Lee Hutchinson: Howdy everybody, and welcome to what I believe we are going to be calling a Dialogue on Dialog, as we walk through cool questions about conversations in adventure gaming and how dialogue shapes narrative, and all kinds of fun, heady questions. Lee Hutchinson: Joining me is Paul Reiche, who is the designer of games that you might heard of and enjoyed like Murder on the Zinderneuf, and Archon, and also, probably, this whole Star Control, Ur-Quan Masters thing, which is likely what you're here for. So as we dive into the design of Ur-Quan Masters II, which is in work right now, Paul had a lot of thoughts about the way that dialogue affects gaming, which sounds like an obvious thing to talk about, but it's actually an incredibly nuanced topic and Paul's been around designing games for a long time, and has a lot of experience in thinking about these questions. So hello, Paul, and how are you doing? Paul Reiche: Hey Lee. Oh, I'm totally nuanced. Ready to go. That would be my middle name, if I had a middle name. Maybe I should adopt it. Lee Hutchinson: Nuanced, Paul Nuanced Reiche. Paul Reiche: Yeah, that's right. Actually, my name was supposed to be Soya, because my parents were hippies, and I am so glad that didn't work out. I don't know why. I don't know. Maybe the drugs wore off or something. In any event, I am so glad to be here and talking about talking, talking about... Lee Hutchinson: Excellent! Paul Reiche: ... writing about talking. Lee Hutchinson: So we've come up... By we, I mean some of the Pistol Shrimp team and me, have come up with a few guiding questions for this discussion here. And really what we want to do is allow you folks, who have contributed so much to the game's design in terms of money and enthusiasm, both of which we greatly appreciate, we want to let you guys peek behind the curtain a little bit into how this process works, and give you an X-ray of what's going on in Paul's head, at least the safe for work parts of it, of how dialogue informs game design choices. So let me see here, we have a big list of questions, so I'll pick one of Paul's questions that he wrote down for him to answer himself, because those are going to have the best answers, because that's how interviewing works. Lee Hutchinson: This one's broad. So we want to try to keep this, once this is all edited down, we want to keep this to a reasonable length. And I recognize that starting this with a huge, open-ended question is not a way to keep this in a reasonable length, but I'm going to do it anyway. Who and what inspired and motivated your interest in interactive conversations in fiction? Paul Reiche: Well, there you go. That is one of the biggest questions. I think the most obvious thing is reading science fiction and fantasy my whole life. I wish I could say that I was a consumer of the really serious adult fiction that supposedly makes you a better person, but what I am is a consumer of fiction and history and science that makes me happy. And this will be a recurrent theme, I do what makes me happy and hopefully other people as well. And the first books that I had read to me were Norwegian folk tales and science fiction, specifically The Zero Stone and some Robert Heinlein, like The Star Beast. And those two books, one by Andre Norton and one by Robert Heinlein, are the first books I actually remember reading, besides maybe The Adventures of Nils, about a boy who turns into a goose, which I think had less influence on me. Paul Reiche: But the idea of traveling out into space, confronting mysterious and dangerous people and aliens and things, and then getting big treasure as a reward, it's just baked into me at this point. And I was so fortunate to be part of the boom in funding for public schools that happened when the Russians got a satellite into orbit before us. They pumped money into the system, and so we had all kinds of material, and literature, and workbooks, and stamp books, and you name it, all about hopefully making us better at making, presumably, spaceships and nuclear weapons. And that actually was my first career choice. I was looking at joining Lawrence Livermore Labs coming out of high school, and then it turned out you needed a degree or two to do that, because I wanted to work on fusion power systems, and fusion star ship engines... Lee Hutchinson: I think that involves a lot of math actually, yeah. Paul Reiche: That was the failing, yeah. Just a couple of classes above calculus, I hit my ceiling and realized I needed a plan B, which actually wasn't going into gaming full-time, it was field geology and I got a horrible case of poison oak, so plan C or plan B slash two was continuing to make games, but just doing it professionally, which, thank God I did that, because one, I really did have a horrible poison oak allergy and two, my math ability... After running into people like Fred Ford and Ken Ford and other people who actually understand real math, boy, I was a long way from doing anything except probably making pretty spectacular explosions. Lee Hutchinson: Yeah. I think Fred was talking about quaternions the other day, which, as far as I know, was like a potential alien race in Star Control and it turns out no, it's just some more maths. Paul Reiche: I always thought it was an evil Victorian, Dr. Quaternion. It just sounds like someone who Sherlock Holmes would've taken down. But to go back to the question, science fiction, fantasy, and fantasy role-playing. So those are the cores of where I got interested in talking with weird beings, whether it's the dialogue in my head with characters in books. So, they're oftentimes in a book, you get this little taste of a character, and then if you're like me, you make a little copy of that character in your head and it just starts running, and you can have little conversations with it. And this does sound kind of crazy, which may explains why I'm answering a question asked by myself. Paul Reiche: But having conversations with these character emulations that are running in your head is a big way that I work, and I think that it was natural for me to take some of those conversations and transcribe them into game-form. And also playing Dungeons & Dragons and other role-playing games, and then working on them when I was young, that naturally led to setting up the Dungeon Master or the Games Master for conversations with players, where it was more than just, "This is exactly what you say to them," but rather it was, "Here's the information that you give immediately, here's the stuff that you can give if they just dig a little bit, and then here's the stuff that you give only when they trigger it with these certain kinds of questions or phrases." And that led, obviously, to text adventures and other early interactive fiction products and experiments that I was running into on... Well, even before personal computers, on teletype-based software, because I started with that really young. Lee Hutchinson: You actually brought up something that I wanted to touch on that isn't written down. When you mentioned the way that conversations in a tabletop role-playing game work, especially if you've got a good group, with the Dungeon Master taking on the role of the NPC, and the player doing the player thing. Is that ultimately, you think, the paradigm that you come back to, no matter what game you're in, with the way that conversations are designed to work? Is it ultimately aping the D&D experience? Paul Reiche: I think that's part of it, and maybe just that sort of extemporaneous conversation just trained me a little bit in how to just pick up and ramble nonsense, and hopefully make jokes and tell important secrets. But I think actually, in terms of how you go about creating the kind of interactive fiction that we made in The Ur-Quan Masters, which is just a particular version, it came out of a short experience I had working with a company called Synapse Software in the early eighties, early mid-eighties. And they had created a language called BTZ, Better Than Zork, Cathryn Mataga was the main implementer of that. And it was intended to be a parsing system and game definition language for making the next generation of text adventures, which is why they called it Better Than Zork. Paul Reiche: And there was a team of, I don't know, maybe eight or nine authors who were just starting out, we all didn't have a real clue on how to do it. So we were taking apart what other people were doing in interactive fiction at the time, which was almost all Infocom and Adventure International's text adventure games by Scott Adams, like Pirate Adventure. And we would sit around this table and talk about the experience both technically of working in the BTZ language, but then also just things that we had been thinking about. How is it that you write interactive fiction? And there was a conversation that just completely changed the way I thought about conversation and about interactive fiction. Paul Reiche: And it was, I can't remember exactly which of the writers it was, it wasn't Pinsky, because, believe it or not, we had a later Poet Laureate of the United States sitting at the table, because it was in Berkeley and he was around, but someone said, "Hey, I figured something out. Conversation can be thought of as a maze." And he said, "So if you think about when you're talking with someone and you actually want to make a game mechanic out of it, what you need to do is think of conversation as having subjects, which are rooms, and you go into a room and you talk with them about the subject. And then you say something which takes you to the next room, which is a different topic of conversation. And ultimately, what you're trying to do is move yourself through this maze to get to your desired destination. And the manner in which you traverse rooms in this conversation maze are the individual game mechanics." Paul Reiche: And honestly, I don't know what came out of that because I got into a big argument with this guy named Ihor about the contract, and subsequently Erol Otus and I, who were working on a horror story, never finished that for them. But that idea, that conversation could be thought of as a maze when it comes to gamifying it, just absolutely structured how I saw things going forward into the future. And, in particular, how we tackled The Ur-Quan Masters. Lee Hutchinson: Did you do any work in interactive fiction before Ur-Quan Masters? And obviously I know the answer to this question, I mentioned, jokingly, Murder on the Zinderneuf and several other game... Archon doesn't, I think, have a lot of conversation in it, but your game design credits extend far and wide in lots of directions in both ways before and after Ur-Quan Masters. So, tell me about your interactive fiction work before Ur-Quan Masters. Paul Reiche: Well, I mean, obviously there was some in paper games, in role-playing games, but the first computer game I worked on was called The Keys of Acheron. And it was for a company which was called Automated Simulations, which would later become Epyx-Games. And they had a fantasy role-playing system, and in it, there wasn't enough memory to actually store text. We could only store references to paragraphs. So you would write paragraphs in a book and then reference those within the game. So you'd walk into... Lee Hutchinson: Oh my gosh, and I have to interrupt you, just very briefly, because there is a generation of PC gamer, even, that I don't think knows what the hell you're talking about with paragraph books. Remind us, just for a moment, what things were like back in those days. Paul Reiche: Okay. So, say you had 16 kilobytes to work with in your game, and you needed to draw dungeons and maybe have a couple of graphics for your monsters and your protagonist character. Text, hey, that chews up a lot of memory, that's maybe a bite per character. And so what we would do back in those days, and this is 1982, 1983, is you would take all of the text and you would move it into a physical book, into a manual, and then you would code each of the paragraphs or statements with an index number, and that's all that you could afford to represent in the game itself. So you would move your little blocky dude into a little blocky room, and it would say paragraph 87 and you would go there, and then there would be my flowery statement about "You meet this guy, and he says this thing to you and..." Paul Reiche: Is that interactive? Kind of, because you got to control how you moved through the world. But the genuine, the first interactive fiction I worked on in games is called Murder on the Zinderneuf, with another designer, John Freeman, and a programmer, Robert Leyland, who shows up repeatedly as a partner of mine, he's the guy who invented the Skylanders hardware. Paul Reiche: And so, in that game, you were trying to solve a mystery in a zeppelin, because of course that's where mysteries occur. So, you're in a zeppelin, you're wandering around, and when you meet people, you could talk with them, but instead of having those expensive statements you could make, you assumed a posture. So it could be hostile, it could be seductive, it could be friendly, it could be whimsical. And then we built these templates for possible investigators. So you could be like Clouseau, in which case, you're making random, goofy statements and confusing people. Or you could be like Dirty Harry wandering around, or Sherlock Holmes. And so you would choose a posture, which is like, I'm going to be crazy, and I'm going to ask a question. And then there were different characters that you would meet, and there was a cast of, I think, 16 characters, and each of them had a personality, and then we had a table for this particular character with this particular posture, how successful is it with this particular person? So, if you're Clouseau and you're trying to be seductive towards a dowager, you have a much better chance than if you're trying to be seductive against... We had, essentially, Dracula wandering around there. Paul Reiche: And so we synthesized... We had a plot template about this is a murder triangle involving two people who are in love and they murder the spouse of the other person. And then we would fit characters into the templated positions. You know, there's lover one, lover two and murdered person. And then you would walk around asking questions, and if you pick the right posture with the right character and talk to the right person, they would give you a piece of information that let you narrow down who was the culprit, and then you got one chance to run that person down and accuse them. And so... Lee Hutchinson: So when you say ask questions and stuff, the actual dialogue that's presented on screen in the game, you get the option of a posture that you're going to do, so you can be obsequious, or friendly, or hostile, or whatever... Paul Reiche: Exactly. Lee Hutchinson: You don't actually see the subsequent... Paul Reiche: Well, you actually did. Lee Hutchinson: ... mustache-twisting dialogue, or do you? Paul Reiche: You actually did. I believe, I think. I think one of the keys was we wanted you to be surprised and delighted by what your character said. Now, I could be mistaking this for what then happened in Starflight, because I spent some time with Greg Johnson talking about this kind of conversation system. And I think this is more or less the direction they took in that, although they obviously took it much further. And the idea was you want to be delighted by what you say and surprised. Paul Reiche: And of course in Star Control, or in The Ur-Quan Masters, we went a different route. We offered specific fixed statements that are contrasted against one another and you get to pick one. And the reason we did that was it was so funny to see the contrasting options. I think one of the keys about protagonists for me, and characters that you meet in fiction, is I love it when they all take themselves seriously, and they're all ridiculous. And when you can contrast this very serious thing you're saying with this very blustery thing, ridiculous over-the-top trying to bully someone with some sort of obvious crazy lie, that absurd contrast is really appealing to me, because I think, in my head, I'm doing all those things all the time. You approach someone at the grocery store and you want to complain about a peach, I could be obsequious, I could be... Paul Reiche: But then we're back to Murder on Zinderneuf, which will be more successful? But influencing this was my playing of Monkey Island. Gilbert and the crew at LucasArts at that time made, what I thought at the time, was one of the best games of all time. And the manner in which you could see the contrasting phrases you could make was super entertaining. So we just ran with that in The Ur-Quan Masters. And I think that's a big part of its charm, is you can go down the straight path and it's pretty clear which route is going to take you to the end quickly in a straightforward way, but you can kind of wind your way through different kind of attitudes and subjects and goofy things, and you get alien responses to them, which is always nice to see. And those responses to unexpected statements is part of what helps you build up the alien's character. Lee Hutchinson: So I want to switch to a question from Dan, Dan Gerstein, our lead designer and master of... Honestly, I'm not sure what Dan does, because he does so many things. But he has a couple of great questions on this list that tie directly into Ur-Quan Masters, and to a couple of other questions that I want to hit. So I want to give both of his back-to-back, and the first one that he wrote here is how do conversations tie into other parts of the game? And I know that sounds like kind of an obvious question, but from a design perspective, does a conversation influence ship design, for example? Paul Reiche: Well, one half of that is on the creative side, which is how do you approach making characters and dialogue, and the other is how does the game itself respond to your conversation? So I'm going to tackle the first one, which is when we were working on The Ur-Quan Masters, we had the basis of what was Star Control I, where we had very, very thin descriptions of the alien races. We would have a postage stamp-sized image of them, and then a very short description of how they worked, but a whole lot of their character existed, again, in those little captain's windows postage stamps that were animated, and then in the behavior of their spaceship. And then there was some additional material that was put into the manual, only some of which I wrote. Paul Reiche: So, when it came time to do the sequel, and Fred and I said, "Hey, let's do a quick sequel, let's get a little light role-playing game mixed in." And obviously that's not where we ended up. A big part of what we did was trying to rationalize the off the cuff character definitions that we had. So in some cases, like with the Yehat, there had been, I think, one little mention of clan structure. And so, at this point I had a couple of Scottish friends and an interest in some Scottish history, which is mostly about massacres and cows. And I mean, apologies to all Scottish people, including my son-in-law. But in any event, with that word clan, I sort of ran with it and grafted on this whole quasi-Scottish structure to their behavior. And I was thinking about the competition between the Queens, Mary and Elizabeth, and that led into this idea that there could be a factional conflict built into the game. Paul Reiche: And so that factional conflict led me into, well, what would they be mad about? And part of it came when I decided that the Shofixti had blown themselves up to really be great heroes and change the course of the war before the game begins, actually. That seemed like the focal point, and the part that would've really stuck in the emotional craw of the Yehat. So it was this one little word, clan, which I think came from the manual. It was the fact that they looked like pterodactyls. And then there was an illustration that Erol Otus drew of the Pkunk, which looked very much like the Yehat. And I had been trying to figure out how to connect the races, and you're always trying to figure out, well, how do they relate to one another? Because that's what makes things interesting, you're not just dealing with each one independently and thing you do over here can change the world on the other side of the space map. So that's when we said, "Oh, okay, well maybe the Pkunk actually related, they're both kind of a birdie." And, okay, so then perhaps they can figure into this civil war. Paul Reiche: So it was, in one sense, any of the assets that had been created that helped describe the characters, whether it was tiny little postage stamp images, whether it was the idea that there was a relationship between them and the Shofixti, which I think is set up in the first game. All of those things come into influence the web of resolution, is how I think of it, where we do plan out a lot about how the game flows, and particularly how the conversations flow, we can get to that in a minute, but as you're going, you discover, or at least I discover, so much about how the game's going to work just by virtue of working on it. Paul Reiche: So, you are in the midst of writing something about the Pkunk, and you hear something on the radio about a 900 number, which no one remembers anymore, probably. And so I throw that in there, and I had been reading something about this... I live in Marin County, and there's a lot of quasi-spiritual, supernatural stuff that goes on here. And there was something about an ancient warrior spirit who could enlighten you if you read a book or paid money, I can't remember what it was. And so I slipped that in and I mixed it with the 900 number, because it was on the phone, and I just sort of fell in love with the Pkunk because Greg Johnson had written a bunch of the meat of their dialogue, and I kind of wanted to play then with that character that Greg had defined. Paul Reiche: So, I would hand out work that was structured, and again, we can get to that, get back the work from the writers who were helping me, like Greg Johnson. And then I would go back in and edit it, and then as the game went along and more stuff would come along, I would speak with the voice that had been created by the author who worked on it. So, in some cases though, Erol, say, would do a drawing of an alien kind of out of the blue, and I would be so inspired, that that would define the character completely. So the Ilwrath, I think, were an example of... Early on, Erol had drawn a spider alien, and the original spiders, as drawn in Star Control I, were very literal and top-down, you saw all their whole abdomens, but when Erol painted them again with those little lava lamp backgrounds, it completely inspired me to make them so evil, and so over-the-top, crazy evil, and bouncing between the absurd evil and the actual scary, weird evil. Paul Reiche: And then Mat Genser wrote a lot of the meat of that dialogue, and he loved being over-the-top, and the whole "Pop The Crunchy Noisemaker" comes from him. So, I think, it's hard to say... I think I love finding things out as I go. There's people who that... They want to plan everything down to the last detail and then implemented it. They may be called engineers, and they definitely have a role in our success, ask Fred, but I just love the idea that you're zipping along through writing, and something just kind of pops into your head and you write it down, and then that night you're watching TV and you're like, "Oh my God, that could connect with this other thing!" Or someone draws a spaceship that looks like a crazy, flowery butterfly, and you're just like, "Yep, that is perfect for the Pkunk, because they're a bunch of flowery butterfly people." Paul Reiche: And I think twice for Bob in a way... That was the studio that we built, Fred and I, we made Star Control and The Ur-Quan Masters games there, then all bunch of other games, and then ended up rolling it in and out of a couple of companies, and eventually building it up and selling it to Activision, and then leading that studio for another decade or so. And to a certain extent, its culture was constructed to allow me to continue making games, because I do tend to operate on the fly and not want to have everything locked down early on. And so that got kind of baked into the culture. And so as we brought more and more people in, that remained the premise of Toys for Bob, which is that if you have a great idea, and we can pull it off, and it doesn't derail everything else, then let's do it. I don't care if it's in the design doc or not. Paul Reiche: And that showed up in solving some problems with Skylanders, in which we actually had the audio department solve one of our major design problems. And we allowed that, because one, we had a programming language for designers, which anyone could use, and then also everybody was authorized to offer ideas. And so I think that's the evolution of how it is that I can make excuses for the way I design and turn it into a company philosophy. Lee Hutchinson: You've answered this already, but I want to hear a focused answer here. So, how much do you know going into crafting a conversation? When you're going to write dialogue for an alien, when you have a conversation you're going to sit down with, how much do you know going in, and how much do you discover, and this can be anything, how much do you discover about the alien or about the plot in the process? And then Dan has written also in here, how do you integrate your discoveries into reevaluating your starting point? Which is very fancy designer language. Paul Reiche: I have no idea about that last part, but I'm going to start with how do you do it? So... Lee Hutchinson: And I have thoughts here too. When you're done, I want to weigh in on this because this is my first major game project, but I'm learning so much by being thrown into this fire. Paul Reiche: Yeah, we like to throw people into the deep end. I think that's another Toys for Bob mechanism. Dan Gerstein, as a matter of fact, showed up one day, I think he had just gotten out of high school or maybe he was on his way out of high school. And at Toys for Bob, we had a computer that anyone could come use if they wanted, and they could... So, gosh, we had newly divorced, single moms, we had lots of kids in their first years of college, some high school students. And the premise was they could work on the computers, and then if they wanted to do something for the game, usually it was pretty... Grunt work, placing coins or something like that, or putting text into the game, or something like that, they could. And then eventually if they did a good job, we'd start paying them. And then eventually if they kept doing that, we would hire them. And so we got a number of our good employees, long-term employees that way. Paul Reiche: But anyway, how do you make a conversation? Well, the first thing is you... What I do is I make a flow chart of the meat of it. And in the past, I actually did these by hand with pencil, and I think maybe we can provide, with this podcast, some samples of what I did in the past that include coffee stains and burrito stains. And primarily this was organized, in the old days, what I would call conversation stacks, which is there's a set of messages, or a set of statements that you can make, and let's call this, gosh, this is sort of a decision, where you need to make a decision about what you're going to say next. Paul Reiche: And there are player statements, and there's an initial set of, say, four player statements, which is, one is a threat, you know, "Surrender or die, alien scum." And another one is a polite request, like, "Oh, if you happen to have any fuel, we could really use it. And it would foster human-alien relationships." And another might just be a random joke. And if you make one of those statements, then there's an alien response, what we call now an NPC response. And so it's then there's a choice, which is either that option goes away completely, and so now you have fewer options when you're done with that, you make a statement and they make a response, or you can replace it. Paul Reiche: And when a stack is a series of these, so I say, "Tell me about your history." And they say, "Well, we don't really like talking about our history." And then you could have, "No, I'm really interested, please?" And then they can respond to that. And eventually you exhaust that stack. Or that stack has something that takes you to a different part of the conversation, it's a new room in the conversation maze. So if you look at the flow charts that I did for The Ur-Quan Masters I, and I did all of those, they pretty much say things like, "Ask about their history" or, "Ask about the Ultron." And in that case, it's something specific that I knew. Or it's threat number four, or threat number one. And I even had this sort of template for a standard alien conversation should incorporate all of this, and it let you communicate to them about who you were, it let them communicate who they were, and then there were ways of exploring some basics. Paul Reiche: And so I would take that template, once I had actually figured it out, and then I would lay in what was unique about this alien race, like stuff about the Ultron, or stuff about telling the Ilwrath about the Thraddash, or... And then I would write out little boxes for every player statement that needed to get made, which is a short, usually, sentence or two. And then an alien response, which could be of any length. And I would hand it off, I did about half the writing, and then I had about half of the first drafts were done by other folks based upon me saying, "Okay, this is the Ilwrath. This is what they're like. And here's the layout of the phrases, and there's a title for each one. If it's important that it accomplishes a certain goal, the title will tell you what the goal is, like tell them about Channel 44, or explain that..." Oh gosh. "Explain that they're related to the Yehat." Or something like that. Paul Reiche: And then the writer... And then these were Erol Otus, and Mat Genser, and Robert Leyland, and Ian McCaig, and a few other folks who I knew were good writers, and very motivated to participate, and hadn't really had a chance to be professional writers yet, so this was a great option for all of us. And they would come back, and oftentimes, if I was lucky, it was typed in a file, oftentimes it was handwritten. And they would just have the title of the statement, and then there would be the block of text for their response. And Erol, for example, started the Orz. And the first thing he did was just write a page of idioms or manners in which they behaved or trademark statements. And this is where the whole happy campers and dancing and use of the asterisks came in. And then Erol had to shift to something else, and so I gave that piece of paper to Greg Johnson and then Greg ran with that, because he didn't know what Erol meant at all. So he was sort of interpreting... Lee Hutchinson: Yeah, but when it comes to folks who could just sit down and bang out alien dialogue, Greg Johnson's probably up near the top of the list. Paul Reiche: Yeah, Greg is... I did a tiny bit of work on Starflight, and Greg did a ton of work on Ur-Quan Masters, and I was so fortunate to have the friends and the people who helped work on the game, because obviously they were a big part of why it is the way it is. Paul Reiche: So, the work would come back, I would enter it in, and then that would be the starting point. But really, a lot of the interconnections and game logic wasn't fully defined yet. So we had fully functional alien races, in terms of being able to meet them, fight with them, make them your friends, get access to their ship designs. And we had populated space with these alien races and their spheres of influence, but we didn't necessarily know how they tied into the overarching story of blowing up the Sa-Matra. And Fred, at one point, came over to my house in Nevada at this point, and sat down and said, "Paul, I know it's all in your head. You need to put it all down on paper now." Paul Reiche: So, we sat down on this big chunk of white cardboard and drew absolutely every little interconnection, and then he could go program all of them. Because there was no system that allowed me to create things, author conversations. It was me doing stuff on paper, and then Fred putting it in C, at that point. However, now we have Ur-Quan Masters II. We have got a system that is totally designer-focused, and this is where you come in, Lee Hutchinson, because... Lee Hutchinson: Kind of, yeah! Paul Reiche: ... I knew you were interested in Star Control, The Ur-Quan Masters, and I also knew you were a good writer. And so I was really excited when you said you were interested in helping us write, and then... Lee Hutchinson: Oh, pleased to hear it. Paul Reiche: ... then I threw you into the very, very deep end of... Lee Hutchinson: You did! Paul Reiche: ... interactive fiction. Lee Hutchinson: Well, there are a couple of things that I want to hit on here, and it's important to note, I think, that when the time comes, and I don't know when that time is, only you do at this point, but when the time comes to pull in some additional help, especially on the writing side, additional volunteer help, what those folks are going to receive to write from is essentially what you did with Ur-Quan Masters. They're going to essentially get, if it's available, a bio of the thing that they're writing for, and they're going to get a series of bare prompts, like you said, ask about the widget, tell them about the planet, whatever. And then it will be up to them to sort of fill that in. Paul Reiche: Absolutely. And that is both because I'm lazy, and I also know how to motivate people and get great creative things out of them. And the way to do it is to provide enough structure so that you're not just basically flailing, because I know structure really helps people, I think, be comforted and confident in how they're working. And also, yeah, hey, it just worked great last time. Between Erol, and Mat, and Greg, they had no problem coming up with awesome, innovative things. And I'd like to do that again, I think this time though, I will not provide them with handwritten, burrito-stained pieces of paper. I'm using Visio, because you recommended it, Lee, and it's awesome. And it'll be very much the same structure. Paul Reiche: So let me, I'm backing up and making a very general statement here, which is that Ur-Quan Masters II, in my mind, is intended to be a direct, clear sequel to what we made. It's not a remake of Ur-Quan Masters I, it is not a reimagining of what that kind of game could be. I want this game to feel like, yes, it's probably prettier than we could have done in 1994, but it feels like it's a direct connection. So in that sense, conversations will have new options and hopefully new, I think what my daughter would call transgressions because she's a PhD student. And, in other words, ways of transforming and expanding the relationship between the player and the choices they can make and what they hear back. But it is really using the same tools to communicate with these characters. And so, for that reason, I really want to follow up on the same level of definition and structure, and then turning to authors who aren't game designers, but letting them flesh out what this alien race is like. And in some cases... Lee Hutchinson: I think that's really great. Paul Reiche: Oh, okay. And you're going to be wonderful. Lee Hutchinson: I was going to say, I think that's really great because you obviate a lot of the problems of introducing a creative non-technical into what is... I mean, game design is obviously a technical process. Even at the writing level, game design is a technical process. And you guys have done an excellent job at abstracting away a lot of that technicalness. I like that you're providing that level of flexibility to prospective writers too, because the main challenge that I've been doing so far is writing a character that is known to us and unknown, currently, to the world. You'll meet this character at some point when the game is out. But that's where I've been focusing a lot of my writing efforts now, because it's a very meaty part with a lot to do, and it's helping to establish a lot of the early tone. Lee Hutchinson: But like Dan's question of how much do you know going into crafting the conversation, I have, generally, a bare outline. But 80% of what that conversation is going to be, at least on the stuff that I've written, has developed once I'm writing it. Paul Reiche: Yeah. Lee Hutchinson: It's the spaces in between the targets that you have to hit where the meat is, almost, the good stuff. My mind kind of works like a... What's the best way to put it? My mind kind of works like a bread machine, where I put all the ingredients in and then walk away, and then at some point ideas start popping out, I'm not sure when. I think there's a guy in there and he's pulling levers, and occasionally he pulls the idea lever and one actually pops up. But I have sprinted from the shower to write Ur-Quan Masters II dialogue that has popped into my head and I'm like, "Holy crap, I will forget this in 30 seconds." It comes at any point. But it's nice having this structured process to put all this into because it so helps with organizing. It helps to know that I don't have to think of a conversation. I have to think of a conversation that has these four things in it. And that is so helpful, so incredibly helpful. At least to me. Paul Reiche: I think for me, the task of, "Tell me about your history." Anybody who's ever been a DM or rambled at their friends or parents about ideas for stories that they have, you ask them, "Make up something about the history of an alien race." And boy they can. And then once, I'm trying to remember, Mat's talking about Chimt in the Murky Bog, it felt like Ghostbusters, to me, this is part of the Utwig conversation where they're just rambling off, with absolutely no connection, these long names of heroic characters from their ancient myths, and just being exposed to anybody's new mythology, you have no idea what he's talking about, but boy, does he take it seriously. Man, the Utwig just went on and on. Paul Reiche: But anyway, I loved reading about them and it was so fun because I knew, yeah, this is exactly what I wanted. I don't know the Utwig character at this point, besides the fact that they're kind of depressed and they wear masks. I think that's what I said. They wear masks and they're depressed because they broke the Ultron, and the Ultron does amazing things, or does it? And real quick on the Ultron. So, the ongoing joke was, are we ever going to add the functionality to the Rosy Sphere? Because all of the things were kind of supposed to do something, that the Druuge had, but then we just sort of ran out of time or interest or the need to do it. So then they just became these pieces of junk that they were trying to sell you. And I still felt bad about Wimbli's Trident because I loved that name and I just thought, "This needs to be awesome." So if you've ever played The Horde, a game that we did immediately following the original version of The Ur-Quan Masters, we did introduce a Wimbli's Trident that summoned meteors, and it was badass and awesome, so. Flaming, flaming meteors. But anyway, so... Lee Hutchinson: Well, you got to do something with those items anyway, right? You can't have extra Chekhov's guns lying around. If an alien is going to sell something, it should do something. Paul Reiche: Yeah. Yeah. Well, yeah. We also had people who dug around in the data, found references to the cloaking device we had and the precursor data tablets. And there was stuff that we cut, I'm afraid, from the game. Hey, we did have a whole conversation that we cut out, I had done the animated art for it, and it was really self-serving and we were burnt out at this point and we were really looking for something insane, and kind of, what's the term? Anti-establishment, because we were dealing with Accolade at this point and they had stopped paying us and they desperately wanted the game and they didn't really understand it. And so we wanted to put in a conversation with ourselves, where we could answer as these sort of supernatural beings in this narrative that we had created. And man, I'm glad we actually didn't put it in there. It looked really cool actually, artistically. But ultimately useless. Lee Hutchinson: If you have any screenshots lying around, this would be the greatest place to share them. Paul Reiche: I can get them out there. And there were some other... There was a race called the (beep). One of the things, when I say that you're taking ideas and connecting them and, like you described, sometimes they just pop in your head, but I have gone back to the code wheel, the initial code we did for Star Control I, and those names, I'm still working through them. And periodically I go back through them like, "Phlegmorf? I love that name!" Like, "Oh damn, I used that as an offhanded reference. I can't use that." But the (beep) are going to be here. And I actually have... Lee Hutchinson: You know what we should do, actually? I don't mean to interrupt, but what would be awesome is because there might be a plan to use the (beep) in the next game, when I'm editing this I should put a beep over every time you say the word (beep). Paul Reiche: I think we should put the code wheel. We should put a picture of the code wheel and say, "If you want to know what's going to be appearing in the game, they're here. Rupatupa and Hudped." Yeah, I love some of those names and I have no idea where they came, but I remember spending a good week of just free associating, writing everything down. Paul Reiche: But you know, you mentioned your ideas. I have this here, "horror story wrong deed search". And this was something that came from a crazy experience, and it took me a long time to remember what that yellow note meant, what that Post-it Note meant. I kept thinking like, "What is the wrong deed that causes a horror story?" It literally has to do with a deed search that I had to do, and they sent me the deed going back to the mid-1800s on the wrong piece of property. And the idea of searching through this bizarre bunch of historical data that goes across different generations and involves exchanges and conflicts and all that, and then realizing some horror about it as you start seeing it get closer and closer to the present. So anyway, someday I'll use that. Lee Hutchinson: So like an 1800s version of the cursed videotape, or now that you've seen the deed, your family is destined to be a part of the curse of the house. Paul Reiche: Yes, yes. Very Lovecraftian. Lee Hutchinson: Okay. Next question here. These are a couple of mine and then we'll go into Arianna's, because Arianna has some excellent questions. This is Paul's daughter, Arianna. Now that we've sort of broken the seal talking about some of the technical stuff, I wanted to get into the mechanics and structure of conversation itself. Because I have this newly privileged position of having done a little bit of this now, and it's shown me a lot of interesting stuff, and the first is exactly how much hay you can make with a font choice. Paul Reiche: Oh God. Lee Hutchinson: So... Paul Reiche: Let's talk fonts. Lee Hutchinson: Ur-Quan Masters differentiates its characters during dialogue in four major ways. Each alien has a unique voiced voice, a unique voice actor, which came with the 3DO version a couple of years after initial release, but they have a voice. Each alien has a unique musical theme. Obviously each alien has its own animated and character art, so you've got Fwiffo flailing his little Spathi arms. And then each alien has a unique typeface and color combination to sort of represent its speaking voice. And all of this came before the 3DO version, there was no voice over. So this typeface and color choice was, to a certain... To a huge extent, actually, was the alien's voice. And each element contributes to the identity as the player sees them, but I want to focus specifically on that typeface and color choice. A, are you much of a font snob, and B, how important to the characters is typeface choice? Paul Reiche: Well, for those who don't know me, I do like fonts. For those who do know me, I am obsessive about them. And this goes back to the Atari 800. One of the very first programs I wrote was a character sheet system for Gamma World, and you could make your fonts on the Atari 800. I don't know, how many of you had Atari 800s or grandparents had them? And it was there that I realized, and again, I think Robert Leyland was the guy who got me into this, how amazing they were. But even before that, when I was working in paper games, so in high school, Mat Genser and Erol Otus, two of the guys who worked on dialogue for The Ur-Quan Masters, we were in high school together, and we played D&D together. And fortunately, Erol was a brilliant artist and Mat was a good writer, and I was lucky enough to have friends who would tolerate me. And we decided that, heck, the secret of Dungeons & Dragons is that it's poorly written, so we can do better than that. We're going to make our own books and sell them. Paul Reiche: And it helped that Erol had already illustrated one of the first unaligned fantasy role-playing game books, called the Arduin Grimoire, by David A. Hargrave. And so, we began writing books of monsters, treasure, and magical spells. And we said, "Look, use these in whatever systems you're using, because there's like, gosh, four or five now, Tunnels & Trolls, and who knows whatever, The Fantasy Trip." And so we wrote monsters, and treasure, and magical spells that appealed to us. So some, obviously, we lifted from our favorite book, like [inaudible 00:46:00]. And then we also had a strange connection to Jack Vance, and so we were able to use some of his monsters and some of his spells with permission. Paul Reiche: But we really belabored our fonts. We thought through, very carefully, our font choices, because we had gotten this Letraset book. And again, this is like speaking about stone tablets, but it was a book of typefaces and you would order a typeface and it would come on rub-off... Almost like temporary tattoos. And you would very carefully write straight lines in pencil, light pencil, and then you would position the rub off letters and then you would rub them off, and they would be these beautiful black letters in these different fonts. And we ended up ordering some of the most unreadable, exotic fonts for our covers, and we ended up having to redo one of our covers because we used old Gothic instead of printers Gothic, and no one can read old Gothic. Paul Reiche: But anyway, so I really got into it, and I used to just sit with this Letraset book, looking at typefaces and imagining what would look cool. And I had the Star Trek Technical Manual and it was using a particular font that I loved, and Larry Niven's books had come out, been reissued with this really cool... It was really like an optical character recognition font. So, I was really into it. And then when it came time to do the fonts, do the characters in The Ur-Quan Masters, I knew I wanted special fonts, but there really wasn't a system that we had access to for them, so I wrote a font editor and it took me... Would have taken Fred two days. It took me six weeks, at minimum. Paul Reiche: But I did, and I introduced this idea of kerning, which not many people were using at that time, but boy, does it make a difference, and I've been obsessive about kerning ever since. And that is how you don't use a regular space between all letters. If you have an uppercase T and a lowercase a following it, you can kind of tuck the lowercase a under the uppercase T. And it's typically done in the past by hand, and nowadays there's lots of complicated ways of defining it. And in some cases you can actually use physics to see how these things should nestle next to each other. So I constructed a way to do that. Paul Reiche: And then in order to pick colors, it was primarily looking at how it related to the color of the artwork. And we were working with 256 color art, so I would reserve a couple of those colors for the fonts. And not only was it that the size of the font mattered, if you had a small font, characters could pack a lot of words on the screen at once. If you had a big font, it sounded loud. This isn't surprising to us, but at that point, writing in caps wasn't a big deal. Now people complain about you yelling at them if you write in all caps. So, we discovered that font size made a difference in character definition. Readability mattered, so writing the Ilwrath, for example, in that kind of Gothic-ish font made them a little harder to understand, and that actually played into your perception of the character. And a certain amount of this also comes from Pogo Possum. Lee Hutchinson: Excellent. I bring this up because we were in the Pistol Shrimp Discord the other day. There was a dumb discussion that sort of devolved into people yelling at each other using the Ilwrath's voice, and the way the folks in the Discord were imitating the Ilwrath was by capitalizing and bolding the first letter of each word in what they were saying. And it's actually what prompted the question, because it was actually remarkable how, just by capitalizing and bolding the first letter of each word, all of a sudden you find that Ilwrath cadence to your voice when you read it like this. Paul Reiche: Many charred corpses. Lee Hutchinson: I just thought it was incredibly impressive how you guys managed to make a typeface and a color so evocative of an actual character, to the point to where you could probably show me the words without the alien background at this point, and it would still feel like something that alien was saying. Paul Reiche: Well, I think the manner in which people write makes such a huge difference. And I wasn't joking about Pogo, I'm going to send you some images of that that we can include, but there was a bad character, an evil, deceptive character in there who, gosh, what was he called? Oh, here, I found him. A vicar. I think he's called The Vicar. And he used a Gothic-like font, and I remember as a little kid really trying hard to read that. And then, strangely, I went to this bizarre little private school in Berkeley called The Academy where, right behind me, one class down from me, and our classes only had like 10 people in them, was Mark Cerny, one of the inventors of Marble Madness and most every famous character-based mascot game ever, as well as, I think, one of the recent PlayStations he designed. Anyway, he's a super genius and is fundamental to the success of games in the world. Paul Reiche: But we all had to take German. We had to take lots of languages at this school, and fencing. It was a strange school. And the books that they gave us were pre-World War II, all of them. So, when we were studying German, we were reading German in old German print. And when I could actually speak remote amounts of German, people would laugh because I sounded like a 80-year-old man, because I was speaking as these books taught you to speak. I don't remember any of it now. Fred, of course, remembers his German perfectly. Paul Reiche: So anyway, fonts, super important, the spacing to me matters. A lot of details, I think, go right over people's heads, but I would never get rid of printed text. Voiceover is powerful for an awful lot of people these days, the books on tape or the audio books, probably people listen to those as much as they read nowadays. But I just can't imagine having dialogue without being able to read it, because the placement on the screen, the use of fonts, colors, the speed with which you bring text on, you had to learn, actually, all about how much you can... Lee Hutchinson: That's actually my next question. Paul Reiche: Yeah. Well, should I ask you this question? What's the question, ask yourself in response. Lee Hutchinson: The question is, like in the writing I've done so far, I have been floored, literally. I mean, I didn't fall onto the floor, but I have been emotionally floored, at just how heavily the limited amount of words you can display on-screen affects not just the pacing of the sentence that the alien is reading, but the tone of the entire conversation. Unlike with a reader and a book, where the reader controls the speed with their eyes, or an audio book or narration where you are listening to something being read to you, in Ur-Quan Masters, we can, in the Ur-Quan sequel using the same system, we can feed a line of dialogue in at a time, and controlling that drip of words can become another way to build tension, or execute comedy, or delay, or force towards dramatic beats or anything else. Do you find that the chunked way dialogue is presented in Ur-Quan Masters, and will be in the sequel, affected not just the presentation of the dialogue, but the actual structure of how and what you were writing? It sort of forces you to build dramatic beats into... It forces you to assess, not just the content of your words, but their presentation, and that's unusual for an author. Paul Reiche: Well, it does force it to me, because I also have a graphics perspective on things, and layout, and how things relate to the kind of composition of the character image or the animation motion. All of that matters to me. So the answer is yes, and I found it, not a limitation, but just another creative choice. So, I really loved how, when you wrote a short sentence, your eye just didn't blink over it. It had impact. I think you may just said that, and I'm saying it again and I'm taking credit for it. Lee Hutchinson: Works for me. Paul Reiche: And then also moving the dialogue in the Zoq-Fot-Pik conversation, I remember Fred, I don't think he was super happy about doing that, because we hadn't done that, where we were popping dialogue around in different flow boxes. So, for each character string that gets printed, you have a flow box where the text goes in there and when a word that's being typed down hits the perimeter of the box, it gets moved down to another line. And Fred had actually done a lot of that in a previous job for a preprint product. But in the Zoq-Fot... Lee Hutchinson: Because we are spatial creatures. We have memory associations with spaciality, and by adding that spatial aspect of where on the screen the dialogue is, it's over here for this guy and over here for this guy, even then that spaciality enhances that instant blink-first readability of your brain, because you don't have to coordinate which one of these characters is saying that, you simply know, at a really low level, thought-fast kind of way. Paul Reiche: You know what would be funny? And we haven't thought about this or talked about it, so I'll just throw it out here, we're not exposing anything we're thinking of. And that is you meet a character who literally thinks out loud, but his species don't hear the out loud part for whatever reason. So, what he's saying to you is up here, and his internal dialogue is right below it. And you can tell him, maybe, but really you're just appreciating, "He is not at all telling me what he's thinking." [inaudible 00:55:18]. Lee Hutchinson: It could be like a species with a large mouth at the top of their head with smaller mouth, and the smaller mouth speaks at a different frequency, and it's like their inner voice mouth and they have a special word for it, but like they can't hear the frequencies. Paul Reiche: Right, no, the ones they did, they would kill each other. I just love that idea. Or you could get a telepathic thingamajig and then you could hear kind of a secondary... So, don't worry, I have this new idea. We're going to double the amount of dialogue we write, because for every piece of dialogue, when you get this little device, you hear a second string. Paul Reiche: One of the challenges that we get when we start talking about font choice and layout and all of that is the impact on people's accessibility. And this is always a fight or a challenge, which is you want to empower absolutely everybody to appreciate your work. So, whether that relates to how they see colors, or the languages that they understand, or their willingness to read in complex character definitions, complex font. And it led to me one of the topics I wanted to talk with you about actually outside of this was about, effectively, I don't think we should take translation into account, because I don't think I know how to do that, and I'm too worried about rounding the corners of what we say because we're worried that, in some language this may eventually get translated into, that the topic won't work. And we ran into this... Lee Hutchinson: For readers who may not be a hundred percent, before Paul goes on, for readers who may not be a hundred percent... For readers, I'm so used to saying readers. I say readers even out loud, like I'm writing for... Okay. For listeners who may not be a hundred percent familiar with this, what Paul's talking about is typically when you're making a video game, the dialogue and all text, any labels, anything where there's words, needs to be translatable so that you can release this game in other language markets. There would be a German version, and a French version, and a Russian version, and a Chinese version, and multiple Chinese versions, and whatever languages you want to pay to localize, it's called localization. And packaging your words up so that they are translatable, so that your words are essentially a resource that can be yanked out, twiddled around, and then shoved back into the game without changing the game is actually a tremendously complex process. Lee Hutchinson: And we did some, we're sort of designing for it with the system that Paul's made for Ur-Quan Masters II, where I believe, internally, the game refers to lines of conversation by a variable name, and then the actual line of conversation that is then summoned when you look up that variable can be in whatever localized language you want. But you run into the problem of, and I think I'm going to talk over what you were about to say, you run into the problem of jokes, idioms, a lot of these things don't translate. Paul Reiche: Yeah. We discovered that with the Japanese version, the Utwig totally didn't work in Japanese. That idea of a character who's pathetic, and hates himself, and hates everything. When we were putting out a Japanese version, the people translating said, "This isn't funny. This just makes me sad." And we were like, "Oh, whoa, that's kind of..." And then it was like, "Yeah, this isn't just me. This is cultural here. This doesn't work." And we're like, "Oh well. We're not going to rewrite all of that." And I think that if we knew a lot of languages, I can't speak for you, I don't know a lot of languages well. Lee Hutchinson: No, I know English. Paul Reiche: But I want... Lee Hutchinson: And high school German. Paul Reiche: I want to use what I do know with some level of sophistication and artistry, and if I have to worry about how will this look in Thai, I won't be able to do that. So, an example of this was I was writing something today for no particular good reason, this popped into my head. It had to do with the fox in the henhouse. And the term fox in the henhouse came up, and I was sort of laughing about it, thinking, "God, I wonder how many people know henhouses?" And then I was thinking about the Druuge, and so they were going to be saying something which was not fox in henhouse, but it had enough of the same cadence and enough of the context that one of the statements you could make is, "Is that like what we say? Fox in henhouse, where it means this and this and this?" Paul Reiche: And they basically say, "Oh, that's kind of cute. No, that isn't what it means. For us, the fox is a psychopathic murderer that we allow to wander free, and henhouse is the place where you keep your most valuable assets, including the family members that you like. And the fox in the henhouse is when you're really angry and frustrated at your competitor, it's that feeling like, "Oh, if only I could take the psychopathic murderer and let them in your henhouse." And it's a rare feeling, it's far more frequent that you actually do that." Man, the fox in the henhouse is just letting the psychopathic murderers into your competitor's houses. And it had to do... Lee Hutchinson: That's very Druuge. Paul Reiche: ... just with like, will any of this make sense? One, I don't know if it makes sense to people that read English because it's sort of a dark concept, but it's very Druugey. And honestly, we don't know exactly the role of the Druuge in the game yet. We've talked about a lot of different options, and who knows if they will have a presence that allows them to speak in that voice. But so much of what is in The Ur-Quan Masters comes from me drinking coffee and just musing and writing this stuff down. And someday, hopefully, either the Druuge or someone else will use that bizarre fox in the henhouse metaphor. Lee Hutchinson: So, let's close on... Paul Reiche: Yep. Paul, that was too weird. We have to wrap it up now, I'm sorry. Lee Hutchinson: No, it was great, but let's close now, otherwise we're going to have to do a second part right after this, with one of Arianna's questions that you said you wanted to get to, because it's an excellent question. I'm going to read this as written, and it's a long question. At a narrative design level, how do you get truly transgressive with interactive fiction? When a game's implicit structure is presented to the player at the start, you're making decisions and you don't know where they'll lead, anything can happen. How can we truly rattle someone? Is it down to story? Is it about making them question the screen or hardware in front of them, like fake-out glitching, that kind of thing? Is it making them question their own environment and the flimsy barrier between game worlds and their own world, getting into the territory of ARGs? Or is there another way to get... I think this is a fascinating question, because I have my own ideas, but as someone who has made transgressive games, how do you get transgressive in IF? Paul Reiche: First of all, kudos to my daughter, she is a PhD student in interactive fiction and she also did do voice work in the original version of The Ur-Quan Masters. But besides that, it's a good question, and I think she's trying to trap me. But what I will say is that being transgressive, or being tricky, depending on how you want to look at it, to me is sort of taking people's expectations and playing with them. And so you have to step back and dissect, "Okay, what do people expect?" They expect that they're a character, and that they make a statement, and that it's accurately transmitted to the NPC in the fantasy world, and that that character hears what you said and responds, and that you can understand their response and that, somehow, they're connected. So, let's break one of those. Let's say you make a choice and the alien hears something different. Lee Hutchinson: There is an example, I'm sorry to interrupt, there's an example that comes immediately to mind. And it's from, I don't know how long it has been or if you have played Portal 2, the sequel to Portal. Paul Reiche: Yeah. Brilliant. Lee Hutchinson: Okay, there is a moment at the very beginning of the game during the tutorial where you awaken from a coma, you've been in a coma for quite some time. And there is sort of a guide, a guide robot, that comes up and says, "Oh, you're awake. I'm so glad you're not in a coma anymore. Can you..." What does he say? It's like, "Look up at me and say the word apple." I'm horribly misremembering, I'm going to get skewered by viewers. But the robot basically says, "Look up at me and say the word apple to let me know that you don't have brain damage." And the game prompts you, "Say apple, space bar." And you press space bar and your character jumps. And Wheatley the robot is like, "Oh, okay. Well, that's good enough." Paul Reiche: Good jumping there. Lee Hutchinson: You probably don't have brain damage. Paul Reiche: Yeah. That is brilliant. I think there's other ways of doing it, and we've talked about some of them, because I think this is a great way to go. And one of the things I would reveal is that there's other things that you can put in the list of statements that you can make, that aren't just the literal statements that you're going to say to the alien. And one of the things that you and I have talked about, and I think it's okay to reveal this, is this idea of, if you're making a statement, that somehow, in parentheses or it's indicated, you're actually thinking about something. So it's a statement to yourself. So, an example would be, "Is he lying?" So you're asking yourself that question, it's internal dialogue. And that internal dialogue might lead to a whole internal conversation with yourself where you're thinking about things. So it's a way of a mechanical process of thinking, in which your character might realize something that maybe you, the player, already know, or he may jump and figure something out by the process of what's being said, and you can then after the fact go, "Oh, I see how he got there, and that was ahead of me." Or, "I never would've thought of that." Paul Reiche: So, it's effectively providing a new dimension of what is my saying something mean? And you could think of a million things, you could break the fourth wall and when the player says something, the player could actually address us. The player could address himself. So the character, the protagonist, directly addresses the player who's playing him. Or, and again... Yeah, I won't get into too much of what we're going to do, but playing with this and surprising you about, "I thought I knew what conversation was about." And then all of a sudden you're doing something kind of the same, but holy cow, it means something entirely different, and the world's bigger and different than I thought. Paul Reiche: So, I think there's probably things you can do in specific statements that people aren't expecting. But personally, I feel like it's worth, if we get transgressive, making it game mechanic-y. And by that, I mean it's not just content. Somehow, it influences the flow of the game. So, an example of that would be in the midst of a conversation, this option pops up and it says, "Raise the shields." And you're like, "Oh, okay. I guess I will." And you're essentially giving the game a verbal instruction, and now the game is responding. Now, is that much different than having a "raise the shields" button in the UI? No, but at least it's being placed in a spot. Lee Hutchinson: [inaudible 01:06:13] if it starts flashing for no reason in the middle of the conversation. Paul Reiche: Yeah. And I think one place that we did a little bit of that was when you are talking with the talking pet, with the Dynarri, and how, all of a sudden, your options are not the options you want to say, they're just like flowers. Talk about the flowers. So anyway, I hope that answers the question, Arianna. Lee Hutchinson: It does. It does, and generally, if I see a truly weird prompt show up down in the dialogue list, if there's something that really doesn't jive with what I think would be normal in that situation, that feels like a breadcrumb, that feels like, as a player, like, "Oh crap, I need to press that immediately, because something's going to happen. It's either going to be really funny, really bad, or both." Paul Reiche: I think it would be funny if there was an option there and you... This isn't funny, this is horrible. There's an option there that looks really cool, and you move your mouse over it. It's like, "Oh, I forget, what was that thing again?" And it's sort of like that moment when you have a great idea and then you go back and you look for it in your memory stack and it's just gone. You're like, yeah. You know? Anyway. Lee Hutchinson: I want to thank you for being available for this podcast, Paul, and let me close here with a question that I'm going to lift straight from Ghostbusters, and I'm going to change the name in it a little bit. How is Fwiffo, and have you seen him lately? Paul Reiche: I do. I actually talk with him on a pretty regular basis, and I spend a lot of money with expensive therapists in a related problem. But at different times over the past 30 years, he's been in debt and that caused him a bunch of problems. He, at one point, appeared out of nowhere and said, "Hi, so sorry. I broke time. Got to go, bye!" And well, for the longest time, I was trying to figure out what that meant, and could I use it in the game and yeah, ultimately we're not going to do that. But yeah, no, he is my alter ego. In fact, he's just me. All of his crazy stuff about wanting to hide in trees from monsters, you can ask anyone who's spent time with me and they will say, "Paul is way weirder." Paul Reiche: For a long time, everybody at Activision knew I was the guy who thought more about surviving the zombie apocalypse through simple activities and knee flexibility. That's a really key one. I'm sorry. Maybe zombies can run fast and there's... Lee Hutchinson: You know, listen, you told me once that... Paul Reiche: Do we want to have a separate talk about zombies, because I'm willing to. Lee Hutchinson: Well, very quickly, you told me once that one of your ambitions in life was to, in fact, learn every skill that might potentially be of use to a medieval villager. And I'm wondering if that actually is in fact tied back to zombie survival? Paul Reiche: They are related. And a lot of this goes back to both my mother and my sister. And my sister is what I would call the sweetest survivalist you've ever met, no weapons at all, no crazy right-wing philosophy. But she is well prepared for all outcomes. And I grew up in the hide under the bed from the nuclear explosion. And I often have said... Lee Hutchinson: The duck and cover days. Paul Reiche: I am kind of unprepared for modern life, because I really expected to be wandering across radioactive wasteland at this point in my life. In fact, far younger. So this is all new to me, and I was really well prepared for that. But in any event, I haven't talked to Fwiffo too much about that, but I do converse with characters. There's characters from games that I never finished that are still alive and kicking, and an example is we did game design for something called Minions when we were with Crystal Dynamics, and it ends up being a whole lot of what goes into Skylanders. And there was a character called The Wilkins in there. Lee Hutchinson: And just for listeners, this is not yellow, one-eyed Minions. This is Minions, Minions before that. Paul Reiche: Oh right, Minions. Yeah, actually, you know what? We have a design document. It's one of the most pretty design documents I've ever seen. And one of the things I'd love to do is, at some point, it's a little off the topic of The Ur-Quan Masters, but I'd love to go through it, because the (beep) make an appearance in there, believe it or not. I think they're called a slightly different name, but they're definitely like that. And you may need to bleep out (beep) again. And some of those characters, there's a particular set of characters called The Whisperers, who... God, I think that was used in a Walking Dead thing. But anyway, The Whisperers were a particular character with a particular background that I desperately want them to exist in other people's heads. So, at some point, they'll get out there. Paul Reiche: So characters, both the ones that I've come up with, ones from my favorite books, and ones from just ideas, live in my head and are using up some of the cycles, those precious cycles that I could be using for other things, are chewing them up. And when I'm driving down the road fully caffeinated, that's the best possible time. Lee Hutchinson: Excellent. All right. Well, I hope this is the first of several of these that we do. Paul Reiche: And I just wanted to say that a part of why we're doing this is because you asked us to. Lee Hutchinson: Yeah. Paul Reiche: And obviously we love to talk about this stuff, but in terms of what's valuable for the community, if it's talking about the crazy stuff that we did that didn't end up in the game, or ideas that we had, or things that we would love to do in the future, we'd love to talk about that stuff. Just let us know what you're most interested in, and we'll try to get to it. Lee Hutchinson: Absolutely. Alrighty. Well, thank you everybody for tuning in, we will be back with another one of these, maybe. Paul Reiche: Bye bye.