Who Needs a Story? Narration Through Art Direction | Riana McKeith
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Delivered at Casual Connect Europe 2017. A discussion on the importance of story as a basis for art direction in mobile games. From murderous tribal warriors, to evil scientists on the warpath, to the adaptation of Futurama for mobile, Riana McKeith will take you through her process to find original visions, themes and art direction for mobile games. This talk will be about why it actually is important to always tell a story and the possibilities of how to do that through art.
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Who Needs a Story? Narration Through Art Direction | Riana McKeith
Editor's Notes
- Hello! Wow – thanks so much for coming out to listen to me blather for 45 mins.
- First up, who here are working in the games industry? Students? Artists? Well I’m keepngthis talk quite broad but if you’ve any questions, or would like me to go into more details in any areas let me know!
- I’ve been workin in mobile games for over 8 years, and here are some of the games I’ve worked on as lead artist and art director. And as you can see these are all mobile, casual free to play games. But originally I came from animation – telling stories has always been a passion for me, and it’s central to everything I do. Over the course of this talk I’d like to share my process with you. But first I’d like to introduce you to the principal protagonists in our story today
- So here they are in all their glory. As an art director, it’s my responcibility to create the artisti vision for the games I work on, and convince the team that it’s the right way to go nd as such I fijd myself always balancing these 3 characters in my mind. Tahe story of the game, the artistic vision of th game, abd the game rules and limitations of the games itself. Ow we’ll get to the first two in a moment, but I want to take a minute to talk about the rules and limitations of mobile games for a mnute
- Free to play games make up 90% of the revenue in the app stores at th mokent, it’s dominanting the appstore. And for me th main characteistics of the games and how the players
- So, obviously free to play games get a large amoht of downloads than paid ga,es – however thy don‘t vlu your gme yet. If a plyer has paid E70 for a ps4 game, thers a certin level of buyer confidence inherent in that, whereas a free game has to prpve itself and prove it quickly before the user has moved on to something else. The patience is pretty low. And they in general hve low patience with your gme since theyve invested nothing i it. Many people would suggest that its simply not possible to tell a story in a game whee the sessin lenght is maybe 5 to 10 minutes. However, my feeling is that we‘re simply thinking bout story in the wrong way.
- Not only that, but commited player of your simple free to play mobioe game could nd up returning to your gme day after day, year after year. Like the Woog game Jelly Splash. So you have a few minutes to capture the interest of your audience & keep them for 3 or more years. Well – do we even need a story at all? Won’t the fun of the game keep them interested? Well for that, let’s go back a bit
- Ok, the history of narration in art goes back millenia, but we don’t have tjme for that right now, so I’m going to jump ahead a touch to
- Donky Kong was revolutionary, not just because it brught platform games to arcdes but also because of this
- A beautiful simple story – to some it might have seemed unnecessary to give a story to a game which such a short play session, but this cahnged how players viewed arcade games, giving them a rason to keep coming back, and puttng their coins into the machine, it hsd new and eciting characters, but more importantly it gave the players xomething they rarely had before
- THE REASON for why they played. And of course it sparked some of thr moost enduring characters in game hustory. But it hd to think about stroytellig a little differently, beause of the medium
- Well you’re probably aware of this story structure, with a clear start, middle and end – you’ll have seen this structure time and time again. But it needs to adapt tk the medium you’re using
- This graph by Terrance Lee exaplins it pretty well. In literature, the audience is presented with the story I a linear manner, as they read thrpugh th bok. All the information is transferred n text.
- Whereas in film you’ve got a whole new tool at your storytelling disposal, the visual and aueal exoerience
- And in games you’ve another dimension, the interactivity – and this allows games to allow the player to find their own story, building it out of the experiences they have and the choices they make.
- Game narratives have come a long, long way since Donkey Kong – employing all the traditional literary & filmic techniques of storytelling. But what about Mobile games? They don’t have the time, or sometimes even the player patience for filmic or AAA story-telling techniques
- So this is a pretty recognisable moent, and anyone in a cinema, or having just bought a E60 AAA game wth a 30 hour campaign is relativrly happy to sit through this tect dump, but I’ll tell you this rightnnow
- A mobile player will not. When You’ve got minutes, maybe seconds to convince your player to continue playing your game – literally every second, ever tap counts. But you can tell this whole story in one second if you allow the art to tell it.
- For instance, this image conveys all the inorstion in the previous text wall at once – a tiny spce ship flews a vast, unimagially more powerful enemy in a distant star system. In one imge. Now this is a simple technique that wa drummed ito me at animation school, and it;s
- When you can, allow the art to tell yur story, and te audience will thank you for it.
- In games, we see this happening more and more, like this moment st th start of Journey. Nontitorik needer, nontext needed I know where I am, and where I’m going to I this one image.
- And that’s how I approach my job in Wooga, by getting to the story as soon as possible and buioldig the game from there. Good art always has serves the needs of the game mechanics, BUT great art serves the mechanics AND the story. Ok, sounds great.. But how? If you’ve already got a kick ass story, brilliant – skip this part…So now you’re thinking, well I WANT to put a story in – but how am I supposed to do that.
- Well some of you will be working in teams where the story, the vision is clear from the start I rarely get that, but even if I did – I would still use this system in early pre-production to really get to the heart of g]the game & explore our options earky on. The aim here is to get to the rules of the univese, what are the essential pillars of th gzame design that the ar MUST support and what’s bonus.
- So here’s an example of th rules I createf for a gme I was brought o to early on to do theme and story breakdowns. So the very firdt thing I do is eliminte the idess which we will definitely not do, either because they don’t suit our audience, or theyre too ovedone. In this case the one I elimnted was thus:
- Tribl wardare,. What themes have already been done, what would bore the audience even if it works. So on to th idess.
- The idea here is to be as efficient and fst as possible to get to the idea. A splash like this one takes maybe 30 minutes to bring together and gives a whole sense of what the world could be to the team.
- Fast, Efficient, Defining the Boundaries
- As you can see, all of these have th rules at the cofe – in all of these worlds it’s good to be bad, and your troops are disposable.
- So this is one half of our dtory, the theme, Art direction is more than just delivering on the THEME though – it’s about FEELINGS
- If I gave yo te theme,
- Both of these games have the same idea at thir core, but the artwork tells two completely different stories
- And that’s done entirely through the art, how the art itself creates a narrative in the mind of the player. And the ART dies even more thsn that
- Let’s take these three drgons, what is the art telling us about the story? And in a medium like games, this sets the audience up to expect very different games.
- You can pay with this, setting up unusal expectatins, but artwork chnges who buys your game
- So in my mind I always try to get these two guys to work together to develop a story. Now there aren’t hard and fast rules for this, but luckilynyour audience is smart, and they qil atively learn about your world as they go throuugh your game.
- So, what do I mean by teaching your audience, well
- What does ths mean to you?
- But it nevr meant that BEFORE the fiom. Your Audience is actively learning, even if it doesn’t realise it is – everything you do has the power to teach and inform your player of the story, the mechanics and the why of what they’re doing. The Rules of your world Are what you teach the player they are. Just as sound is used in Jaws, you’ve got plenty of artistic tools at your disposal to help your players.
- Visual cues, or signs that transmit messages to the viewer We are preprogrammed to see meaning & patterns in art – and like the sound in jaws, it just makes sense to build a coherent narrative around them – to build a world that your players will want to return to agai and agin. SO now, a look at soe of the tools at our artistic disposal
- Luke develops over time, going from a unbalanced state of innocent, just a Vadar is uhbalanced in his evil state, and throhg his journey both he and vader come to a balanced moment, one where they are both flawed men, but inheently good inside. Told yhrough the use of white and black here
- Limbo – the tone is used so cleverly to obscures the information. The danger. Sense of unease. But the boy is PART of this world, belongs there – he’s dark too. A huge amount of the story in this game is delivered through the art, how the world looks, how things move
- Logically, after tone comes colour
- In this image, are they on the same team?
- Here colour is being used to reinforce he game mechanics, one side rd, th other blue in a neutral orange workd. But like tone, you can use colour to enhance your game’s narrative also
- There’s no rule book for colour – nothing saying green = fake, blue = real But we LEARN it over the course of the film
- So in oe of the games I was workig on, we had a definite story
- The planet express team has invented delivery drones
- Putting them in direct coflict with Mom nd her momazon primo drones
- But we hve a colour matchig game – colour becomes incredivly nportant – lkke i tf2 – color needs first to support the game mechanices. I had to create two colour palettes, one for good drones, oe for bad
- Colour showing the difference between the 2 factions, AND reinforcing the game play as “silver” metal is always the toughest thing to beat in the game. These colours are reserved and always maintained in this way
- Carl
- Russell
- Carl, Russel & Muntz
- Developed over time to support the narrative
- In my own work, I was doing eark concepts for a game called divinity
- If any of the elements in the game instead contradicts the theme, then it sticks out and detracts from the power of the message, or at the very least, misses an opportunity to strengthen the message.
- Good art always has serves the needs of the game mechanics, BUT great art serves the mechanics AND the story
- So what sort of narrative do we actually achieve in a mobile game this way – what benefits does it give us? Well Pacing Develops over time No start, end
- And the audience really responds to it – here’s some of our 5 star reviews for Futurama: Game of Drones
- But even more than positive reviews, a good story is about communication
- The art team, a consistent vision – a check for every piece of art you create, as the team changes and grows. A consistent reference point for all the decisions you make as you go.
- Your team, the game designers, the marketing guys, the testers, the engineers – all centered around a coherent narrative so that in the end
- But in the end it’s all about communication with your players – giving them the reason WHY to play your game, to explore the world YOU created, to entertain them but really, in the end to make them feel something – and really isn’t that what making games is all about?