Tavern Talk
Gentle TrollCozy and fun, with over 20 colorful fantastic characters and a D&D inspired story, Tavern Talk is full of charm, wit and humor. We were thrilled that this delightful story was made with articy:draft and so we jumped at the occasion to chat with the team and get behind the scenes. Here’s what we found out:
Articy: Please introduce yourselves and tell us about the team at Gentle Troll Entertainment working on Tavern Talk
Selima: I’m Selima Heister and I’m the Creative Lead on Tavern Talk. I’ve been a Narrative Designer at Gentle Troll for almost four years, and over the past 2 ½ years, I had the privilege of bringing Tavern Talk to life with an incredibly talented team of 15+ people.
Gentle Troll was founded in 2014 and began its journey with developing serious games for various clients. Ever since then, we have had a strong desire to create valuable and meaningful games. Serious games were a good medium to create a place for people to playfully engage with a serious topic, like dealing with the consequences of climate change (KLIM:S) or learn about the obstacles people with disabilities have to face in their daily life (The Unstoppables). However, we have always wanted to create entertainment games that carry just as much meaning.
This year, Gentle Troll had its 10th birthday and what better way to have celebrated than by publishing Tavern Talk!
Articy: Tavern Talk is a cozy visual novel about running a tavern in a D&D-inspired fantasy. How did the idea for the story originate?
Selima: It’s kind of a funny story. Markus Klamer, our Game Designer, and I were actually working on the concept of an entirely different game where we were thinking of implementing a barkeeping minigame. During that time, TavernTok (D&D- and fantasy inspired TikToks playing in a Tavern) was extremely popular and I stumbled upon the content creator “Quincy’s Tavern”. It got me thinking: Imagine a game in a fantasy setting where you play as the innkeeper and the drinks you create influence the fate of the adventurers while they’re out on their quests. In almost every TTRPG or CRPG you play as the adventurer, so we were thinking, what if we turn this trope around and you play as an NPC instead? The idea immediately resonated with everyone in the team. After a couple of brainstorming sessions, we threw together a concept to apply for prototype funding.
We chose to make it D&D aligned, because of the rising popularity of TTRPGs and to draw in the right audience for the game. Furthermore, a lot of people in our team enjoy TTRPGs and Pen&Paper.
Articy: The players encounter a huge cast of interesting characters and serve them magical drinks that can change their fate. How did you manage to keep track of so many characters’ storylines and all the different possible outcomes?
Selima: From the very beginning we were aware that we had to pay attention to not create exponential branching, so we decided to stick to a set of simple rules to keep it manageable. We defined what was important for the game: Being able to influence the outcome of a quest depending on the drink you choose and also have that influence the overarching story of Tavern Talk. Briefly, we even considered altering the quest outcomes depending on which character takes the quest and even keep that variable, but then we realized that the uniqueness of an outcome would have to suffer in order to manage the workload.
So we said: Every quest can have two outcomes, and you get a choice of which direction you want the outcome to go (e.g.: charismatic approach vs. forceful approach). While keeping a few things open, we kept it pretty linear in certain places. We mostly worked with the fold-back method of branching dialogue, meaning that instead of opening big new branches for every decision, we created sub branches. These sub-branches then would always flow back into the main branch. That way we were able to ensure the player felt the impact of their decision where it truly mattered.
To keep a good overview over the quests, storylines and characters, we worked with entities in articy:draft. Each game item is an entity that contains crucial information for the game and links back to each other.
Furthermore, we worked with several flows and dialogues, connecting them with hubs and jumps, so that we wouldn’t end up with one large dialogue flow but rather, several smaller ones. That helped us keep a good overview of the story.
Articy: At which point in development did you decide you need to use a professional tool and what made you opt for articy:draft?
Selima: We have been working in articy:draft for quite some time, even long before starting development on Tavern Talk. articy:draft has always been a great tool to easily implement dialogue into our projects, so we were very familiar with it.
We immediately knew that Tavern Talk was a game that required the complexity of a tool like articy:draft. Once everything was set up, we aimed to create an environment where the narrative team could work independently.
Articy: What kind of impact did articy:draft have on your development process?
Selima: It had a pretty big impact on our development process, since it was our goal to have as much of the features and text come from articy:draft as possible. Firstly, to make localisation easier and also, to make sure the narrative and game design team could work independently from the game engine and add content freely. So, we even set up things like music triggers or cutscenes to be triggered from within articy:draft.
Articy: What features of articy:draft did you use the most and how?
Selima: Definitely hubs and entities! We created a variety of hubs that each had different features and thus, were able to trigger a variety of special conditions at specific points in the game, like a musical track, a drink-mixing sequence or unlocking content for the journal. We chose this approach, to create as much flexibility as possible for the team when it came to implementing story bits.
Apart from that, we used entities that we could fill with information that then would be displayed in the game or define certain aspects of a feature (e.g. the stats of a drink, or talking speed of a character).
Generally, we used features and templates as much as we could. On the dialogue fragments, they helped us to set a character’s expression or be able to play SFX if needed.
And, as its common practice for choice-heavy games, we used over 400 global variables to keep track of all the player decisions 😁
Articy: If you were to give a small piece of wisdom to a new studio, what would that be?
Selima: Stay true to your game’s vision and don’t get intimidated by people’s opinions. Don’t get me wrong, feedback is important and helps improve your game, however, too many cooks spoil the broth. Do what is best for your game and not what pleases the most people. Act in the best of your beliefs and what serves your audience.
Tavern Talk is available on: Steam Nintendo Switch
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