Heaven's Vault: Creating a Dynamic Detective Story

I've spent the last year thinking about the same stuff, but this guy is light years ahead of me. A very valuable watch.

Easily one of the best GDC talk i've ever seen. I have a new favourite designer now. I would check those other talks, but i want to play the games first

Reminds me of GMing tabletop. The players muck about on the scene, and when they do something I think is clever I reward it. If they seem bored I make up a reason to move on. They're simulating verisimilitude in place of realism, because realism is resulting in boredom.

The point about LA Noire for the creation of LA with nothing to do in it is a great point. A crazy amount of effort went into effectively making a stage for car chases and driving around.

This dude is my favorite GDC speaker. A free-thinker with inspiring ideas and a great sense of humour. I deeply enjoy his snarky comments about other games. 😂

The line about the conservation of narrative momentum at the end is pure gold. It's one of the biggest plagues of narrative games right now

I played the game and I had very mixed feelings about it. I LOVED it on one side and felt somehow frustrated aboout it on the other. Having seen this presentation i can now see the developer's message and undersood that what was frustrating me was the gamer's logic i was trying to apply to Heaven's Vault! I really loved this speech and i TOTALLY share its content!! Good work guys! You made an EXCELLENT job!

11:48 • “Neither of those games are charting here.” I guess you could say they’re...Uncharted.

I finished Heaven's Vault and while there were some aspects of the narrative that really didn't resonate with me, notably the ending, I found the immersive experience to be absolutely impeccable. Sometimes in real life, you mean to say something then the conversation moves along and it's forgotten forever, or you say something you regret and you just have to make do. I felt like I was truly inhabiting Aliya. I wish she wasn't so hard on Six, though.

If James Veitch was a game dev

This is a really interesting approach to making narrative games!

My guess was that the closest to freedom you can get is "What do I WANT to do now?", given the previous category is asking what a player CAN do (asking about the possibility space). The issue being that, for the most part, only pencil and paper RPGs can actually achieve that level of player freedom, as there are virtually no limits on what can be attempted and you can create "content" on the spot. This kind of freedom is essentially what video games have been trying to achieve and, quite hilariously, boasted to have achieved ("Be anyone, go anywhere!") in the past. I'm wondering if it's a goal worth striving towards given it might not be possible, and whether games should instead embrace their limitations... but "Yikes what have I done?" is an interesting way to flip that question on its head a bit and put how games are played front and center, so it might actually be the answer to some extent.

Never thought about Heaven's Vault as unfair, but now that he said it, can't help but agree. And I feel weirdly ok with that!

And then in the middle of this, they created this world that feels real and lived in

So good!

those authoring patterns are super interesting. Very similar to how ttrpgs can be approached (and I prefer to approach them): moment>room>dungeon>scenario>campaign

Really liked the talk. I'm not surprised anymore of how I loved 80 days! The game was really built ground-up to be that engaging. Now I'd like 2 more talks: 1 about that fictional language, 1 about that time you sneaked past the Pooh-wall. :D

46:33 woops.. I err, may have done a lot of that. It felt like the thing to do, I realised I could scavenge clues and went out scavenging! I wonder if you can end up completing the game then without ever entering an "episode".. Also he was wrong haha, I loved it! Although I probably did a bit more of this grindy clue hunting than he probably wanted..

Cool!

Hecking masterclass!