Unreal for Feature

How to build Story and Character Twitter thread

Bumped across this twitter thread from Kat Jo Lewis

 

Earlier this year, I took a job as a narrative designer at a video game company. Here are three things I learned while writing video games that made me a better novelist (1/14)

1. Plot is your friend.

External conflict does not work without internal conflict. And for the literary fiction writers out there like myself: internal conflict ABSOLUTELY does not work w/o external conflict. How do you write a story with both external and internal conflict? 

 

Ask yourself two questions: Q1: What concrete thing does my character want? To test that their goal is concrete, it should fall into one of four categories: win, stop, escape, or retrieve. If it doesn’t, it’s not concrete enough and your external conflict will likely be too weak.

 

Q2: What is my character’s core misbelief? This will point to their internal need and works best if it drives their external goal. E.g. AJ wants to rob a bank (a retrieve goal) because his misbelief is that money will give him freedom.

 

An effective story would show how AJ’s misbelief is false (internal conflict) as he progresses toward his concrete goal (external conflict).   

 

2. Theme is key. You might be asking, “How do I find my character’s misbelief?” Misbelief is tied to theme. Before writing game narratives, I thought theme was something that naturally manifested in a story. I couldn’t have been more wrong. 

 

Theme drives the story’s tone, pitch, and audience. Theme is only effective if it drives your characters too. To find the misbelief, find your theme first. What lesson does the protagonist need to learn? Write down your theme, then write down the opposite. That’s the misbelief.

 

Let’s continue with the bank robbery example: Theme: Greed is a prison. Misbelief: Money gives you freedom.

 

3. Outlines improve pacing and save time in revision. If you’re a discovery writer and your process is working, feel free to keep scrolling. I used to be a discovery writer, but it did not work for me for three reasons:

 

(1) throwing out countless pages in revision felt like a waste of time, (2) that feeling made me hostile toward the revision process, and (3) improving the pacing of my novel felt tedious because I was constantly going down the wrong path before I found the right one.

 

Writing video games taught me that finding a story structure that resonated with how I understand narrative was not a useless constraint. Instead, structure gave me the freedom to be more creative and enjoy the writing process because I had a framework to make sure that:

 

(1) the story finds an effective pacing in earlier drafts and (2) the protagonist is constantly making progress toward their concrete goal (external conflict) while battling their misbelief (internal conflict).

 

There are a lot of different story structures out there to explore. I personally use the 3-Act Structure as described in Save the Cat (check out the novel version if you write prose) and the Hero Goal Sequences Paradigm from Eric Edson’s The Story Solution. Links below.

Link Dump

 Bunch of links I've been holding on to. 

Using Procreate to make an AR scene

 

An essay on different story structures throughout the world, beyond just 3 acts

Games for Change - Gamemakers trying to make games that make the world better

Game VFX Forum

Unreal Learning

The official Unreal learning site, haven't seen it in a while, so putting it here for finding later. 

 Unreal 5 Control Rig   (can animate in sequencer and bake out to animation sequence)
 

Animating in Engine  (looks like they're going after mobu)

 

 Stylized Rending in Unreal Course

 

Independent Film Making with Unreal

Getting in and out of Ragdoll

Airborn studios promo piece

Such a cool world, really wish it was a game. Think it's a promo piece funded with a grant, for Airborn studioo to level up to unreal 5 and just have a new calling card. 

Griffin Animation Academy Webinars

 Ran across some new school? I think. 

Anyway, head of it has done a ton of interviews with people. (calling them webinars.)  Was watching this one with Andrew Tan that had some good tips. Blocked in his dynamic camera with a bouncing ball, then grease pencil on top. Thinking about spacing and texture to rhythm.

Definitely going to wander through the rest of the webinars.

Legend - Dragon Ball Tale

 

 

Amazing Fan Made film

Character Design Course

 https://docs.google.com/document/d/1IgswlDEFUe2owv2XZbeFUJt8_pYLsAxfM2HX3T0-g8Q/edit


Ran across this character design for animation course. Seems pretty decent, exercises and links out to more info.

Martin Chang Game Projects

 It's feeling more and more like the next step for me is to level up my non animation side but learning how to work better inside a game engine to get motion more integrated with the world. Procedural animation and IK legs and control rig stuff.

Martin Chang has done a few projects in that direction.

And in a similar vein, a twitter thread I've been holding on to for setting up a quadruped on a slope.

Prophet animations

Game Design for empathy

 Just read an article that's a postmortem on Journey. Really interesting, talking about game and level design to promote more empathetic behavior.

Most games simulate competition, and are power fantasies. Give players guns and limited resources and they'll be thinking "who can I dominate, I'm going to be strongest". Journey has no possessions, so no resources to compete over, and no arms on characters so no agency to push others for the sake of being rude.

In Journey, they designed environments to make the player feel small and a sense of awe. They believed this vulnerability made the players more empathetic to others, and more aware of how you are stronger with a partner.

They also talked about having no way to communicate with another player, that people projected missing loved ones onto their partner, helping them to grieve. 

The really interesting question was implied: "What would a game where you were given a med kit instead of a gun be like".   Like Hacksaw Ridge as a game. Or some kind of RTS where you are building robots to rescue people from an earthquake.

Toby Olié - Puppet God

Found this cool guy Toby Olie doing awesome stuff

WorldBuilding

Found this tumblr with this great advice, pasting it here because how long will tumblr survive? (or blogs :P  )

 

 

Hey btw, if you’re doing worldbuilding on something, and you’re scared of writing ~unrealistic~ things into it out of fear that it’ll sound lazy and ripped-out-of-your-ass, but you also don’t want to do all the back-breaking research on coming up with depressingly boring, but practical and ~realistic~ solutions, have a rule:

Just give the thing two layers of explanation. One to explain the specific problem, and another one explaining the explanation. Have an example:

Plot hole 1: If the vampires can’t stand daylight, why couldn’t they just move around underground?

Solution 1: They can’t go underground, the sewer system of the city is full of giant alligators who would eat them.

Well, that’s a very quick and simple explanation, which sure opens up additional questions.

Plot hole 2: How and why the fuck are there alligators in the sewers? How do they survive, what do they eat down there when there’s no vampires?

Solution 2: The nuns of the Underground Monastery feed and take care of them as a part of their sacred duties.

It takes exactly two layers to create an illusion that every question has an answer - that it’s just turtles all the way down. And if you’re lucky, you might even find that the second question’s answer loops right back into the first one, filling up the plot hole entirely:

Plot hole 3: Who the fuck are the sewer nuns and what’s their point and purpose?

Solution 3: The sewer nuns live underground in order to feed the alligators, in order to make sure that the vampires don’t try to move around via the sewer system.

When you’re just making things up, you don’t need to have an answer for everything - just two layers is enough to create the illusion of infinite depth. Answer the question that looms behind the answer of the first question, and a normal reader won’t bother to dig around for a 3rd question.

King and The Beaver

Irradiation - short made with Unreal

Irradiation - Process from Sava Zivkovic on Vimeo.

interesting. He just threw in assets into unreal and virtually walked around to discover shots.

Film Riot Talked about the same thing basically


Times are changing, no longer need anything but a computer to make a film (if you're clever)