Making Tutorials that Don't Feel Like Tutorials for Narrative Games | BPM
Details
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THE TALK
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Tutorials are often the least immersive part of a game, and that lack of immersion can be particularly damning to narrative games, which need to quickly hook players into their world. Join Tony and Abby from Black Tabby Games as they take a deep dive into how they built the tutorial for Scarlet Hollow to seamlessly blend into the rest of the game while still teaching players how to play!
Length: 1 hour (30-40 minutes of presentation + 20-30 minutes of Q&A)
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ABOUT THE SPEAKERS
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Black Tabby Games is a two-person narrative game studio founded by Abby Howard and Tony Howard-Arias. They're married too! Prior to her work in games, Abby's had a 10 year long career as a self-employed indie cartoonist, with seven published books under her belt, and quite a few awards, including the 2021 Ignatz for Outstanding Collection for her one-woman horror anthology The Crossroads at Midnight. Her spouse Tony has worked in a number of companies in the tech and startup spaces, including heading up audience development for STAT, the Boston Globe's life science publication, and co-founding OrganizeTogether, a startup that built community organizing tools for nonprofits.
They founded Black Tabby Games to create the kinds of projects they wanted to see in the world— deep, interactive narratives with rich lore that need to be games to properly tell their stories. With thousands of individual, hand-drawn pieces of art, nuanced character interactions, and dynamic branching, they’re hoping that Scarlet Hollow can serve as a story that ultimately ends as a satisfying reflection of its players. Abby provides all of the art for Scarlet Hollow, Tony handles game design, programming, and business operations, and the two of them write the story and script together.
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DEMO SIGNUPS
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Want to show off a project you or your team have been working on? Submit it here to demo it for the group! https://forms.gle/QJgq6PvTpTVVh8co6