Agenda

Owlcat Games is famous for making sprawling RPGs with tons of player choice and reactivity. Such games often have hundreds or even thousands of individual variables to represent current narrative state: quests, previous decisions, etc. Essentially a bunch of global variables managed with ad-hoc logic.

This approach scales poorly, and so we designed a better system, which organizes game state into a hierarchy of sub-states that are automatically turned on and off while taking into account potential conflicts.

This talk will share the experience of building and using this "Etude"-based system, and show examples of using it in both Unity and Unreal engines.

Takeaway

Attendees will learn about a novel approach to handling narrative state, along with implementation details — enough to implement their own version, or mine this approach for ideas.

Intended Audience

Narrative and quest designers, gameplay and tool programmers. Some technical details will be given, but no specific programming background is required to understand the main points.