James Cavin Writes

Temple Run: Legends was a really interesting challenge in general, but the trickiest part was definitely the limited time events that the design team wanted to do as post-launch content. The "main game" is a linear string of hundreds of also linear levels (it's the first Temple Run game where you can reach a finish line!) This linearity gave us the power to have a fun Saturday-morning-cartoon-show-style narrative attached. (Time and budget and layoffs complicated things, but the end result is still a zany little linear romp with a fun roster of pulp adventure heroes from across time and space that I'm still quite proud of.) The player started out with franchise mascots Guy Dangerous and Scarlett Fox, and then made their way across Temple Run's lost world, discovering mysteries and unlocking new allies to run as they went. NOW, having established this zany little linear story, the design team wanted to add limited time events that players could ...

Our premise is simple: Don't try to use story to contradict everything else that the player sees and does. It's actually a shockingly easy thing to fall into: players see the visuals and mechanics of the game and come away with a conclusion. Is it not the conclusion that we want them to have? Do we have a different narrative in mind? Quick! Send in a bit of story to tell them they have the wrong idea! WHAT THEY HAVE SEEN AND PLAYED HAS DECEIVED THEM. THE TRUE TRUTH IS WHAT THIS CONTRADICTING SNIPPET OF DIALOGUE HAS TO SAY! Tragically, videogames, are first and foremost, a visual medium. This means that if the player sees something, they believe it. If the visuals tell the player something, it is going to be an uphill battle to convince them that things are otherwise. If you ever find yourself trying to use the game's narrative to tell players that things are actually different from what the visuals lead them to believe, you are going against th...

A quick and simple rundown of the power of "player fantasy" in narrative design - OR - Narrative happens everywhere all the time on every single screen. This is a super simple narrative design trick that I've used on basically every project that I've worked on for the last decade. (I suppose that it actually dabbles a little bit in the fabled User Experience Design, for those of you who might be interested in such things.) Before I get any further, I should make it clear that I don't mean "narrative" here as character dialogue and text logs and big cinematic cut scenes. I mean narrative at its most primal: THEME and DREAM. I mean… (*Cue drumroll and/or epic eunuch choir chanting*) THE PLAYER FANTASY I use the term "player fantasy" a lot when I'm talking to clients, and I almost always have to stop and define it really quick. It's a weird sounding term, but the idea is actually incredibly simple:...

I recently rediscovered this in the depths of my Google drive! Years ago, I printed this out and gave it as a Christmas present to my boss at the company that I was working at the time, who had complained about not knowing what to do with the tuna steaks a family member had recently given him. For some reason, I no longer work at that company. Anyways, now you can have this wisdom! PREPARE YOURSELF FOR ENLIGHTENMENT. Here I shall impart to you my arcane knowledge on the subject of searing tuna steaks. The most important things to remember when searing tuna steaks are as follows: 1. You will trash your entire kitchen. This is an unbreakable law of the cosmos. Don't fight it. 2. Wear clothes you don't care about. (If possible, wear skin you don't care about.) With that covered, let's get on with the deliciounating. First off, you need some tuna steaks, a pan, and some oil. (Use olive oi...

Are you human being who sometimes must describe things to other people to convince them to give you money to feed your children and/or dangerous addiction to high-end Lego castles ? Are these things which you are describing computer games on a digital storefront such as, to grab a random example, Valve Corporation's STEAM ? Well then, I have a beautiful, simple formula to make your description-writing life much easier. You should care, because I actually spent a couple of years as a subcontractor working on Valve Corporation's Steam storefront, and this was a formula that my team and I came up with to help smaller game developers create better, more discoverable store pages for their games. You see, in the before times, in the long long ago – Actually, before we get into that, here's the formula: Who am I? What's my goal? How do I do it? Or, as I like to think of it, RGG: Role, Goal, Gameplay. You can describe these things in basically an...

Did you know that if you take 90-year-old public domain banjo music and then chop it up and slow it down 1000% and loop it over itself a bunch of times and add a bunch of distortion filters, it becomes melancholy ambient space music? Or perhaps some sort of CIA advanced interrogation tool. ...I'm still figuring out this whole audio leveling thing. Anyways, I made a whole album. …If your speakers sound like they're about to combust, that's just them attempting lift off. Or maybe they're actually about to combust. Like I said, I didn't adjust the levels of anything. I've always been obsessed with venturing out of my narrative design foxhole and trying to dip my fingers at all the other elements of game development. I'm not a great artist, but I've drawn a character portrait or two. I'm not a great programmer, but I've created my share of clunky game prototypes. The one thing which is always eluded me is MUSIC. Because,...