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 tips for storytelling and comedy in his IGF award-winning recreation, and he landed as regards to animated textual content. In Tactical Breach Wizards, he defined, Suspicious Developments made all the recreation’s dialogue extra participating by animating dialogue phrase by phrase as a substitute of letter by letter. Every snappy repartee lands with the clack of a typewriter, and gamers who simply need to learn all of the textual content without delay can mash the “advance” button to hurry by it.
Suspicious Improvement’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 “evening and day.” In a quick video demonstration, he paired the 2 kinds aspect by aspect, the traditional model was, as he mentioned “very clean.”
“I feel that is a nasty factor…as a result of it lacks rhythm,” he mentioned. “It is too clean, 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 velocity, altering circulate based mostly on the construction of the sentence. “I feel the explanation it really works is that it form of matches how brains course of speech,” earlier than swiftly 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 p.c” of the indie video games he performs depend on letter-by-letter animation (triple-A video games are likely to rely extra on voice performing of late…although that will change if recreation studios nonetheless refuse to cut price with SAG-AFTRA on the subject of generative AI).
As somebody who’s been considering so much currently about interactive textual content in video games, and Francis’ argument struck an actual chord. There is no approach round it—extra builders, particularly indie builders, can enhance their narrative experiences with this system.
Participating textual content helps gamers connect with a recreation
Right here I have to make a confession. These days I’ve had a casual rule when evaluating the standard of any given recreation. It goes like this: the earlier I can really play a recreation, the extra doubtless I’m to keep it up. Overlong cutscenes (particularly ones which might be basically movement comics) make me twitchy, and smaller video games that limit how far I transfer or act within the first couple of minutes make me yearn for one thing extra interactive.
Which may shock readers who know I am a fan of huge finances 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. A fascinating 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 haven’t got the finances for a giant costly cutscene, indies attempt to lean on artwork and interactive textual content (both dialogue selections 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 usually 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 fascinating writing you will have below 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 programs to take action. “It’s important to do all the things you may with the that 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 may 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 together with the nonsense babbling noises to make every villager participating to talk with. But it surely’s a deliberate alternative, not one in every of comfort. In case your recreation has easy scrolling textual content animating letter by letter—with none further thought into font, placement onscreen, velocity, or accessibility choices, it is simple to take a enjoyable exercise and clean 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. But it surely’s not the one style that does so. Every kind of video games may benefit from punchier, extra participating textual content.
