We're all about ARGs and procedural generation on this week's discussion with Tanya (designer on Age of Conan, Dungeons of Fayte, The Secret World, Shattered Planet and Moon Hunters) and Rob (writer on ALFA-ARKIV, Gears of War: Judgment, The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, Playmation, and Battlefield Hardline). Our sprawling conversation includes chatbots, transmedia narratives, creating mythologies, binary morality systems, pacing in a procedurally generated game, why haven't we moved past cutscenes in games, how procedural and systemic gameplay affects development and writing, and games based on information retrieval.
Our Guests on the Internet
Tanya's Website and Twitter
Rob's Twitter
Stuff We Talked About
Moon Hunters on Steam
ALFA-ARKIV app
itch.io
Chatscript
Versu
The Fake 'Terrorist' Conspiracy Game That Fooled People For Years by Patricia Hernandez
GDC Talk: AI-driven Dynamic Dialog through Fuzzy Pattern Matching by Elan Ruskin
Our theme music was composed by 2Mello, and our logo was created by Lily Nishita.