My ears perked up whereas lurking behind a Moscone West lecture corridor on the 2025 Recreation Builders Convention. Suspicious Developments founder and Tactical Breach Wizards director Tom Francis was breaking down his methods for storytelling and comedy in his IGF award-winning recreation, and he landed with reference to animated textual content. In Tactical Breach Wizards, he defined, Suspicious Developments made the entire recreation’s dialogue extra partaking by animating dialogue phrase by phrase as an alternative of letter by letter. Every snappy repartee lands with the clack of a typewriter, and gamers who simply wish to learn all of the textual content directly can mash the “advance” button to hurry via it.
Suspicious Growth’s earlier video games Gunpoint and Warmth Signature animated phrases by the letter, Francis (him, not me) defined. When he experimented with word-by-word animation, he mentioned it was like “night time and day.” In a quick video demonstration, he paired the 2 types facet by facet, the traditional model was, as he mentioned “very easy.”
“I believe that is a foul factor…as a result of it lacks rhythm,” he mentioned. “It is too easy, it is similar to a steady stream [of words.]”
Even with out the sound of the clacking typewriter, the word-based animated dialogue moved with janky pace, altering movement based mostly on the construction of the sentence. “I believe the rationale it really works is that it type of matches how brains course of speech,” earlier than unexpectedly clarifying that “This isn’t science. That is only a conjecture.”
He mentioned he was amazed this system “wasn’t extra widespread,” remarking that “90 %” of the indie video games he performs depend on letter-by-letter animation (triple-A video games are likely to rely extra on voice appearing of late…although which will change if recreation studios nonetheless refuse to discount with SAG-AFTRA on the subject of generative AI).
As somebody who’s been considering so much recently about interactive textual content in video games, and Francis’ argument struck an actual chord. There isn’t any approach round it—extra builders, particularly indie builders, can enhance their narrative experiences with this system.
Partaking textual content helps gamers connect with a recreation
Right here I need to make a confession. Recently I’ve had an off-the-cuff rule when evaluating the standard of any given recreation. It goes like this: the earlier I can truly play a recreation, the extra seemingly I’m to keep it up. Overlong cutscenes (particularly ones which might be primarily movement comics) make me twitchy, and smaller video games that prohibit how far I transfer or act within the first jiffy make me yearn for one thing extra interactive.
That may shock readers who know I am a fan of huge price range cinematic video games like Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 or Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, however these video games are sometimes an exception to the rule. An attractive cutscene that units up the story with out counting on a backstory dump do so much to cue up gameplay. Spider-Man 2‘s opening scene leans on shenanigans to tee up a tango with Sandman, and Survivor‘s grim opening scene units the tone and stakes for the primary mission.
Once they do not have the price range for an enormous costly cutscene, indies attempt to lean on artwork and interactive textual content (both dialogue decisions or pushing a button to advance) to fill the hole. My bar for “gameplay” is low sufficient that tapping, clicking, or urgent a button to advance textual content typically snaps my thoughts into place. However right here we encounter a problem text-heavy video games like Disco Elysium face: textual content, when not animated nicely, flattens no matter attention-grabbing writing you will have beneath the hood.
In a 2020 interview with GameSpot, Disco Elysium lead designer and author Robert Kurvitz defined the sport would not have resonated with gamers if ZA/UM hadn’t labored to make the textual content “comprehensible.” The sport’s deep reliance on twentieth century ideological and philosophical ideas would not translate to mass leisure with out extreme iteration on textual content. To take action, they created a system that made textual content “as addictive and as snappy as Twitter,” taking inspiration from messaging apps and notification methods to take action. “You need to do every thing you possibly can with the which means of the textual content to make it as punchy as potential and to make it as private as potential,” Kurvitz mentioned on the time.
Which brings us again to Francis’ advocacy for word-based animation. Tactical Breach Wizards is not precisely the primary recreation to make use of this system! Recreation Boy and Recreation Boy Advance video games like Golden Solar and Hearth Emblem used it extensively—fact be informed, the sound and really feel of that advancing textual content is partly why these video games stick in my head.
Heck, If I might give this web site an choice to animate letters phrase by phrase with out breaking it (a tall order), I might!
Letter-by-letter animation could be helpful. The Animal Crossing collection makes use of it along side the nonsense babbling noises to make every villager partaking to talk with. Nevertheless it’s a deliberate alternative, not certainly one of comfort. In case your recreation has easy scrolling textual content animating letter by letter—with none further thought into font, placement onscreen, pace, or accessibility choices, it is easy to take a enjoyable exercise and easy it out into one thing extra bland.
Francis famous that this system works nice for comedy, as a result of comedy advantages from timing and precision on how phrases are delivered. Nevertheless it’s not the one style that does so. Every kind of video games may gain advantage from punchier, extra partaking textual content.
