Multiverse theory
As interactive fiction grows ever more mainstream, Wales Interactive posits one potential future via its new software
Wales Interactive unveils its new interactive-fiction scripting tool
The Bandersnatch effect is in full flow. Like it or not – and many less wellknown, far more experienced interactive fiction writers than Charlie Brooker are, understandably, a bit miffed – the choicebased Black Mirror film has put a niche genre in front of millions of eyeballs with startling results. Suddenly, the world is sitting up and paying close attention to the role interactivity can play in previously
traditional forms of media, and all the major players are after a piece of the pie, from Netflix to the BBC.
All credit to Wales Interactive, then, which has spotted a chance to offer its considerable expertise in the genre to help guide a whole other industry through the wilds of gamified stories. WIST is its brand-new, internally developed interactive fiction tool: it’s being used to simultaneously write and develop several of Wales Interactive’s latest titles, but the BAFTA Cymru award-winning studio is also hoping to help facilitate the merging and growth of multiple artistic media.
Studio founders David Banner and Richard Pring have had plenty of their own experience trying to do so. After a drunken Gamescom conversation with Splendy Games, they decided to help
produce and publish the studio’s first FMV game, interactive horror film The Bunker. “It was a massive learning curve,” Banner tells us, “the way these things are filmed, and working with writers that were not from the game industry.” Despite the unique challenges things such as continuity errors posed, the project opened their eyes to the many benefits of working with film and filmmakers: the marketing clout behind recognisable actors, the money saved on not rendering graphics or optimising, and wide appeal. “People who didn’t class themselves as gamers would play it,” Banner says.
What’s more, people who didn’t class themselves as game writers were starting to become interested in working on their projects – such as forthcoming interactive sci-fi thriller film The Complex, scripted by Lynn Renee Maxcy, one of the writers on the television adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale. It soon became clear that the toolset they were using wasn’t communicating how a choice-based game works to traditional media writers. “Film writers are used to throwing away loads of bits, and making the story they want to tell,”, Banner says. “But writers don’t want to be programmers.”
Banner and Pring were shown opensource interactive fiction tool Twine (with which Bandersnatch was developed), but it was deemed too intimidating for traditional writers to learn an alien-looking program, as well as insufficient for what Wales Interactive was trying to achieve on the gameplay side of things.
It seemed the studio would have to build its own tool from scratch – one that could present as simply as possible to people used to writing linear scripts, but which had enough flexibility to allow for more sophisticated game mechanics underneath. At first glance, WIST might have the familiar flowchart-esque look of Twine, but Pring clicks a single button and the layout changes into a standard screenplay view – complete with Courier font and formatting. (“We had to go back and forth between the writers,” Pring says, “because we didn’t even realise we needed to use the right fonts. They were very particular!”) The ability to toggle between the two, we’re told, means writers can be more involved in the process of deciding where certain choices crop up and which scenes they branch off to, instead of handing over a full script to a dev team and having them arrange the pieces. “They can play as they build the script,” Banner says, “so what we end up with is an interactive script which the writer has created – not us.”
A more complex back end on the technological side as compared to software such as Twine, meanwhile, means that developers can jump into a script and easily start tinkering around with the nitty-gritty stuff, and allows some much more mechanically complex features than you’d usually expect from an interactive-fiction writing tool. WIST is specifically designed to unite the two halves of the process in one universally appealing and capable program – a significant refinement of the process of putting together Bandersnatch (detailed in E329), which required challenging backand-forth attempts at coordinating the accessible Twine with Netflix’s own highly technical Branch Manager engine, as well as the creatives using each of them.
WIST, meanwhile, is flexible enough in its presentation that writers are able to engage with the basics of the mechanical parts of their interactive narratives: variables, for instance, calculated throughout the course of a playthrough according to player actions, and which can trigger new scenes and narrative paths. A writer can have a choice add or subtract points from certain characters’ totals. “So without them knowing, they’re programming,” explains Banner, bringing up a simple menu on the left. “In this one, we’ve got ‘fortitude’, ‘intuition’, ‘temperance’, and they have scores as they go along – so it’s not just binary decisions.” If an
NPC or player character’s fortitude falls exceeds a defined limit, then, you can expect consequences during a ‘check’ somewhere down the line – a concept that even nongame writers can logically understand. “Say there’s a choice: ‘Do you run or hide?’” Pring says. “If your fortitude’s too high, you can’t hide because you’re too brave. The choice just doesn’t appear. So we’re not allowing the player to become a totally different character – if you’ve been nice all the way through, then you want to be a bastard, you can’t.”
Twine also has variables, of course, but using them does require some basic knowledge of programming languages. “And it doesn’t plug into our tech,” Banner says. Pring clicks over to the other side of the screen and shows how in WIST, written scenes are linked to video clips through their naming system. “You can do rapid prototyping, so when [developers] deliver the video, that will be the name of the video and this automatically plugs directly into our tech.” WIST allows the script to drive the film, then, rather than coming in at the end of the process. “This is like Twine on steroids,” Banner smiles.
“Nothing else existed, really,” Pring says. “We had a look around, because we’re not one to make something unless we really need to. It’s simple stuff, like audio actions. If we have an FMV film, audio can play over two clips. But how do you set it? We’ve had to incorporate that into this, where if a track’s playing, it carries over to the next clip.”
It all contributes to a tool that makes it easier for Banner and Pring to direct. “We can already play our writer’s script, have opinions and make decisions,” Banner says, “and they can work within this, update it wherever – we can even print it out as a traditional script.” The idea is that game directors and producers can reference and play the script in WIST while shooting on set. “But the main thing is we can play it before we spend any
money making the thing.”
“We can play our writer’s script, have opinions and make decisions, and they can work within this”
It’s undoubtedly a tantalising business prospect for many would-be interactive fiction makers, then. Banner and Pring have already taken meetings with streaming giants Netflix and Amazon to show how WIST can augment a creative process in flux. “We realised making these films with different types of creatives could be made better,” Banner says. “It’s not a new genre, but it’s being reinvented. And the tools don’t work the way we need them to.”
WIST’s uses as a narrative tool go beyond interactive films: the studio is already using it to shape the branching story for its forthcoming firstperson survival-horror horror game Maid Of Sker. Its ability to translate game scripts – even if in a largely superficial manner – into something that non-game writers can parse could be one of the first steps to bridging the gap between two different creative industries, opening up the talent pool and hopefully giving rise to new concepts for interactive media. No doubt we’ll see plenty more studios announce they’re working on their own tools in a race to make the ‘one size fits all’ software and capitalise on the renewed mainstream interest in interactive narrative. Ultimately, however, Wales Interactive hopes WIST will help enrich videogames as a medium, both in terms of creators and players. “Our audience is growing, and that's the important thing," Banner says. Hear, hear.