Transcript

Aaron Nemoyten (00:40)
Kyle Holmquist, thank you for joining me on Make Games Drink Coffee.

Kyle Holmquist (00:44)
Hi, Aaron, happy to be here. Thank you.

of my experiences in writing and narrative design, but I also really love game design. I really love programming and just game development in general is something I find deeply, deeply fun and passionate about. So I kind of like to do a little bit of everything.

Aaron Nemoyten (01:02)
within writing and narrative design, do you feel like you have a niche in terms of game genre don’t know what to call it, the literary genre? In other words, know, sci-fi, fantasy, contemporary, whatever, humor. do you have a niche in those areas or do you feel like being a narrative designer, you sort of just have to understand how to do everything?

Kyle Holmquist (01:26)
Well, I mean, you definitely should understand how to do everything. I think that’s just a basic rule to have. But outside of that, I’ve done a lot of my career in horror. And I got other contracts working in horror. And Akupara Games did a lot of horror stuff as well. So I’ve done a lot of horror.

So with that a lot of kind of adventure stuff a lot of really deep character stuff a lot of player psychology And a lot of pacing and those things to me I think are really really amazing things that that can go really anywhere with storytelling that I’m really glad that horror kind of honed my skills on because there are certain things that that you

like have to do really well in horror otherwise it comes off super dumb. And that’s important, you know? And it really kind of taught me to respect the player experience as much as possible. That’s something that as I grow more as a developer is something that I’m working more on. Writing is an interesting thing.

in game development because you’re trying to tell a story but at the same time what really matters is the the story that the player is experiencing not what they’re being told but the story that then they’re gonna go tell other people about the game the story that they remember in their mind about playing the game and so often that that’s not the words that you use

as a writer. It’s the tone that you’ve conveyed. It’s the experience you’ve provided. It’s the monsters. It’s the theme, the philosophy. You know, it’s that and that’s honestly what I really love about writing a narrative design. I do a bit of writing outside of, know, do a bit of prose writing, but it’s completely different. You are 100 % tailoring what the

the audience, what your reader is experiencing and getting out of your story. But with games, have to just, you have to create something that you think is unbelievably cool and, you know, hopefully has no holes in it and is exciting and unique and hope that when people are spending time in that, they will, they will feel the same way because

It’s really easy when you have your own control inside of a game, especially a horror game or a game that’s supposed to be serious, to not feel serious. And so I think it’s really a tough balancing act, but a fun one. And it really forces you to create a high level of immersion to really care about every single moment and second in your game as well.

love horror, but I love all genres of games, truly.

Aaron Nemoyten (04:44)
Nice. So I’m going to follow up on that. What do you think of the current state of what’s popular and getting attention in horror games? you know, specifically one of the things I’m thinking about is the trend of the sort of co-op horror.

but where horror is like kind of in quotes because it’s also silly.

Kyle Holmquist (05:04)
Well, think that there’s, I mean, it’s kind of like there’s a, horror has many.

many aspects and you’ve got the very serious, extremely gruesome, really realistic horror and then you’ve got stuff that are jump scares that are meant in some ways to be fun and excite the nervous system. I would argue that the experiences that you’re talking about that are kind of fun and those are just digital versions of are, haunted houses.

Aaron Nemoyten (05:34)
Yeah.

Kyle Holmquist (05:35)
And they’re super fun and they’re really entertaining. I’ve played some, what is it, what’s the paranormal game where you’re in first person,

phasmophobia.

Aaron Nemoyten (05:47)
Phasmophobia.

Yeah, I knew that’s exactly what yeah, okay. I knew what game you were talking about, but I couldn’t remember the name.

Kyle Holmquist (05:50)
That game is…

terrifying. Absolutely terrifying. They did such a good job with the design, but at the same time it’s really really fun because you’re playing with your friends and there’s this kind of almost streaming element to it and it’s like, you know, like I’m not getting hurt that badly, you know, but then you look at a game like Dead by Daylight and Dead by Daylight, although also fun,

It’s more serious, way more serious, unless it’s a different kind of terror, because once you’re dead in that game, you just kind of have to watch and wait. it’s just, it’s interesting. But then you have games like Dead Space, which, I mean, that’s a single player experience.

You know, like that’s scary. You’ve got your lights off. You’re by yourself. That’s engineered to scare you. But anything that you’ve created that is multiplayer, I think you’re guaranteed to have a level of, fun and comedy to it. You can’t, you can’t help it. You know, like it reminds me of watching The Exorcist with my friend. First time I ever watched it. Most hilarious movie I’ve ever seen in my life. And then I watched it alone.

And that movie is really, really scary. It’s my favorite horror movie. And it does kind of remind me of the duality of horrors that you can… I watched, know, Exorcist was a multiplayer experience for me. Like my friend had seen it. He was like joking about all the insane nasty stuff that we were watching. And it wasn’t a scary experience for me when I was 14 watching it. But now that I watched that movie, if I watch that movie as an adult, I’m like,

But it’s great, I love it. It’s just so good when the Pazuzu snaps up on the screen and you’re like, god, that face. It’s just great. So I think that the experience that you’re trying to define in horror can have many aspects. Also, some of the games that I worked on were horror comedy games.

Aaron Nemoyten (07:35)
You

Kyle Holmquist (08:00)
you know, I think that they kind of needed to be horror comedy because some of the content that we were talking about in terms of the actual story were messed up. And so I think it helped kind of alleviate some of that stuff to have that. So, I don’t know.

I love horror because it has such a humongous range of what it is. It can be paranormal, can be silly, it can be real life, you know, and it’s a cool genre.

Aaron Nemoyten (08:33)
you seen weapons?

Kyle Holmquist (08:35)
I have not, my partner is like, we need to watch weapons, it’s on my list to watch. I really, I really wanna watch it, but I have not yet seen it. I don’t know anything about it either, other than the name.

Aaron Nemoyten (08:47)
Have you seen Barbarian? so same director as weapons.

Kyle Holmquist (08:48)
I have not.

Aaron Nemoyten (08:50)
But yeah, I will say, I mean, we can’t since you haven’t seen it, we can’t really like talk about it. But I will say the idea that horror can encompass this range of emotions. He really gets with both of those movies because they have moments that are very scary and they have moments that are. Deliberately so ridiculous that you will laugh.

And they’re both an absolute ride. So I think you will really enjoy them.

Kyle Holmquist (09:17)
That sounds lovely to me. Yeah, I, that, reminds me actually, when I was, at Netmarble, I was watching some Joon and I was watching like, the, parasite, I think, or whatever the hosts or what, I can’t remember what it’s called.

Aaron Nemoyten (09:33)
The host is the one with the family fighting a monster together. Yeah.

Kyle Holmquist (09:36)
Yes, that’s the one I watched and there

was really weird moments in that movie where it’s like this is obviously meant to be a horror movie But there were some really weird moment moments where I was like what? Why did they have a moment of comedy right here where they had it? I you know from a western perspective. I was like I understand Having humor in order to release tension, but it’s usually placed in specific points

And this was placed like in the middle of an action scene essentially. And I was like, that was really strange to me. So I asked one of my colleagues, my coworkers, one of the translators, and I was like, what is up with that? Like that was a really interesting thing. And he explained to me that in Korean horror, like they feel that if there is not something that is breaking that tension, it’s not good. So it’s actually like a, from what he explained to me, a cultural thing, apparently.

And so I found that to be very interesting because I don’t feel like most Americans are film literate enough to have a conversation where they’d be like, yeah, know, like this is a rule inside of this particular kind of genre. And it’s almost like something that is discussed or well known.

in Korean film culture or just general culture, which I found really fascinating as

Aaron Nemoyten (11:49)
I think the interesting thing about literacy in regards to film conventions, language tropes, etc. is that people that watch a lot of stuff are literate, but subconsciously. And, you know, it’s my one of my favorite quotes that explains this is from the Red Letter Media. Plinkett Star Wars reviews, which is

You didn’t notice, but your brain did. And I think that’s a great way to put it, where if you’re enjoying something, you’re not enjoying something, or you like feel like, you know, it’s going to happen. A lot of this stuff is subconscious, but you’re pattern matching. And when stuff is not happening in the way you like, you’re, you’re also missing that. And your, your brain that’s trying to pattern match is dissatisfied. And you may not know why, because it’s subconscious, but it’s still a thing that’s happened.

Kyle Holmquist (12:43)
is the crux of being a good game designer or a good writer or a good whatever you are creative person there are things that we do that that people come to expect and and you know a lot of people like I kind of tell people and I feel like it’s the same for a lot of people in game in games or any creative approach like

You know you’ve done a good job when no one has complained about your work. Like they might not, I don’t necessarily need people to praise it. You don’t even know, if you haven’t even noticed that I was there, you don’t even think about it. That I think is an interesting touch of writing a narrative design and connecting.

connecting story to gameplay and making players experience a story and experience something and that’s something that I’ve really been thinking a lot about and really trying to figure out from a narrative game design development perspective like how do I facilitate the player experience the player like them coming away

and being, you know, feeling like they’ve just had an amazing experience. And it’s really fun to analyze games from that perspective. um, and, and…

be less about the hardcore, the mechanics, and less about the seriousness of presenting a linear story, and more about how are all these little elements working together in order to create a magical whole? And I think that that is the most important thing we can do as designers and developers, is really think of…

of the player experience and understand those patterns that they’re looking for. And for instance, when I’m like back to Helldivers, that game is most fun when I have gotten out of a match and it is like, man, that’s one of the hardest things I’ve ever done in my life. Like.

that was insane. I cannot believe we survived that. Like that was a grueling, in some ways awful experience, but scraping through it and getting through it like it just

That is the gameplay experience of that game and that’s what you talk about at the end. You’re like, just like, there’s so many monsters and you’re shooting at them. You’re throwing all sorts of stratagems and it’s like, it’s not a kind of gameplay experience that I ever would if somebody was like, hey, would you like to play this kind of game? And they explained that to me. I’d be like, get that away from me. But sitting down and playing it is a different experience and I love it.

Aaron Nemoyten (15:40)
You

Kyle Holmquist (15:44)
it really strikes an amazing balance and

You know, they they really have a large number of difficulties actually, which I think really helps with that So the hell divers Experience it’s really fun to talk about from a game design perspective because yeah They’ve got the three different factions and each different faction plays differently and so they Have their own level of difficulty depending on like the stuff that you have or whatever and then also because they have like

nine or ten different difficulties, each of those gradations isn’t such a huge step away from each other. So you can really kind of fine-tune the experience you want to have. And on top of that, every time you’re choosing missions, you can choose either a

10 minute mission or a 12 minute mission maybe a 20 minute mission or a 40 minute mission and those are the amounts and they give you a time limit that you have to finish the match which is also a good estimate for how long you’re gonna be playing you might finish earlier but i think that that’s amazing as an adult you know you’re like i only have 12 minutes to play again i can jump on a helldivers match right now and murder some

Aaron Nemoyten (17:06)
I was just thinking

that.

Kyle Holmquist (17:07)
automatons it’s it’s really amazing and it’s a it’s it’s a cool it’s a cool game if you haven’t played it I’ve been gushing about it it’s all I’ve been playing lately it’s so good

Aaron Nemoyten (17:21)
I I definitely get into a state sometimes where I’m only playing one game and it’s not the newest or the best. It’s just like the thing that I know that I can comfortably just sit down and start playing because I don’t have the mental bandwidth to do anything else. I do want to mention just at like a personal level in regards to your note that like you’ve done your job if people don’t think about it.

The first actual industry job I had was working on cutscenes in the Madagascar game. So this is the tie-in to the movie that came out in 2005, I believe, or maybe it was 2006. But they wanted to hire a junior.

person to work on the cut scenes. And my programming experience at that point was like making websites with HTML because this was before like people were using CSS even. So I was like, well, I’ve taken film classes at community college and I can build a website. So therefore I’m qualified for this job. Anyway, somehow I got it. It’s not the point of the story, but after I was there, right, I was there on a six month contract and then I went back to school.

Kyle Holmquist (18:12)
Nice.

Aaron Nemoyten (18:30)
Afterwards I went back and I watched my cutscenes that I had been working on all that time and I thought man These are so long. These are too long. They’re too long people are gonna complain about them because they’re too long and they’re interrupting the gameplay and nobody did and Years later when I posted my You know cutscene reel on YouTube. I got some comments from people. They’re like I played this as a kid I loved it blah blah. Thank you for working on it, and I’ve occasionally replied and asked them like hey

I always worried that the cut scenes were too long and they’re like, I never noticed. I guess, you know, I guess the job was done because nobody ever mentioned it. And that means they’re entertaining enough or I don’t know, I hit the right notes somehow in the way that they were made that the length of them didn’t bother people. it’s something that I’ve thought about a lot in terms of

something that I worry about that nobody noticed. And I people that make games, we’re probably in that zone a lot.

Kyle Holmquist (19:31)
Yes, I think that that’s one of the human conditions that we talk about all the time, you know, it’s always like, my hair doesn’t look perfect. My outfit looks like crap. Like people are way too much thinking about that their own hair looks like crap and that their outfit isn’t what they want to really think about it. But from a player perspective, yeah, like.

It’s really tough when you’re, as a developer, you’re working on something and you see something that is to you just a huge glaring error and you’re like, well, okay, but other people really just don’t notice the same things that we do.

Aaron Nemoyten (20:08)
So you are not the first writer slash narrative designer that I’ve talked to for the podcast. The episode that came out today, actually, it’s Sahil Bajaj who has a bunch of experience doing writing and narrative design.

We talked about the idea that a lot of people, even game developers, don’t really fully understand what it takes to do that job specifically for games. And that they often sort of feel like because everyone can write in a general sense that anyone can write a video game. I assume you do not believe that. And so my question to you is what do people, including other game developers, get wrong about writing a narrative design for video games?

Kyle Holmquist (20:53)
Hmm, that’s a really interesting question.

I’ve been really lucky to work with amazing developers who kind of let me do my thing. My experience of the issue of the process comes more when working with clients. I think that that’s everybody’s experience working with clients. But I think that, you know, it’s a good…

use case in this scenario because clients, you know, many, many clients who work on games and want to make a story based game have an interest in, in writing and doing the writing and stuff like that. And the problem is they don’t understand how to create a story that is at one time linear, but

at the same time it’s kinda not linear.

game development storytelling in my personal experience. You know, you are creating a story with continuity and stuff like that, but you also can’t create something that’s overly complex or that is, you know, that big of a mystery requires too much learning, too much player attention, too much knowledge. It has to be

pretty simple. It has to be a little bit more cut and dry than people realize. have to, you know, have pretty defined heroes, enemies, you know, and allies because most people are not paying that much attention to the story. And, you know, also there is a thing where

the cognitive capacity is super important. And that’s why when we see games these days that are very, very narrative heavy, like The Last of Us or like the God of War series games, which are all amazing, but they are not attempting to tell the story that much.

through the gameplay and what you’re doing. They are using cutscenes and you’re going between cutscene and action and gameplay. And that’s because of cognitive capacity. When you’re doing something, your brain literally cannot pay attention to…

the story aspects to other things. You’re fighting monsters and all of your attention is on that. So you’re not listening to the piece of dialogue. You’re not caring about the storytelling that’s being chosen there. it’s it and bringing that back to the lack of linearity is because although games are and many games are a linear storytelling medium.

in a different respect from writing or movies, the player is not necessarily interacting with that story in a fully linear fashion. They might go away, they might be paying attention to something else, which in the minds of someone, the player experience, that is the story that they are doing, right? So

the you know that’s something that I think that a lot of even narrative designers it’s something that even I didn’t do enough as a younger narrative designer and something that I’m really growing to try and learn more of as I’ve kind of talked about well I’ve been chatting about this is the player experience what is

the player experience. What is the story that they’re being told and they perceiving it? And that there are, I think, a lot more ways to provide story than just by shoving a cutscene in someone’s face.

Aaron Nemoyten (24:59)
So I always like to ask people about their more unusual hobbies and interests and something that you have listed, I think in your LinkedIn even, is that you are a hobbyist blacksmith. So tell me about that.

Kyle Holmquist (25:10)
Yes.

Well, so yeah, I, during COVID, I was, I don’t know, sitting around watching television or something. I was watching a show called Forged in Fire and they make, they make knives and weapons from, from history. And I was like, that looks cool. That looks fun. I’d always been interested in, you know, like I’m a giant nerd.

So, I mean, who doesn’t, who’s not, who among us is not interested in knights and armor and stuff like that? And so I was like, oh, let me go take a class. There was a, there’s a little blacksmithing school in the LA area called Adams Forge. And so was like, oh, let me go take a class. And I fell in love with it. It’s exactly what I’ve always wanted out of a hobby, which is,

I get to create stuff and I get some exercise at the same time. I like staying in shape. I hate going to the gym. It feels like a waste of time. It feels so vain and kind of like, what am I doing here? Like I’m bored. So.

Blacksmithing is just incredibly amazing and it has enriched my life in a variety of different ways in terms of the people I’ve met.

Kyle Holmquist (26:32)
And it’s an amazing hobby. It connects you to thousands of years of human history, and it teaches you about many things. It makes you look at the world differently, and the people who do it are all really, really cool.

people because it’s like, what’s your hobby? Like, I’m going to go work really hard in the hot, like to bang out some metal and make some stuff. And it’s hot and it’s dirty. And it’s very empowering because I’ve learned to weld. And it’s just taught me that my world is editable. You know, I’m not.

requisitioned to only what I can purchase in the store or if something breaks, I’m S.O.L. like I can, I can fix things. I can edit them. I can make things if, you know, it, was thinking about purchasing some little piece of furniture, like some little storage piece of furniture and thinking, Hey, it would be nice if it had some hooks on there for some other stuff. And it’s like, I can drill holes in it.

I’m an adult, like I know how to do this. And I feel like before I started blacksmithing, I never really would have thought to do that. You know, I never would have been like, like, you know, so it’s, it’s provided kind of an engineering kind of mindset to my life, which, I truly love. And I encourage anyone to do it. I actually, I actually, so I fell in love with blacksmithing so much in the organization that taught me they’re a nonprofit organization.

And so now I teach blacksmithing with them on a monthly basis. So that’s really fun and has brought another amazing aspect to my life because teaching is its own skill and its own fun, amazing thing. I get to pass on this thing that I learned that I find empowering and pass it on to other people. And I get to continue this, this…

multi-thousand year journey of keeping blacksmithing alive for humanity, which I think is really special.

Aaron Nemoyten (28:53)
Kyle Homequist, thank you so much for being a guest on Make Games Drink Coffee. This has been a really cool conversation and I hope that whoever listened got to learn a lot about narrative design and game design and that kind of thing.

Kyle Holmquist (29:04)
Thank you, Aaron. It was an absolute pleasure. Really loved our chat.