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Hi, I'm Alexa Ray Korea, and this is the Game Makers Notebook podcast.
Today, I spoke to Nick Herman.
He's the co-founder, CEO and director at Ad Hoc Studio.
You know them from the recently released Dispatch.
Dispatch is a narrative focused game.
So we talked a lot about what makes a good narrative focused game and the road to funding to make it happen.
I thought there was.
This was a really interesting one, based on talking about the current landscape of games, the landscape of funding and this seeming resurgence of a focus on narrative focused titles.
I thought this was really cool and I hope you enjoy it, too.
Welcome to The Game Maker's Notebook, a podcast featuring a series of in-depth one-on-one conversations between game makers, providing a thoughtful, intimate perspective on the business and craft of interactive entertainment.
The Game Maker's Notebook is presented by the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences, a member-driven organization dedicated to the recognition and advancement of interactive entertainment.
My favorite question that I always like to start these interviews with, how did you get here?
Like, here, here?
Here, in this version?
Into the industry?
Yeah.
How did you get here?
Oh, boy.
Kind of by accident, I think.
I don't know.
It wasn't a plan.
I didn't think I was going to be making video games, that's for sure.
No.
Yeah, I was 18 and... uh the the kind of like music director at this opera house that i had been sort of going to as a kid basically said hey there's this company they need a marketing intern to like roll posters um and i was in the phase of my life where i had decided i wasn't going to college i was just going to either make movies you know short films or i was going to like continue to do theater um so it's like kind of like director or actor was like the path i was on but i also was not I don't know.
I didn't have my shit together.
Can I swear?
Can I say shit?
Yes.
Yes, you can.
Okay.
I didn't have my shit together enough to know what I was doing.
And I just basically took a temporary job working at a video game company called Telltale Games.
Wow.
And that ended up being a good place for me.
They were super small.
It was like 15 people at the time.
And I ended up doing trailers for their games because I was into learning, editing and making short films and stuff.
And then eventually, it's like, oh, cool.
You understand basic cinematic principles.
Do you want to start trying to make stuff in the game itself?
And so it's like, yeah, why not?
And so it snowballed into learning how to do cut scenes and performance stuff.
And then eventually it went from intern to cinematic person, to director, to creative director over the course of 10 years.
So what I'm hearing is you were a former theater kid.
That's all you heard.
No, no, no, no.
I heard I heard all of that.
But I've noticed something that I've picked up from doing doing this podcast.
A lot of us are former theater kids and we end up in video games, which is.
It's weird.
It's interesting.
It's weird.
I think it's maybe like the desire to create something interactive because, like with games, you do get that feedback loop with your audience, which is kind of the same as theater, as opposed to writing a TV show.
So you were at Telltale and now you are at a self created studio you guys made ad hoc.
What was the journey like from you starting at telltale in your first games job to starting your own studio?
Um yeah, i mean, i was, i was, you know, i was at telltale for a long time so i i kind of got to see, you know, i was there when we were making sam and max and monkey island and sort of more traditional adventure games and then, as we kind of slowly transitioned to um, maybe more mainstream appeal type things like Jurassic Park and Back to the Future and then eventually The Walking Dead,
So I kind of saw the trajectory and it was very fortunate to be a part of a really pretty small studio and kind of see all the pros and cons of that growth.
And along the way, working with Dennis and Pierre over the years at Telltale, of like taking notes on like, what we would have done differently and like oh, if you know, here's where we wish telltale would sort of expand towards and and then they would, you know, kind of famously just said, did the same thing over and over again until until they um, didn't work anymore.
Um, so that was always kind of in our heads is like hey like, here are the, here are the pillars we would focus on if we were making our own studio and And really, when we left Telltale before they shut down and we went to Ubisoft or the three of us did, and that was an attempt to take our sensibilities and the things that we care about and put it into a AAA game and see OK well, what if it starts with story and characters and writing?
And then that didn't really work out.
After that kind of disappointing experience, which we learned a lot, but it wasn't, you know ultimately what.
We didn't land where we wanted it to land.
That's when we had the opportunity to um.
Essentially, we.
We found a.
There's a company who was looking for people to make live action interactive narrative games.
So essentially like telltale games, but with real people on sets, um kind of like banner snatch basically.
Yeah.
Um, yeah.
And and so that felt like okay, this feels like new and exciting and like kind of you know doing, taking the things that we already know how to do and expanding our kind of broadening what that experience could look like.
So that's where it started.
And we kind of thought that's what we were going to be.
It's just like a studio that just like shows up and like makes other people's narratives better.
Essentially,
Then you were at Telltale.
I find it really interesting that you you talked a little bit about, you know, germinating on.
This is what we're learning that we like and this is what we're learning that we don't like, as you are sort of building your craft.
So in your mind you know the telltale.
When people talk about telltale, it's the walking dead, it's the systemic branching, the choices and stuff like that.
So in your mind, when you're looking at that, what were you thinking?
Like, this is something that I would like to expand upon that I think we can go deeper.
And where were you like?
No, I don't think this is the right approach.
This is the way I would like to approach it.
What was it like in that part of evolving your craft?
Yeah, I mean, I think we were pretty confident that if you've got a great story you want to tell, if you've got a great script and characters that people care about, that there shouldn't be a a barrier for people who just you know television was getting more and more popular.
Now it's like, you know, everyone watches, you know, stuff on HBO and Netflix and all that stuff.
So like it's, it's good stories are ubiquitous, like sort of regardless of like whatever age or demographic, like if the story is good, people show up.
And so we kind of had this feeling that there are things that are keeping a lot of people away from these interactive narrative experiences.
And I don't think it's the part where you have to choose what happens next.
I think that part, a lot of people can get excited about.
And so we basically felt like, okay, well, the big obvious thing that's holding people back when we would show our friends or people who maybe play games, but don't play our type of games, they look at it and they thought, this doesn't look premium enough like yes i'd be interested in watching an animated an animated show but if the animation looked like this maybe not so we knew that like fidelity was a thing we wanted to just like crush and just make that undeniable so that we didn't have that stopping people from from engaging with our with our stories basically that's so interesting that it was fidelity why do you why do you think that is I think, I don't, you know, I don't know.
I think, I think it's, I think it's hard to get people to, to do something, to like go outside of their comfort zone and like try something new.
And so kind of any.
Any reason to not do that is is you know people will sort of take, take that and use that as an excuse.
So, one of the goals was like, let's make sure that when people see this, they're confused.
Like they think it's a show first and then we have to teach them like Oh no actually, like you have agency over this stuff.
Um, and and I think a lot of people um, I think I heard this when I was at Ubisoft.
I heard this about like Naughty Dog.
So it could be complete bullshit, but like they basically say that, or like the way they talk about stuff is like, people's the most important thing about with first impression is visuals and and and then it flips once you have once you're playing the game it's the least important thing once you're like already in and you know bought in wow um so it was something that like i've always i've always remembered um and weirdly i think narrative stays the same i think it's in the middle there's like three anyways i don't want to someone from naughty dog will come on this podcast and tell you the real thing but yeah so it was just that was a big thing and then the other thing was let's make sure that the gameplay is not um it doesn't push people away like it's accessible it's it's kind of uh intuitive so it's where like the dispatching mechanic like came in where we wanted it to be like very like oh i'm just moving folders around on my on my desktop you know um it feels like anyone can kind of see this and do it and it's actually not very difficult but still there be enough depth for people who who you know want to dig in yeah accessibility is the wrong word but it sounds like that for you the hurdle to clear was get people to like what they're looking at and then in terms of like the dispatch mechanics something that was very easy to easy to pick up but like required some level of kind of i guess mastery a little bit as you move through move through the episode approachable is probably the word Yeah, approachable.
That's so interesting.
The fidelity conversation as you were talking.
It reminds me of kind of what we're seeing in AAA right now, which is everyone feels like they have to make these super big, like photorealistic, see every poor, like hyper hyper, believable stories.
And I think that's where we're seeing. budget inflation and then studio closures and layoffs and stuff like that so that's really interesting that you are um you are seeing that on your end of the industry which is uh indie double a what would you say how what would you call yourself i think i think now that we're that we're through it yeah i mean i think i think sort of like by traditional standards we're probably double a um i think it's it's not a cool thing to say double a is like yeah you have an indie or you want to be triple a it's, I think, I think the industry just shifted at a certain point.
Like double a was a dirty word.
Like if you were going to go, especially if you're trying to raise money, be like Oh, I'm going, I'm.
You know, we've heard a double, a game.
Like there were just, there's a graveyard of, of games for a long time that were in that category.
So I, the sort of conventional wisdom is either be super indie or go really big.
Um, and you could, it's easier to raise money for, you know, $50 million than it is to raise 15.
Um So so yeah, so that was kind of like a weirdly.
That's relevant when you're running a studio, maybe less relevant if you're just, you know, joining one.
But I think we settled on Triple I. We like that one.
But we like it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Triple I. I like I like Triple I. It's cute.
It's cute.
It's clean.
It is.
It's clean.
What you're saying actually reminds me of a quote that I pulled from one of the interviews that you've done so far about Dispatch.
When you're talking about working at Ubisoft.
You were working on a Splitter Cell game which sounds cool.
That franchise I definitely would love to see revitalized in some way.
But you said, as you were working with them before you left, And then you realize that all of the things that you care about they don't anymore.
It's a common thing in games.
And I kind of want to unpack that and unpack that a little bit because again, like fellow writer obviously, like we like to prioritize narrative.
We really want to have like a very strong story.
So for you, when you're you were in that triple A space. what was that realization for you?
Like, what were the things that you really cared about, that you felt like leadership or, you know, people around you were maybe cared about something else.
Yeah.
I mean, I think in a lot of ways, like I understand, like everyone, no one's, no one starts a, you know, starts a game, especially a game that's supposed to have story in it.
Like thinking like oh, let's make a bad story, like let's, it's okay, it doesn't need to be good, like the intent is always there.
To like have great writing, have great characters.
And then where the rubber meets the road is what that requires and the reality of what that means for your production.
I think that's where a lot of folks who haven't prioritized it before don't appreciate what that's going to look like.
And so most game studios.
They focus on a genre or a mechanic and they spend, you know, a bunch of time prototyping and iterating and making something really sticky and fun.
And, um, and then they go, okay, now what, now what's the story now?
Where are we?
You know, who, who is this person?
Um, and at ad hoc, we do the exact opposite.
We're like, Hey, let's figure out the story.
Let's figure out the characters.
And then what makes sense from a gameplay standpoint to sort of inject into it which um is why the dispatching thing feels a little bit more organic um yeah and it's and it's why we stripped a lot of that stuff out a lot of the stuff that you would expect from like a normal telltale game isn't in ours or isn't in dispatch um because we were just trying to be clean and efficient and and take out anything that just didn't make sense and felt like a holdover so there's there's no exploration which a lot of people want and love and i i get it but I couldn't or we couldn't justify the need for it.
So that's kind of what we were trying to do in general at AdHoc is strip away all the stuff that didn't need to be there.
And also, we're our own studio, so we need to scope things out.
So it's a production reality, too.
But yeah, the experience at Ubisoft was really great.
I'm glad we did it.
Because I'd always be left wondering, maybe we could have gone off and done a AAA thing.
But I'm happy.
I'm happy where we landed.
Yeah, it sounds like...
Yeah, it's the AAA experience in terms of writing.
Definitely at this point in time in our industry, we're seeing, you know, writers getting laid off.
Everyone's talking about generative AI, all that stuff, shareholders, blah, blah, blah.
For you, when you are, you know, you came in and it sounds like it was design-led and then you were hired to, you know, throw a little narrative at it, make it pretty, make it nice.
When you work with designers and teams like that, how do you kind of, what do you think is a good way to like educate them on investing in the narrative?
How do you get them to get buy-in?
What is a good way to approach that relationship in a way that results in, you know, a more collaborative, collaborative work and also an understanding of the importance of your half of the equation? tough question um i know it's loaded i yeah i i i don't think i don't think we've had i mean so we also um we also do like sort of consulting and like work on like other ip like that that is not announced uh yet but like whatever it'll later you'll you'll hear about stuff we're doing but those teams are bought in on what we're trying to do and we're you know it's a it's not like i think it's really hard to like just parachute into a team who don't really care about you know stories being a you know a pillar of of the experience um i think it's hard to convince them otherwise and i honestly don't think it's worth the effort um uh but i think more and more we're finding that that people in the industry do appreciate that now.
And like I think they see the value, especially if it's like a single player sort of lead experience, um that they, they know that a great game can be ruined by a bad, you know, by bad writing.
Um, and so I, I think it's becoming easier, but, um, I don't know.
It's really hard to kind of like force people to do something like that, because you do have to consider a lot of new things that are annoying, that get in the way of design or that get in the way of you know, an experience, um.
But in order for all to feel cohesive, you have to take those things into account, and it's i mean, it's just like anything, it's just like any working with any other department um, it's just one that's been historically, you know, like kind of a second class citizen in games, specifically.
Why, though?
I feel like all of the... Narrative stuff is so... Well, it's been big for a while.
It's not like it's just made a comeback.
If you look at everything that's come out this year we have Dispatch, we have Expedition 33, which everyone is really just talking about the story, stuff like that.
Why do you think they treat it that way?
I mean, we might be coming out of a time where Because there was a period where everyone was saying single-player games are dead
And it was just all gas, all multiplayer, all loot boxes.
And I think we're emerging out of that now, especially this year.
Everyone's looking at a bunch of great games that were all single-player with heavy narrative.
So I don't know.
I mean, I just think...
I think the money kind of dictates what is getting made.
And our experience with Dispatch was it was a nightmare to get it funded.
It was a nightmare.
We had funding.
We lost funding.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It was terrible.
Getting people excited about a new IP from a team who's never made a game before as a studio.
It's narrative driven.
They look at comps from all the previous, The last, whatever five years of just like narrative games.
It's not.
It's not a murderer's row, you know.
It's certainly like there's one or two in there that you're like oh, that's oh yeah, that did well.
But even well is is like.
You know, it's uh, relative to things that blew it out of the water.
So it's been a tough road to get to spetch green that, even with people like aaron paul attached and um, So yes, it's weird.
So I would like to talk about Dispatch.
So when did you start?
And we'll talk about the funding stuff.
When did you start working on Dispatch?
When did you first get the idea of this is what it's going to do?
Was it when you were working with the live action studio?
Or was this an idea that you guys had previously, that you were like this could be a good fit for this.
Yeah, no think.
Uh mike, one of our co-founders had the, the initial pitch um, but it was basically we were essentially contracted to come up with two original stories that we could make live action interactive.
Uh, content out of and dispatch was the first thing we did and it was really born from like a pretty cynical like, like it had to be kind of family friendly and so we just learned like okay, the avengers meets the office, like it was like the first thing we, you know, wrote down and and then slowly it it came into kind of its own sort of vibe but but it was going to be like a super cheap.
I mean, like we had, it wasn't, you know, super cheap, but we had like $5 million to shoot.
I don't know.
I can't remember what the runtime was supposed to be, but pretty like episodes that are like eight minutes long, you know, it was like really short form um, and so we were gonna.
We had to like kind of crap everything up.
So it was like SDN, like the office that the that the game takes place in was like in a strip mall, like next to a Baskin Robbins, and it was like the you know wires are hanging from the ceiling and it's like practically these, we're making these decisions because this is like we can make that look good, you know, versus a beautiful giant you know set.
So we were like kind of like crapping up the whole, like the whole vibe of it.
So it felt like uh, like really rinky, dink and um, and yeah, and then, and then essentially what happened is we went into, started to go into production, we were in pre-pro, we were casting and then um, the pandemic hit.
So shut, shut all that down yeah yeah, so we never got to, never got to realize it.
Um, and in hindsight it's like thank God.
Like that would have been, that would have been really bad.
Like it, you know, no one would be talking about it.
Um, as fun as it would have been.
Um, yeah.
And yeah.
And then so at that point we, you know, we we started working on Wolf 2 uh, with Telltale, and there's a whole couple of years of stuff there we can skip.
Um, and, and then when we decided we wanted to, uh, um, Yeah.
Yeah.
I've talked about Wolf enough.
Yeah.
We don't have to.
We don't have to.
Good luck.
Yeah.
So then we were then we were basically like, OK, let's do our own original thing.
And we basically started somewhere else.
We tried on some like six months trying making some new IPs.
That was like a completely different genre of game.
And then eventually we're just like, what are we doing?
We already have this like scripts like sitting on the shelf.
Like, let's just let's just make that.
What what made you decide on superheroes?
And I ask because the ongoing debate in TV film everything with Marvel and DC is, you know, superhero fatigue, and then Invincible comes out and it's like superheroes are, we are so back like, and then something else happens and it's like oh no, we're over.
So for you, what about the superhero genre did you feel was a good fit for this kind of execution?
Well, I mean, when we had the idea seven years ago, there was a little less fatigue.
So that that was less of a concern and really it was very cynically like let's make something with fraud appeal.
Um, and so it was, uh, you know, we're running a business, you know, at the end of the day.
So it's like let's make sure let's do something like our my, my sort of experience working with Pierre and Dennis uh we we, we.
The three of us started working together for the first time on Wolf Among Us at Telltale.
And that experience was, hey, here's a comic book.
None of us were really huge fables heads or anything.
We read it and appreciated it, but we weren't huge fanboys.
And so we had to figure out what version of this would we be really excited about.
And so that's kind of where you know the 80s neo-noir like prequel stuff came from, is like we just could get excited about it.
And then sort of similarly on Tales from the Borderlands.
Not a huge Borderlands person, like you know, played a bunch of Borderlands 2 but it was like how do we turn this into something that we would go see or go play ourselves?
And so that's our kind of general style is take a thing it doesn't matter what it is and just turn it into something that we'd be into.
So Super Heroes is kind of just that again.
It's like its own IP of like, what are we going to do with this that's going to be appealing to us?
And so yeah.
And I mean the tone of the game and a lot of the decisions, the sort of high-level creative decisions, kind of went all over the place.
It used to be super depressing and then the pandemic hit and then we were watching Ted Lasso going.
I just want to feel good.
Can we just not be super cynical for a second and make something that feels more like comfort food?
And so it's kind of like this mix of things.
Robert is still kind of a depressed person, but we're surrounding him with good people and trying to constantly entertain him.
But it is like a hodgepodge of things and I'm glad it worked, or I'm glad people like it, because it's one of those things that we've been so close to for so long that I truly did not know what people are going to think of this thing.
It's a very weird game.
Yeah, but it sounds like you were talking about something comforting, something less cynical, and I think that's very present in the final product of Dispatch.
Yeah.
That's good.
So when you were going for funding for this and you were building it out, I've read you had a publisher that bailed on you.
Yeah, you stopped paying yourselves a couple months ago, prior to launch, according to an article I read.
So in terms of that situation, what was that like?
Was it just partners were coming and leaving?
Or was it the story that is so familiar to so many indie games right now, which is oh, give us something that's 90 done and we'll give you enough money to put our name on the box and just get you across the finish line and market you, which is an unfortunate reality right now and kind of a very cynical looking at it.
But what was that journey like for you?
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, we, um, it was hard to find kind of an initial partner.
Uh, like I said, we I mean we pitched basically everybody and and what would happen is we had a pretty solid pitch and a and a and a good you know, like we knew what we were doing people would go.
We would go like, oh my god, this is incredible, this looks so good.
Wow, this is you guys.
I love everything you've done before, a big fan.
But we just can't do this.
It would just be like the same thing over and over again, where it's like we love this, this is so cool, it looks incredible.
We had, we had animation, we had you know stuff to show that that basically was close to final and but it was still just like it's too risky, it's too much of a risk um, and so we eventually found someone who, who did believe in us.
Um, and, uh, they supported the project about halfway through development.
And then, and then, halfway through um, it was, you know, the one of the worst times in the industry, like I don't know.
And, like the last 15 years was just, like you know, all sorts of deals, closing studios, shutting down.
Like it was like everything froze, like money was impossible to find, to the point where people who were supporting us were having trouble too.
And we're like looking for like what they, what they had to lose.
Um, and we were, we were kind of at the top of the list because we were such a weird game.
Um, so, so then we lost, yeah, we lost funding.
Uh, and we've.
I mean, we were looking for like a year before, essentially before we found critical role.
Um, And, uh, it was, you know, every, every, every week where you're, where you don't know where the money's coming from is, is, you know, the screws get tighter and, and things get tense and yeah.
And you have to make a lot of hard calls.
Like it's.
It's the part of this thing that, like you know, you start up, you start a game studio to make video games and you realize that's like half the job you know.
Um, and and supporting the studio and keeping it, keeping it going is is the actual um.
It's weirdly the most important part, right?
Not weirdly, but it's obvious now.
But you don't think about that kind of stuff when you're starting.
No.
How did you find Critical Role?
Like, did they approach you?
Did you approach them?
What did they bring?
Playing the dispatch parts of the game does feel a little bit like playing a tabletop game.
So i have to ask like, what was that was?
How did that partnership come to be?
Yeah, that was um.
So we had already.
We were working with laura um, who we have a relationship with from from tales in the borderlands, and we had been recording with her and um, she had basically showed travis like hey, check out this, this animation for this game that i'm doing with the ad hoc guys and And she's married to Travis Willingham, who is the CEO of Critical Role.
And he saw that and I guess they were kind of in this spot where they had been looking for a while to figure out what their game strategy was going to be.
Like they're this they've got TV shows, they've got you know tabletop, they've got you know the sort of live show stuff.
And so they're naturally looking to figure out what's next for them as far as like the next, like whatever sector of their business.
So they had, You know, a lot of opportunities, a lot of options in front of them, but nothing felt right to Travis.
And then he saw what we were doing and thought like this feels like something that would make sense for for critical role.
And so we engage with them.
I mean, I don't know honestly, like about a year before, before we did the, they kind of helped us dispatch.
We were talking to them about what could we do for critical role.
So we were very much, all you know, focused on their ip um, and kind of eventually i don't really remember the moment or when it happened, but we were just like hey, like we, we're not even gonna get there if we can't get dispatch out like yeah, why don't we talk about you guys like helping us on dispatch?
Are you interested?
And and luckily, by that point we've got a lot of the game built and you can kind of see more of it and play it and understand it.
So um, so yeah.
So then it then the conversation shifted to like okay, let's focus on dispatch first and um, and then once, once those conversations started, it was like obvious, like everyone was like oh, my god, i can't believe we didn't talk about this sooner.
So um, so yeah they, basically they came in um, i mean the game had already been like sort of written designed.
We were in animation, so they really were like, you know, champions for us.
They're helping us, you know, post launch with a lot of stuff.
Um they're, you know, been helping us with the marketing.
But but really initially it was like they came in to to make sure that the project got the funding it needed and um, and supported us and and they're, i mean we, it's a perfect partner for us because They're exactly the kind of studio or company that we hope to be.
It's creative-led.
They started just by telling literally interactive stories and then figuring out ways to reach people and share that with folks.
So they see what we're doing and then it really feels like they're kind of like an older brother or sister to us.
That's really sweet.
I love a success story.
I love it.
I love seeing co-dev partnerships that work out well for everybody.
Yeah, it's rare.
Oh, yeah.
I want to rewind a little bit and talk about a lot of the conversation around Dispatch.
You all did come from Telltale.
You came up through Telltale.
And so a lot of people talk about this with the Telltale sauce.
How?
How would you draw, you know, the DNA line between kind of the Telltale style branching to what you did in Dispatch?
Because it is similar, but has its own identity.
Yeah, I mean, I think it's the.
You know, when Sean and Jake did The Walking Dead, you know they kind of you know, I feel like they invented a new like genre.
Obviously like, a lot of these pieces were there um, in different forms, but the sort of combination of what, what they put together for for walking dead, it was um clearly uh uh, important to me and impactful to me.
I think what I think what Telltale did and um, and what we are continuing to do is focus on characters and um.
It's where I think there can be critique on stuff we do, where it's like oh, but how many endings are there?
It's a question we would get all the time before the game launched.
How many endings are there going to be?
And it just seems like the wrong thing to be focused on to us.
So I think we're really focused on the characters, meaningful relationships that you have agency over um, and then ultimately that will lead to different outcomes and um and yeah, and so there's.
I think that's kind of the difference between maybe telltale and like i don't know, like a, something like more like quantic dream or something um, but that's at least the thing that i think i carried forward uh, or at least Pierre and the writers carry forward when we're designing our stories.
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How did you... You mentioned your characters, and your cast is really quite big.
So you have Robert, and then you have this really colorful cast of supporting characters.
For you...
When you were thinking about the format.
Putting that story together sounds like you were very character-led.
Did you build out that roster first and think, these are the pieces that we want to use?
Or did you come up with a framework of the story and then all of these characters came in after?
Because something that I think that's really interesting about the...
Cast is like in the way that they fit into the dispatch mechanic in terms of Oh, this is their skill set.
This is what they're good at kind of like this is where they are.
I found that to be really interesting.
You feel like you have kind of full coverage of every element you possibly could, but in terms of the you know personality and character, some of them are really quite interesting, like you have.
You know your small, strong guy and crypto bat, who was my favorite character um, but yeah, just how did you, how did you approach building out such a large cast?
Well now i know who you, who you cut, but oh yeah yes, i did 100.
I had to keep crypto bat.
Um, i love him.
He's an interesting one to start with because he started as that character in the very first draft of the live action thing.
He was there, but just the scene in the break room.
So in episode two, when he's screaming and Robert's jumping constantly, he was there for literally that joke.
That a guy who was a bat is using echolocation and scaring the shit out of Robert.
Um, and, uh, yeah.
And so that that character, specifically when, basically when we were building out we need a roster of of of heroes, he was just like bear and we're like okay, grab him.
Like, we'll see, we'll see what we can do with this guy.
Um, so it was, I mean, all of our characters kind of come from different places.
Sometimes it comes from personality, an archetype uh, where it's like oh, we need this.
Like whatever cocky person,
Don't know what his powers are.
Don't know what makes him special.
But we need this as a narrative device almost.
And some of it is then just, hey, concept artists drew 30 characters.
We like these three.
These are our favorite.
And then you just kind of pick them up and go, what if this is what Prism looks like?
Or what if this is what Waterboy could be? um it's it's really and we had the luxury of this taking a long time because because we had like one version of it to sort of sit with and then kind of revisit and change and rip out and for instance like in the original version there was no z team in the original version you show up and essentially have starter pokemon of like do you do you want to mentor nizigal do you want to mentor water boy or do you want to mentor mr whiskey which is like that big orange cat you see everywhere yeah um and you just chose and then that was what your your game was was you're just focused on on them alone interesting okay yeah and so and then at some point we were discussing gameplay and what it was gonna be and we realized that we really like this like management sim thing it sort of like felt like the right genre for for what you were doing and at that point we needed you know nine characters so it was um Kind of honestly daunting at first, but really glad we went in that direction.
How did you choose your archetypes and your power sets?
Were you like, oh, we have this person and we like them, so we need a counterbalance.
We need an opposite.
How do you go about building a balanced character roster, not only in terms of archetype and character, but also you have to think about the gameplay element as well.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, I think we could take a lot of credit for having a great process.
But really, it was pretty, pretty haphazard.
It was just like, oh, here's a joke.
And what if this character is this?
What if this character is that?
And it's like, sure, yeah, fine.
And then we'll figure it out later.
I remember when we released the demo this summer, some of the characters we didn't even actually know what their powers were at that time like, like if someone had asked me like oh, what's what's um punch-ups, why is he super?
Um, we didn't know, we just knew.
Like there was a line in the script where he was, he got shrunk and he's strong, and like that was it.
It's like okay fine, but like how does that on screen manifest?
How does that?
What can we do?
And so so literally some of these characters I was basically kind of like designing because we have to put like in the dossier.
You can see their powers.
It tells you what their powers are.
So we had to like write that down.
But that just kind of speaks to like how character focused we are, is like the super power stuff came like later.
You know, it was like the last thing that came together.
And I imagine that on most superhero games or IPs that are being developed, that's like the first thing that you know.
Um so, so yeah, and like and like, we were like, like malevola prism used to do portals.
She used to have portals that she could do, and what happened was she was so overpowered like she in the gameplay, she was so strong that, like we, we i was just like okay, let's just take the, the teleport power, and give it to malevola.
She's this demon lady with a sword.
Um, And then what that meant is everyone started comparing her to magic from Marvel Rivals and from the Marvel Universe, which is hilarious, because you can't win.
It's all been done before.
Just don't listen to them.
Yeah.
You kind of just have to shut it out and just hope that enough of the decisions you make are unique and it'll turn into something new eventually.
So you have all these characters you're managing their gameplay managing their data in terms of data i'm really fascinated with their choices structure because like the telltale games you have the you know the data at the end of every episode but when you finish the entire game it's tracking stuff like and we can we can absolutely be spoilerific on this podcast it's it's implied but you know it's tracking How you support Invisigal.
It's tracking, you know, what how does Robert respond to people?
I think mine was.
He was an everyman because I always picked the like middle of the road option of like.
I'm not sure what to say here.
Oh, gosh, this is also weird.
And, you know, things you did.
And it also tracks, you know, this was the hero you use the most.
You did better than this percent of players on this round.
If I get my hands on dispatch the code and I look under the hood, what am I looking at in terms of your structure?
We can say branching.
Branching means so many things now, though.
But when you were crafting that technical narrative design, how did you approach that in terms of where you put your choices?
What kind of choices you want?
What choices are small versus which ones have the big sort of narrative effects, such as what happens to invisigal at the end.
Yeah, i mean, i think it all starts with you know the, the sort of the big sort of choices are are very just.
That starts in the writer's room of like what are the themes, what are the goals, like what you know what sounds cool, like when you know what sounds like an exciting thing to make someone sort of um, deliberate over um and and.
Then with the invisigal stuff, it was the, the intent and and, to be honest, i feel like in our first draft it was much clearer.
I see, i see right now, like when people so that we're spoiling stuff right, it's fine yeah, that's fine okay yeah um, When people get the Invisigal Breaks, bad ending where she basically appears in Murder's Shroud and then disappears.
Well, you gotta play better.
Unless that's what you wanted.
Were you romancing her?
So I fumbled both her and Blazer.
I ended up with nobody.
And the stat was like it was so funny because it was like you and 4 of people ended up with no one.
And I was like that's rough.
Yeah, it's not an indictment on you, but it is kind of though i was trying too hard to be a try hard and i ended up with nobody basically um well, that's interesting.
Yeah, i mean the the.
The goal was in the very first version of this.
It was a different sort of setup in the showdown, But it was a very clear moment where you could not reach Invisigal and you're stuck with Blonde Blazer and you're watching her approach Trout.
And it's very clear of like, okay, all we can do now is watch her make a decision.
And she'll either do something heroic or do something evil.
It's not as clean, in kind of what we shipped, but the idea was always that, Instead of making a choice, here you're watching.
You're basically watching the sum of your choices, Like their impact on this person, and now they're gonna, they're gonna make a choice, and that was kind of the big pitch for Invisigal essentially is like Yeah, like what your decisions affect other characters and that affects their behavior, and in this big pivotal moment like um, that you should feel it.
So I um yeah we yeah, we've.
There were a lot of people who, when it, when it launched uh, it's really hard for us to test this stuff until we get a bunch of data and um, so we were essentially like we knew what the intent was for the app for, like the kind of percentage breakdowns and like how many people have her good and how many people have her bad.
And when it launched, it was really skewed to where, like everybody, it was like 90 of players, like she was good, which is just like that's basically a bug in our minds, like that's like, that's like we need to tune that essentially, which is weird to think about because it's like story, like logic and outcomes.
But so then we patched it, like a couple hours after the game came out um, but all the people who got her to be good went back to go like try different endings And they realized they couldn't get her to be good again or like not all the people, but a bunch of people.
And the reality is that the she should never should have been good in their playthrough, but it was such a.
It was such an interesting like they were so upset like that.
We, we like, changed the game and made their game worse.
But it's like, the reality is like they kind of deserve for being bad, like based on how they had played.
So it's like a weird, it's been a weird, interesting, like learning experience.
Like um patching narrative you know what i mean they're like or like tuning, tweaking those narrative variables, but but the reality is she breaks bad, not just based on decisions in the cinematics, but also how you play in the gameplay which um, no one, i think, was really expecting.
So that wasn't.
You know, it's not not something they're thinking about as they're playing across the season, but now it's kind of out there.
People know that that how you play, that stuff changes um yeah, what happens with her?
I think that's so fascinating.
The bugging bugging.
Maybe bugging narrative is not the right term, but it speaks to like revisiting.
It speaks to, you know, you you want that. that balance.
Like you don't as a player, when you're writing something that has some kind of systemic elements and some kind of choice.
You don't want them to see the mechanism right.
You don't want them to see the man behind the curtain.
You want them to make the, make the organic choices.
And then you know, try in terms of you know longevity and replay.
Go back, play again and see if they can get all of the endings.
I remember playing a tales from the borderlands, probably my favorite telltale game actually.
I loved I loved Tales from the Borderlands.
I thought it was great.
And again, not a huge Borderlands fan, but the way it dealt with the IP I thought was really excellent.
But at the time, I was not.
Now I work for them.
But the idea that you would replay to like see all of the different outcomes and all of the different ways things could fall out, I think was something really interesting in the Telltale style.
But in terms of dispatch I can't see.
As a designer, I can kind of see the mechanism, but I can't see the entire mechanism.
And I think that's really interesting because you have this dialogue stuff.
Well, I'm glad you think it's interesting.
Because most people are frustrated by it.
They're just telling me exactly what I need to do.
And I'm like, just come on.
There's going to be a wiki page eventually.
Let's live in this unknown.
I like that it's...
I mean it's yeah, it is one of those things where it's like as a designer or as like a creative, you're like I don't want you to know.
I want you to just like.
And when people pause when the choices are up, it kind of like it makes my eye twitch.
It's like.
The point is that you're supposed to just make a decision in the limited amount of time you have.
You know.
Or when streamers will like choose the you know something.
At the end of episode four, it'll pick a branch and then they'll immediately go watch the other branch on youtube, just to be like i want to know, i want to know everything.
So then, and then they'll change their decision based on what they like more, which is so like the opposite of what i would want for somebody.
But also it's like, If they're enjoying the game and this is how they want to play, what am I going to say?
When we release this, it kind of turns over to them and it's now their thing.
It's interesting.
It's the whole conversation about.
When you release a piece of art into the world, it's no longer yours.
It belongs to everyone.
I...
I.
The way that I played dispatch was, you know, a bunch of us were playing it and then we would book club it.
We would talk about it after.
And that's how I learned.
That's how I learned.
I was fumbling Invisigal because everyone asked me, well, did you lean into or out of her kiss?
And I was like, there's a kiss.
I didn't get shit.
So that's when I kind of knew, oh, I'm on the path to loneliness.
I'm going to end up with nobody at the end of this game.
But I think that's the dialogue that happens.
You know what?
It's me.
I played it true to myself.
But the dialogue that you have outside with the community, outside the game.
I think maybe the way that the industry has gone, the way that gamers have gone, it's this idea of like well, I want to be able to see everything.
But then you think of games like Baldur's Gate 3 that are so impossibly large, like unless you spend thousands of hours playing all of the different edge cases into all of the edge cases, you will not see everything, which I think is the beauty of something like that, which I think is the beauty of what we can do with branching.
Yeah, and I'm kind of the like the kind of person who plays like XCOM on Iron Man and like oh, my character's dead.
I'm, you know, not reloading that save even though they're my best character.
Like I'm like I like kind of enforce stupid things on myself more, because I just think it makes the experience more unique and exciting.
Like, I don't know.
Like, it's just, like, uh but but i i also understand that i'm that i don't want to like make other people do things they don't want to do so it's definitely i think with dispatch what was really unique for me was this is the first time like the last game i made was tales from the barland so it's like 10 years ago um wow the last yeah it's i know it's it's depressing after after making like shipping like 40 something episodes at telltale over 10 years like not shipping a game for 10 is crazy but I have a lot of empathy back then.
Yeah.
Streaming wasn't as big of it.
No, it wasn't.
No, it wasn't.
So so it.
So it was.
It was still a thing we had to talk about and you'd watch streamers but, like 10 years later, it's like we basically built the game to be streamer friendly and like to give them like it was.
It was a strategy to adopt this instead of like like rebuke it which was cut.
Everyone was was back in the day like These streamers are playing our games and basically ruining it for so many people, because now those people aren't going to buy the game.
And it was a very controversial topic back then.
But now it's like, there's no way we're going to stop them from streaming.
It's effectively the only... Pierre pointed this out the other day.
You can't stream TV or movies on Twitch.
But you can stream our games. which is essentially an interactive TV show.
So it's kind of this awesome thing for creators to be able to watch and engage with their community with this very unique type of thing.
And the weekly cadence creates a schedule for the streamer.
But the weird downside of it, I think or not downside but the thing that I didn't anticipate is all of the discourse week to week would change how people played, like on a meta level, like at the end of episode two, you know, you find out blonde blazer has a boyfriend um, we thought that was just a fun little bump and like a little twist that like destroyed her credibility for so many people and i think, i think if they could just play episode three instead of having to wait they, it wouldn't have been as extreme as it was.
But, like the community, like they joined other streams to spread, like you know, you know, you know she's dead to me now.
Like you know, it was so interesting week to week seeing like how they would all kind of like coalesce and and sort of spread the narrative um so yeah well, we learned a lot watching people play the game.
Um, there's nothing we could do about it because it was, all you know, mostly in the can already.
But right yeah, Of what was not in the cam when you went live.
What did you still have to have to work with while you were watching all of this happen in front of you?
Yeah, so every week.
So every week we'd launch an episode on a Wednesday at 9 in the morning.
And we were basically closing the next week's episode.
So we were still working.
I mean, it was like...
90%, 85% of the way there.
But we essentially never, we were crunching for like, you know, that entire time.
So it was hard to like, you're like, oh my God, everyone's playing the game.
It's so much fun.
Like they're having a great time.
Meanwhile, I've got, you know, we've got all these bugs, you know, it's totally busted.
It's not running on PS5.
Like, so it was like super, super stressful.
Basically shipping four games in four weeks um, and the closer you get to the end, the like, the more work it needed.
So, like episode eight was it's a monster.
It's a really big episode with a lot of things going on, a lot of sound effects and and stuff that were coming in at the last minute.
So it was pretty crazy um, and certainly wouldn't want to.
I just want to do that part better like, have have it more finished by the time we're launching but um, it did allow us to tweak things of like oh, these relationships um, For instance, I don't think I've said this anywhere, but the original design was, if you kill Shroud and you're romancing Blonde Blazer, she would not kiss you in the end.
There's a scene that if you're romancing her, they have a romantic moment and they kiss.
True to her character.
It's like I don't think you guys are making out after you know you just murdered somebody, you know yeah, so so uh, that's what the intent was.
The problem was blazer folks were getting kind of they were the minority and they were constantly kind of getting shafted, like in scenes where, like in physic, i was getting a lot of love.
Um, blazer was kind of getting the short end of the stick and it was something we were seeing people notice and acknowledge and it was just like man, let's just let them be happy.
And we saw everyone talking about how they wanted to kill Shroud.
So we were seeing a future where the majority of people were going to kill him.
And it was like, they're just going to be bummed.
And we didn't have content designed in a way to where you would know she didn't kiss me because I killed Shroud.
It wasn't clear.
So it would just feel like a not super satisfying, motivated end to that relationship.
So...
We did things like that where we would change logic and change kind of tune and try to make, Try to anticipate how the community was going to be playing.
So this is so interesting to me because, as narrative folks writers artists, creators we try to make something that people will love, with the understanding that there will be people who don't like it.
But you had the opportunity for a video game, to watch your community and, kind of like, take that in as you are finishing up your own sort of your own story.
So how do you balance your original artistic intent and obviously, as a professional, you know where to put the drama, how to make it, you know how to make it good basically, how do you balance your expertise in the craft with what your audience is hungry for?
Yeah, i mean it's, it's a, it's a, it's a hard.
Yeah, it's definitely.
It's certainly not easy.
I think, like i think we want to just say this was the intent, this is what we're doing, come hell or high water, like they'll have to just live with it.
Uh, There's certainly enough of that happening already.
I mean, I think episodic is an example where no one was asking us to make this episodic and everyone just wants it immediately.
But we thought that we saw value in the delayed gratification, in the community building and like the conversation that happens week to week and, And you know, I think we were right.
You know, it's hard to say what would happen if it all came out day one.
But that's one of those that it was like, we're trying something here.
You know, it's not just a marketing thing.
It's actually there's like there's sort of like creative merit to this as far as like an experience goes, you know, and if you don't want to do this in three weeks, like you can have the whole game, you can play it whenever you want for the for the rest of eternity, you know.
So Um, it was, I think.
As for me, I kind of thought a little bit as we got closer to the end, because I saw people were having, people were really enjoying it and and and engaging with it in a way that um, maybe wasn't what I, how I expected them to, but but was clearly um, whatever valid reactions and experiences to have.
So I started to feel like, let's make sure that we land the plan and everyone's happy.
And maybe some things that I wanted at the beginning of this project are less important now that I'm being able to appreciate it for what it actually is.
Yeah.
So it's out, pull things out.
We you've.
You have, you know, the experience with the weird funding in the industry with, you know, moving from triple a to triple i, and obviously you have this upcoming game with critical role.
So you will be making more games like this in the future.
Now that you've been through it, what is your yeah, what would you say if anything?
Um, what is your greatest piece of advice for other story-focused developer folk who would love to go out on their own and try something like this as well?
What is your non-negotiable?
Tell the kids.
That's tough.
Narrative-focused experiences?
Is that specifically what I'm responding to?
Honestly, it's such a basic answer, but if it's gonna be, if it's a narrative driven thing, that's the narrative is what you gotta just crush, because if you, if that's not living up to you know, if the script's not good enough, everything else is gonna fall apart.
Like we have a really really pretty game, but with bad writing and i'm not here talking to you, you know like we have, we have really talented writers.
Pierre is really incredible.
And we've managed to sort of build a team to sort of, yeah, to be able to make this.
Like it's not easy.
And I'm not a writer.
So it's like I see it happen every day.
And I'm glad I don't have to be a writer because it looks very hard.
But that is honestly like if you get that right, then everything else gets a lot easier.
But I would say honestly, if you can find a way just to make this stuff and prove it out, we started with and I imagine our next project will start with an interactive script.
You could do this with Inkle or other twine game stuff.
But if it's a story that has interactive elements, then just build it out in script form.
You can find out pretty quick if something is exciting and interesting.
And it should be compelling in text.
So I would definitely start there if that's your ambition and build on top of that.
That's not basic at all.
That's really good advice.
Yeah, i'll also say like, keep your ambition small, start small.
Like, don't it's really easy to like want to um, you know, have a, you know crazy, i want to.
You know, raise 100 million dollars to tell 10 stories like, just chill out, just do one thing.
Well, make it small um, but yeah it's, i don't know.
I'm hoping, i'm hoping dispatch makes it easier for people to be able to get stuff like that done.
Me too, me too.
Isn't that the dream?
Thank you so much for being so candid and chatting with me today.
I feel like I learned a lot from this conversation and looking forward to seeing what you guys make next.
Thank you.
Thanks for having me.
It's been fun.
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