewhat poor visibility in the UI.   For example, patients had a number of “lives” before they expired.  We gave a critical warning that the patient only had one life left within the dialogue instead of changing the actual UI during this critical status.  A user who was skipping dialogue through that point had a high chance of missing this and would be surprised that a patient just died.

One Last Thing

It was a wonderful experience to create these characters and shape their interactions with Dr. Awesome.  The talk taught me that writing is incredibly powerful as a tool to set the mood, add color, and create energy.  It must be approached as a means of supporting the game play experience, not the other way around.  Keeping this in mind will allow for a much more fulfilling experience to all your players.

-Allen M