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Flying Wild Hog explains what goes into creating compelling narrative and worlds - Maria Borys-Piątkowska DevGAMM Interview
We caught up with Maria Borys-Piątkowska, the narrative lead at Polish developer Flying Wild Hog, to learn more about how she helped created and define the amazing and diverse worlds we saw in Evil West, Shadow Warrior, and more.
Audio transcription
"All right, we are in Lisbon for the DevGAMM 2024 and I'm here joined by Maria and we're gonna be talking narrative mostly, so thank you so much for joining us. I find your profile pretty interesting and I think it's very good to talk narrative nowadays with the AI etc and so let's touch upon different topics. So first of all, Shadow Warrior and Evil West are the games you're known for mostly, so what can you tell us about the experience writing for these pretty crazy games? Actually, yeah, welcome, thank you for having me here."
"Regarding Evil West and Shadow Warrior, actually these were my two biggest experiences as a writer and as a narrative designer. I started my career a bit earlier than doing Evil West and Shadow Warrior, however, these were like those that I learned the most from them, because I was doing two functions."
"Writer, so I was writing dialogues and all the texts in the environment and in the game and also I was responsible for the narrative design, which is kind of different because writer is someone who is responsible for the character in the story and narrative designer for a player in that story. For the interaction with that story. How to actually show or rather tell the story through the game mechanics? I mean this is something that actually do all those designers do, right?
But narrative designer is a fully fledged designer. How did you approach that? Like being able to tell a story you want to tell and also for the players to to interact with it the way you want them to interact? The biggest challenge in game industry is to communicate with other people. This is like the biggest problem and since we are like co-working all the time and you know making games is a team effort, so as a narrative designer I need to know at least basics of the things that other departments are able to do and what tools they actually have to do it. They are capable of delivering and of course as a narrative designer I was also responsible for making up, creating this whole story and whole character arc creation and I was actually the guardian of the context and the guardian of all the story throughout all the levels. In linear narratives and linear stories as Evil West and Shadow Warrior actually they were, it was kind of easier because we had more control over what the player can do and what can't do. However still like telling the story with not that many narrative tools that are for example compared to you know open worlds or big blockbuster games. It is important and it is difficult to pick those that will work the best and that will be specifically clear for the understanding of the player how to navigate and how to experience this story. So that was challenging. I mentioned before that these are crazy violent games so which would you say is the craziest thing you've done narratively with these games for those who haven't played yet? Actually the most challenge there was to switch between the projects because we were doing those two games like almost simultaneously and Evil West was a serious stuff like a gothic horror vampire hunter in Wild West and Shadow Warrior was this Lo Wang who is known for most of the audience because it's like a part of the franchise already. It was the third part of Shadow Warrior series so the audience the players already knew Lo Wang the main character the mercenary ninja and he is also known for you know let's say sloppy cheesy humor and the biggest challenge for me was to switch from the serious mood vibe fantasy of vampires in Wild West gothic fiction to this cartoonish Japan style with Lo Wang who's actually a stress talker so he keeps talking all the time and he keeps like selling all those bad jokes you can imagine and so writing jokes that are out of the box and sometimes they are very dirty that was something challenging and I had to learn it. So did you have two jackets? So I'm gonna be the joker now then you switch jackets and then you went to the other room. When I went into you know our telephone box I was Superman to you know face it and to learn how to write bad jokes really because Lo Wang is like that he was hard to hard to write because we needed to it was like a sitcom style let's say so we needed like very often we needed more humor and more jokey style dialogues however we still we had to remember that the players needed to understand the progress of the game so they needed to be informed as well about the progress about the objectives so this informativeness of the game was actually mixed with this cheesy language and those jokes and we we actually we were have we had to find a place that for them to let them you know be hearable as well and understandable yes. Okay speaking about bad jokes let me clear my throat and I'm gonna say, "words don't come easy to me" that's the title of your panel tomorrow it's raining now you see that I sang and it's raining now okay so that's the title and the subtitle is how to make better dialogue for games if I'm correct so what's sort of the main takeaway the main message you want to convey to for example you know narrative designers or writers or young developers that are gathered here in Lisbon we are going to delve into the details of how to how to actually write dialogues what is the difference between the rapid everyday speech and why dialogues it is told that they are to not copy the real conversations but rather have to be similar but not the same so we are going to find some you know brilliant hints of how to do it and how to build the conflict that should be actually included in every scene so the structure of the scene and then in the lower level in the dialogues and we are going to you know watch some kind of examples of good and bad dialogues in the games and in the movies and we're gonna exercise it we're gonna learn it so that's actually a I would say this is for all the people not only you know experience interested this is the first one but also the experience you know game developers narrative designers writers I think all of those people aspiring students or already seniors in this job I think these are the basics they should know good good good sad I won't be able to attend but looking forward to learning from it so speaking of good and bad dialogue as I teased I also wanted to ask you about AI so what's the stance on AI how do you feel about it how do you think it can help or not how do you think it can be used as an agent for developers when it comes to specifically writing and dialogue and story etc well I heard Ubisoft already used AI the ChatGPT or other similar tool my actually my attitude towards using AI is that I use it however I use it only I use it only for research purposes not for writing because writing is it actually it goes from me from my heart so I already know what is written by AI I think I know I have some kind of I you know intuition to detect it so I would rather I prefer writing put more energy and time but writing from myself and the same I I require from my colleagues however when it comes to research and you know delving into sources and asking questions about okay so tell me about you know pre-columbian you know monsters in South America for example I would before the era of the AI I would probably spend like hundreds of hours or days looking for specific information now I just I just learned how to ask ChatGPT or other AI tool and I just got the frames of course I am double-checking them I am always to check if it's actually telling me the truth but I have at least I have frames I can you know refer to some sources that it actually gives me and I can check it Google it and narrow down the the whole let's say bag of ideas right and the whole field of expertise you can also feed it with your whole script for example and then make questions about your own thing and then so as correction yeah of course sometimes also it's it's very helpful when it comes to when I'm for example making up the lower things lower elements that are not that you know important when it comes to dialogues for example but they're important for the environmental storytelling or the functionality of some you know location in a game or the system in a game or infrastructure in a game and I can come up with something but then possibly I will ask question is it believable to make this work like that is there any reference I can give to learn more and this these are the frames that I actually think I I would need to double-check later but I have something to I have a hook right this is it all right all right when I read your profile it says that you love Vikings and Mortal Kombat German football for some reason so I think it's because of Bayern Munich so you know okay how do you think you know your personal taste and preferences shape you as a writer and also you know the games were talked about are not your usual games and narrative Mortal Kombat definitely however this is like a paradoxical but when I played Mortal Kombat for the first time it was like 1994 or 5 John Romero over there was was recalling the release of Mortal Kombat and violence when they released Doom exactly Doom also was one of the games I was learning from however Mortal Kombat actually has the special place in my heart because and that time there were like additional materials published like Secret Service that was the newspaper and all that you know magazine newspaper extras regarding the games they were delivered and they were on the market so if we wanted to learn more about the game we needed to buy it and I actually remember my my brother used to buy it a lot because he was a great fan of games in general and I I actually I loved Mortal Kombat for some reason but I loved it more when I read the whole background of the story of Mortal Kombat from the Secret Service service newspaper and I was delving into the lore I was delving into the story about the characters they were of course they were like simple archetypes right and it was like very simple very silly sometimes however I I asked myself and my brother a question why I don't see it in the game and my brother was like probably someday this will be like more visible in the games and he was right and then they had this whole story exactly so I actually learned how to take care of the lore and the story playing Mortal Kombat and reading about Mortal Kombat so that's why I I like this game very much because it opened my eyes how however it actually sounds right now regarding the games that are delivered and released today but that was eye-opening you could apply that to football as well, EA tried to have the story mode and it sort of failed but you know it's the same kind of I actually playing FIFA at that time when I was a great fan of Manchester United and Bayern Munich and remember the final championship you - in Spain which is your favorite - best which Spanish? Club. Ehm... Barcelona? Because of Lewandowski, you know but actually I was a great fan of those of those two teams and when I played FIFA because me and my brother we were like we were great fans fanboys fangirls fanboys of the EA Sports sports games and we were like doing our own teams in FIFA because of thanks to the this customisation mode and we were doing our own teams our own players and my players always has had some stories behind so they were like empty you know vessels they were like people so I actually I used to also write some you know story books for them why they joined you know my team and so yeah so that's actually I had a knack for writing like since very you know very early stage okay as far as I understand you're not working for EA so those stories can't get into the next installment so what else can we spread from you in the near future that you can share today I actually have a mission that I want to especially in my country I want to spread the word and spread good let's say practices best practices on narrative design and writing because like in the world right right now there are like many outside Poland outside Europe I guess in America there are plenty of sources to learn from however I feel that on the Polish market it's missing something and I have a strong mission to to spread the word and to teach how to teach narrative design and how to do narrative design and you're doing that how if you can share of course I'm a lecturer at the Warsaw Film School I teach there the narrative design and actually I'm also in a part of member of the advisory board specifically the narrative part of the Future Games Academy based in Malmö Sweden and Poland right now also and I'm doing plenty of talks speeches workshops at various conferences like this one for example I'm heading to GDC finally to give a talk on crafting characters in linear narratives such as Evil West so conferences fantastic see you there at GDC hopefully. Words come easy to you I would I would say, enjoy the rest of the of the DevGAMM it's been a pleasure it was it's been a pleasure thank you"
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