Finding Our Way North

Hello fine folks. It is I, the one most prone to self-indulgent waffle. That’s right, it’s Alex. It’s been a minute, but Allie and Phillip have done such a great job giving actual honest to goodness advice and sharing their experiences I thought it was about time I did the same. So….

The All Too Hospitable Hospitality

Hospitality in the UK is in a weird place right now. There’s myriad reasons for that; it’s never quite recovered from the COVID era, and industry carried by the younger generations, who are now (and quite rightly so) less willing to work the ludicrous hours for crap pay, and more than ever I think most customers have higher expectations of what they want and sometimes those can be unreasonable. There’s a smaller work force now, and people are pushed to their limits. More and more we’re seeing chains take over as wee privately owned ‘mom and pop’ shops struggle to keep up. It’s fiercely competitive and can lead to a futile approach. The ‘all things for all people’ approach.

We’ve all been in a pub or restaurant where something just doesn’t feel quite right. You look around and there’s a mismatch of just about everything. Traditional fine wines, but experimental crafty beers. Double smash burgers on a menu with lobster thermidor, or maybe it’s staff dressed to the rafters in an establishment that just makes them look out of place. As good as some of these places are, it always feels like there’s something holding them back. A case of mistaken identity.

Wings

In (the most beautiful city in all the world) Edinburgh there used to be the nerdiest ‘restaurant’ I’d ever seen. The walls were papered with pages out of comic books, all the tables downstairs had televisions and game consoles on them, there was a big projector with pews and big bean bags for cinema nights and video game tournaments, and they sold one food. Chicken wings. Though the menu was super small, the selection of sauces and rubs was massive and each of those were themed around nerdy pop culture references (Skywalker Ranch Dressing was my favourite). These folks knew exactly what they were about, and every single part and person of the place effused enthusiastically this identity, and the restaurant was always rammed. If you wanted to play Lylat Wars on the N64 (who wouldn’t?) you had to book weeks in advance. This place had a north star and everything pointed in that direction.

The North Star

If you’ve ever heard high level business people talk, invariably they’ll mention the importance of quick decisions, and if you know me you know that is not something I’ve only just learned to do. I used to so quickly get bogged down in the quagmire of ‘analysis paralysis’ as I weighed up the different pros and cons and tried to predict the various potential outcomes. This could be a plague, not just for me, but for the whole team as folks would wait for me to make design or narrative choices so that we could finish the task and move onto the next. All you fine folks that just like me, tangle yourself up in knots when you just need to move on, know exactly what that feels like, but guess what. There’s something you can do to help that.

Yes, it’s The North Star. This is something that came up during Dundev (No, we’re not going to stop talking about Dundev. It was awesome.) and though we knew we were looking for it ourselves, we didn’t have the word for it. Our North Star is “to tell meaningful stories in unconventional ways” and it has two primary functions. First, it’s something the whole team understands and internalises, it informs pretty much all the decisions we make and keeps us all moving in one direction and towards one vision. The second function is that when we communicate it externally, people understand what the core motivation of our studio is.

There’s so much information about North Stars and like all things on the internet, a lot of it is conflicting. Most of what I read (coming from a business perspective) is about communicating a value proposition to a potential customer base, and is usually quite an internal thing. It’s a metric that ‘captures a customer success moment’, ‘shows measurable growth’ and ‘creates a clear path to revenue’. Not the kind of language you might expect around an artistic endeavour, but then making video games is a business and I actually love learning this stuff.

The Briefcase Without A Handle

Our North Star doesn’t necessarily do all those things in that ‘traditional’ sense, but I think it checks the boxes in a way that’s relevant to us and that’s where the value in having one comes from. You make it matter to you. For us, it tells us what we want the player’s experience to be, that our games are going to have a symbiosis between narrative and mechanics, and that players are going to engage with that all the way through.

Having this core motivation of our studio defined has lead to much faster decisions being made, not just by me, but the whole team. We all know, at all times, which direction we’re going in.

I’ve been reading Creativity, INC by Ed Catmull (This isn’t an essay, I’m not going to reference in the Harvard style, but go look it up. It’s great.) and there’s an excellent chapter about what the team at Pixar learned after crunching on Toy Story 2. At Pixar they had two core principles; ‘Story is King’ and ‘Trust the Process’ but though those were initially well intentioned and proactive, after a while they came to mean different things to different people. ‘Trust the Process’, for example, came to mean something closer to ‘even if it isn’t working, just push through’ so the project, and more importantly people, suffered because of it.

He describes those two core principles as the tatty, old and worn handle of a briefcase. At first they encapsulated the briefcase itself and all the wonderful contents (the lessons, motivations and directions) within, but over time these concepts became meaningless or misleading. That when people would use them it was like they grabbed the handle but the briefcase was left behind without anyone knowing. He puts this a lot more eloquently and I definitely recommend reading that book.

Finding You Way North

It’s not enough just to have that North Star. You have to actively put it into practice and be reflective on it. This can be as simple or as complex as you like (though I recommend keeping it simple at first). For me, this basically boils down to whenever I make a decision I ask myself ‘does this help to tell a story, is it unconventional design and does it put these together in a meaningful way?’ So often just the action of adding that filter to a choice has lead to a quick and definitive answer. An answer I can move on from knowing it was the right decision, that isn’t followed up with anxious consternation and self-doubt or a massive redesign based on a whim.

It’s also something I keep at the forefront when I’m actually designing the game. We’re making a narrative driven life simulator that eschews a lot of the conventions tied to those games, and though I don’t design things to be unconventional just for the sake of being different, it does encourage me to approach design from a different perspective.

It’s also the same with narrative (at some point I will get into being a writer and what my process is). This week I was feeling disconnected from the story. It hadn’t been in my mind for a while, and I felt I needed to clear some of the fog. I did this by working on some development sheets for the story and I wanted to hammer out some of the major beats, so I turned to the much loved (and equally loathed) ‘Beat Sheet’. Though I see a great deal of value in writing a ‘beat sheet’ by their very nature they can become quite derivative and, when misused, make a template story. This happened to me this week.

Everything I wrote was tedious and rote. None of it felt inspired and nor did any of it excite me, but off in the distance I could feel our North Star rapping at the chamber door of my mind. So, I threw it all out and tried using a technique I’d never used before. Less than 2 hours at WilbertandSulivan (yes, I named my whiteboard. What of it?) and I had a tonne of new content, felt invigorated to write more and was firmly reconnected to the story. I made the North Star an active element in the process and I saw the results for doing so.

Your Milage May Vary

I know this isn’t for everyone and I’m certainly not telling you there’s only one way to do things but the North Star can be a powerful tool for those that engage with it. It certainly is for me.

Anyway, I think I’ve once again waffled on enough so I’ll leave you with a final bit. This cheeky wee blog we’ve been working on gets more and more traction each week, so I just wanted to say I appreciate you and thanks for following along with us.

As ever you can reach out to me in the usual noisy ways and please be cool to one another.

Pea Suit

Alex