Narrative design in mobile games

The role of the writer in games has changed hugely in recent years. From an optional extra to a vital part of the development team, the narrative designer is responsible for far more than ‘words on a page’.

PocketGamer.biz’s Brian Baglow – a long-time games writer – sat down with Tactile Games’ Jedidjah Noomen to find out about her work within the studio, why narrative is such a big part of even ‘simple’ games and how things might change with the advent of new technologies such as AI.

PocketGamer.biz: It’s wonderful to meet you Jedidjah, can you tell us more about your role at Tactile and what you’re doing at the studio?

Jedijah Noomen: I am a game director at Tactile. I’ve been with the studio for about two and a half years and for most of that time I have been responsible for Lily’s Garden. We’ve recently appointed a wonderful new story director, which means that I can focus a bit on the bigger aspects of that game and some new things within the company, but in general, I’m supporting the narrative structures that we develop within Tactile. 

What sort of game is Lily’s Garden? Can you give our readers a little background for anyone who’s not yet played it?

Oh, there are so many reasons it’s such a cool game. We just recently celebrated five years of Lily’s Garden, which is amazing. It is a match-three game that has garden decoration at its core. The game is all about Lily Roberts, who gets into all kinds of different adventures. 

The story began five years ago with Lily having to redecorate the estate that she inherited from her aunt Mary, but since then her adventures have taken her to lots of different places – most recently to Australia –  so she’s travelling all over the world with her friends.

I think we have released around 260 ‘story days’, so that’s 260 weekly releases within the main game that all have story content, We also have other story-related features within the game, so that’s a huge amount of narrative content in there.

So every story day is a week, is that correct? 

Yes, we release one story day per week, normally on Wednesday and every story day has generally around 18 tasks, so that means that we have 18 full scenes of story, so you could compare it with like, let’s say a weekly TV series, where you have one episode a week. 

How important is the story aspect of the game in the ongoing success of Lily’s Garden? Do you think players understand how much work goes into the narrative elements of an apparently ‘simple’ mobile game in comparison to the console market and huge cinematic AAA titles?

One of the things that I often see when I explain to people what kind of storytelling we do is that they expect storytelling in mobile – if there’s any storytelling in there – to be extremely short and simple.

There are many different ways of storytelling in mobile as they are in any other games, but one of the things that we do at Tactile for Lily – and our other characters such as Penny and Flo – have fully-animated scenes, so it’s not just ‘dialogue’. We have new animations created for the characters and the scenes for each story that we’re telling that week. So there’s a lot of visual love that goes into the storytelling In a lot of cases the writer in me says some of the most effective ways of storytelling is not using words.

How important is the storytelling to Lily’s Garden and to the other games that you’re working on? Do you get any feedback about it from your players?

Yes, it’s the core of what we do. I think there is a lot of love within the company for all of the characters in the games that we make. What we love to do is hook our players with those characters and tell stories that we think are important and that we think our players will enjoy.

That’s one of the things that we’re seeing and that we all enjoy so much coming from our players is that they feel a real attachment to those characters as well, just like we feel that in the making of the games – and that I think that gives a very different emotional experience. 

And yeah, and we see that in our players and we see that in the work that we do as well. It’s fun to have characters that we all feel very connected to and that we can talk about and make shine on a daily basis.

Was the focus on the story part of the game from the outset? To use that character development and make the players fall in love with Lily and her adventures?

I wasn’t involved back when the story started and when the game was initially made, but yes, it has always been the plan to make sure that that narrative and those characters were the key focus of the game. 

You can see that right from the start. The team that worked on the game back then took a lot of care in deciding what their backstories were, what they looked like, and what else we could tell about them in the future.

So there was a lot of thought going into that from the early days. In addition, one of the other things that in the past that we have been very famous for were the advertisements for our games, which had just as much thought put into them and a lot of things going on. But even in the advertising – the focus has always been on the characters.

And for me that’s a huge thing that we’re always putting a human face on the game.

Does Tactile use narrative in the same way across all of its titles?

Yeah, definitely. Almost all of our games are, are story-driven –  or at least have a large narrative component to them. Again, there are big differences. And I think narrative and story is fundamental to almost everything we do.

So we have games that may have less story content but have recognisable characters and world-building. But yes, narrative and story are a core part of what we do at Tactile. We have Simon’s Cat, for instance, which is based on the very well-known cartoon and comics of the same name, which is another great example of how narrative is important, but in a very different way. And that doesn’t mean we don’t explore other approaches, because that’s one of the fun things of game making that you can explore a lot of different things.

But yeah, narrative and story are definitely at the heart and soul of what we do. Our games always have a lot of narrative and world-building in there. 

One of the things we tend to be surprised about is that mobile is still seen as somehow behind the AAA market. But as you’ve just mentioned Lily’s Garden has multiple releases, live events and in-depth weekly updates. Do you think people realise just how much work goes into even casual mobile games?

I truly don’t think that people see it – especially compared with AAA. When you look at AAA games, the first thing that stands out is often the visual aspect. So for instance in our games, our characters will look a bit more, let’s say, cartoony, more drawn. 

That doesn’t mean that there’s not a lot of work going into them. Like, when we define new characters, we have wonderful character artists who take weeks to just get their design right. Because it’s, it’s about facial expressions, it’s about the colours, it’s about the outfits.

One of the additional things that we also have in mobile that maybe people don’t realise, is that because you play it on a small device, you have to make very different decisions about how things look because you want it to be beautiful and clear in very limited space on the small screen. And that has its own challenges, it’s very different from AAA games that you would play on a large TV, for instance. 

But I think one of the other things that we sometimes see, which I always find funny, but I also totally understand, is how much content there is and how much we’re producing. As I said, we have about 260 story days for Lily’s Garden now. So that’s five years of content! When people start playing it now, they can play all of that.

So they don’t have to wait. It will take them a long time, but they can just continue playing. Players who started earlier with our games, a lot of them are now at the end of that huge range of content.

That means that they they now have to wait a week, every week for the new content, because they’ve basically finished everything we’ve produced so far. So we sometimes get players who comment and say: “Has something changed at your company? Or can’t you work harder? Because I used to be able to just continue playing – and now I have to wait a week?”

What they don’t realise is that we’ve always been doing weekly releases. They just didn’t notice, because they started playing later.

So there’s this slight disconnect between what they know we are producing versus how they’re consuming it! The reality is that in order to have those weekly releases, we have a team of about 30 people working on the game full-time – and that’s not even including QA, marketing, all those kinds of people.

With the AAA games market, you get the full game from beginning to end, with DLC appearing perhaps six months later, or sometimes a year. So it comes in much larger chunks.

And I think people understand that’s the time that you need. But in mobile, because I think some people playing mobile treat it, like, let’s say social media. So they just expect it to be there. All the content they want. Whenever they want it!

That tends to make them forget about all of the work that goes on behind the scenes to actually make that content. And that happens more in mobile, just because people see it like a commodity, like social media.

Do you think mobile games are still undervalued? There seem to be a lot of ‘real’ gamers out there who still look upon mobile as somehow less creative or technically challenging to create as console or PC games.

Yeah, that continues happening. In AAA and console gaming, you normally have a very clear release date. If you want to play this game, this is the day when it’s released. But on mobile, you just open the app store, and you click on something. And there is no clear release date or any indication of when or how the game will be updated.

Players may not know when they start a new game, whether it has been going for a long time, so it has a lot of content, or if it’s a game that has just been released, and does not have a huge amount of content just yet. And it’s really hard to explain that to players because every one of them will be at a different point in time when they start it. So it can be really hard to communicate, what exists and what’s coming.

How do you see the market changing – and are your skills as a writer and narrative designer becoming more or less valuable?

Oh, a lot has changed. It’s gone from the early days of not having writers at all, to now getting writers from other disciplines into games – and narrative design being a proper field and a field that is very much wanted. 

There are so many people out there who now really want to be a games writer. Maybe even too many.

But that’s fine because it’s amazing to see so many players want to write for video games because seriously, people realising that you need writers in order to make a good narrative game is a huge step forward. And not just writing, but also narrative design. I think those two titles sometimes get mixed up a bit.

The fact that we now have ‘narrative design’ as a title also says a lot about how story-driven games have developed. There is now that sweet spot of knowing that you also need to think about how to connect the story with the game design, which is what a narrative designer does, connecting the dots between the two and making sure that any story is embedded in the gameplay. And I think that that in mobile, one of the interesting things that I’ve seen happening is that several years ago, a lot of the writing was just filling content.

At that point a lot of writing was outsourced. So you’d have companies would say: “We want to do something that’s narrative-driven. We know that players like this, we don’t have it in-house.”

But these were basically pages that needed to be filled. So they would hire writers, often contractors to just fill pages. And while that can work – in a lot of cases it really didn’t.

Now, when you look at the most successful games companies and mobile games which are narrative-driven, you can see how many writers and narrative designers work on those and how much room they need to develop new things. I think this is really good.

I don’t see that going away anytime soon. Sure, there are shifts in the market, especially mobile. When you’re in free-to-play markets, you will always have to think about your monetisation, because if players don’t want to pay money for your game, you’re not going to be able to sustain your game – or your studio.

That’s something that you need to think about all the time. But as far as I can see, the companies and the games focusing on more narrative-driven stories have a really good grasp of knowing what they need in terms of writers and narrative designers and story directors and give them room to develop new ideas, develop new stories. And that’s great.

Is the art of storytelling in games changing? Do you see the role of writer/narrative designer or the desire for narrative in games being significantly impacted by new technologies such as AI?

There’s a lot of people trying different things. A lot of people are very vocal about wanting to try different things. But we’re still in the early stages – especially in terms of writing and cinematics. 

There is no way at this moment that AI could actually replace any of that because what we do is so specific. When you look at writing, that narrative design aspect is so important. That’s not something an AI can take over. I think there will be lots of companies who will try it.

As I said, we had a couple of years when there were a lot of smaller companies who wanted to do narrative and then realised that filling pages is a lot of work and costs a lot of money. 

I think there will definitely be companies who think, well, let’s start something, give a prompt to the AI and just use that in a game. At the same time, for anything to touch players, I think it needs to have a heart. And AI can be a great tool, but you always need to infuse that heart into it.

I don’t see it as an issue or a threat at this moment. I do see that there are different ways of storytelling emerging in mobile. And I think one of the key things that has been happening is that more and more companies have realised that although narrative is very important to players, it also takes a lot of time and a lot of resources.

And that they’re starting to think in a smarter way about how to use and incorporate narrative. And I think that’s something that we will continue seeing. And who knows, maybe AI will start being part of that.

But I don’t see that happening anytime soon. I think it needs to sort of find its rightful place somewhere. And we’re definitely not there yet.

We’ve talked a lot about Tactile’s own IP, but the studio has also had success with third-party properties like Simon’s Cat. Can you talk to us about how the company approaches narrative when it’s someone else’s story world? Is that something that you work on with the author? What are the constraints that you have to work within?

I don’t have that experience within Tactile. I have worked with existing IPs at other companies. There’s always that balance between doing what’s right for the original IP, but also making sure that you can make the game that you want to make and make it fun.

I think Simon’s cat is one of those examples where the combination just works. I think often in using existing IPs, it takes a while to find why it would work for your game. 

There’s a lot of convergence happening, especially over the last couple of years, where also big conglomerates will try and sell out their IPs to make not just movies, but TV series, comic books, and video games, just to widen their reach, which I think is a wonderful thing to be able to do. But you need to make sure it works for the sort of entertainment that you’re making. And not every IP will work for games.

In the past Tactile has had to ask the question: if we want to make this into a game, what would it look like? And has realised like, okay, this wouldn’t do justice to either the IP or what we want to do with game making. However, I think with Simon’s cat, it sort of, it’s a very happy marriage. Those two things just gel.

What inspired you to get into game writing and narrative design? Who’s work out there do you admire?

I’ve always been somebody who played video games. I started out in theatre originally. And then after a while realised – oh, you can actually work in video games! For me, games like Bioshock were what sealed the deal because what is being told has so much to do with that controller in my hand.

That is such an interesting way to tell a story. It made me think differently about storytelling, which is not just handy in games, but also in other ways of storytelling, like thinking about that interaction aspect is very relevant, even if you’re not making anything interactive. I still do a lot of work with theatre makers, explaining how we in game design approach storytelling, where we’re always thinking about the player and explaining to them how that can be useful for their work in theatre as well.  Think about that audience – even if they don’t have a controller in their hands, or even if their work isn’t interactive, you still have somebody who is hopefully an active part of the world that you’re building.

There are so many great games, I recently played Pentiment, which I think is, is a wonderful example of very effective visual storytelling, which I greatly admire.

As we’ve been talking about the difference between mobile games and AAA, Pentiment hits that sweet spot of having that visual aspect which looks simple but really isn’t. That relates directly to what we do in mobile, where you think it looks,” Oh, this looks really simple. It’s just drawings, and it might move around a bit,” but no, no it’s far more than that.

It’s that visual cinematic aspect of it that drives so much of the story. And it’s not just, and it’s great dialogue as well. And it’s great gameplay, but it all gels together so well, in a way that that you don’t often see in games like that.

And obviously Alan Wake. I mean, if you love narrative, you gotta love Alan Wake.

It has nothing to do with mobile whatsoever. But that’s okay.

There’s a huge amount that games can teach the wider world about engagement and how to connect people within a digital environment, but we’re so often overlooked as ‘digital toys’ so very few people outside the actual industry look at them seriously.

 It can be difficult to shake people out of that, that mindset – and that’s such a shame.  especially when games are seen as ‘just’ entertainment. There’s nothing wrong with just entertainment. Nobody says about a Spielberg film: “Oh it’s just entertainment!” 

One of the things that I enjoy so much about making narrative-driven stories is that no matter if it’s mobile, AAA, indie, or whatever, players will play your game for the gameplay, they will get that narrative as well, even if they didn’t choose it. So there’s a lot of storytelling you can do and a lot of subjects you can tackle. 

Whereas if that story had been part of a film or TV series, they might have skipped it on Netflix. But if they’re playing a game that has a continuous story in it, you can take bits and pieces of storytelling that they maybe wouldn’t have chosen themselves as a story, but then do enjoy or have characters that they get into contact with that they probably would never have otherwise chosen, just because they’re into that game.

So you can you can feed a lot more storytelling to, let’s say, unassuming players, which I think is great. One of the great joys is connecting with people who perhaps don’t pick up books, or who don’t necessarily engage with other types of content but can play and enjoy games. And that can lead them in a lot of different directions.