Articy: Please introduce yourselves and tell us about the team at at Croteam working on The Talos Principle 2
Croteam: Croteam is an independent game development company based in Zagreb, Croatia. Initially started as a garage game development team in 1992, Croteam has spent 30 years developing technology and video games for PC, Mac, Linux, PlayStation, Xbox, Nintendo, iOS, and Android, as well as various VR platforms.
Jonas: I’m Jonas, I co-wrote the original Talos Principle and was Lead Writer on Talos Principle 2, which mostly means the other two writers pushed me to the front when there were problems to solve.
Verena: I’m Verena, I’m one of the other writers who tell Jonas what to do.
Goran: I’m Goran, currently the Lead Programmer on The Talos Principle 2, worked on all the Croteam’s games since 2007, started out as a gameplay programmer. I was deeply involved with story tools for The Talos Principle.
Mladen: I’m Mladen, and I work as a gameplay programmer. I started working at Croteam during Serious Sam 4 development. My job is to make sure all game systems behave properly. I also helped our writers get the most out of our story writing tools.
Articy: The Talos Principle 2 is as a humanist story focusing on what makes a group of sentient beings a society and what it means to be part of one. Outside of the backstory from The Talos Principle, what were your sources of inspiration for the story behind this second installment?
Jonas: Like the first game, Talos 2 draws on a pretty wide variety of sources, from the Bible to the poetry of William Blake, materialist philosophy both modern and ancient, and classic science fiction. There isn’t really a single source one could point to, but an amalgamation of ideas and concepts that together form something new. What unites all of them is a belief in the value of humanity.
Articy: In addition to even more engaging puzzles, The Talos Principle 2 has players meeting different characters and facing choices in their journey. How big of an impact do player choices have on the way the story plays out?
Verena: The choices have a variety of effects on the story of the game as you play it, particularly on the other members of your expedition and their worldviews, which is important because this is a character-driven story. They also affect where the civilization you are part of ultimately ends up, so if you take your role as a citizen seriously, that may help you steer things in the direction you want.
Articy: How did you manage to keep track of all the possible branching storylines?
Jonas: Mostly by taking a lot of notes and trying to make the Articy scripting as clear and modular as possible. If the story branched drastically, that would probably have actually made it easier, but because there are so many small effects on how characters think, it wasn’t easy to keep track of. Separating things visually in Articy was helpful in this regard.
Articy: At which point in development did you decide you need to use a professional tool and what made you opt for articy:draft?
Goran: Very early in development we experimented with some in house tools for node-graph based dialogue editing in order to replace the text based approach used in the first game. While evaluating the early prototypes, we also began evaluating other industry tools and articy:draft caught our attention. After completing a few tutorials (aided with a great tutorial system) we were pretty much sold, especially because of the multi-user support (with hosting) and the very promising voice over helper plugin. At this point in time we were very busy switching to a new engine and content production pipeline so we needed all the help we could get.
Articy: How was articy:draft integrated into the game development pipeline?
Goran: One thing we really liked about articy:draft was that we could postpone the integration while allowing the writers to work on the story and also being able to play out the dialogues (even with voices) before we had the full production pipeline ready for this. Simultaneously we were developing prototypes for integration, starting with the Unreal Engine plugin provided by the articy:draft developers, but ultimately settling for a simpler custom built importer that used only the features we needed. Our custom built importer and playback modules gave us better control and error handling of the imported data that was tailored for our use cases. It also allowed us faster imports (without the need of restarting the editor). It is based on Unreal Engine’s python module so it was easy to iterate on it as well.
Mladen: Our import process was split between importing the main bulk of data from articy:draft (dialogues, variables, conditions, instructions and speakers) and importing custom templates into their own data structures in Unreal Engine. With that we had a clear separation of story content (dialogue between characters, background chatter, cinematics) and additional content, meant for deepening the world building (found documents, audio logs, textual conversations between characters). A big part of our content pipeline from articy:draft to Unreal Engine was managing voice overs. For that we used a voice over plugin provided by articy:draft developers. While it was helpful in creating text to speech previews for dialogue, we found it a bit difficult to use in the scope we needed. First problem we had was the need to claim all dialogue fragment nodes that should generate a voice over. It often happened that writers had to pause what they were doing and unclaim everything, so we could generate new voice lines. The other problem was the amount of server space the voice lines began to occupy. Over the development process of The Talos Principle 2 we modified that plugin to no longer require node claiming, or even to store voice lines on articy:draft server. Instead, we wrote new managing logic that used our version control software to handle voice lines. Due to the scale of our game, we found the concept of white listing nodes that are voiced prone to errors. Because of that, we tried a black listing concept that worked much better for our needs. We used different templates, entities and flow fragments to easily and quickly define what needs to be voiced and what doesn’t. On top of all the changes on the voice over plugin, we added automatic subtitle generation. Those subtitles, combined with text to speech generation, helped us to get a fully voiced game very early into our development cycle. And later, when we had proper voice lines recorded and ready to put into the game, we were able to do so with minimal effort. The voice over plugin helped us easily voice an entire game with over 3000 different voice lines.
Articy: What kind of impact did articy:draft have on your development process?
Goran: As I mentioned before, it freed us from having to prioritize developing tools for the writers early in development because it enabled us to develop the story right away. One thing that took getting used to was the fact that we needed a longer import process than we were accustomed to with our own engine, but that was not specific just to story content. But due to the fact that you could preview the story in articy:draft client kind of helped in that regard.
Articy: What features of articy:draft did you use the most and how?
Mladen: Obviously, our writers used a flow editor to write and script the whole story. While we initially started with using them, by the end of the project we didn’t have much use from asset handling in articy:draft, or from locations and documents editors. Templates were heavily used to distinguish between voiced and unvoiced content, and helped us define custom data used to enrich the game.
Plugin for generating and handling voice overs was of great help in voicing the entire game, and the automation it provided helped us save countless hours of manual work. We also took advantage of export customization to streamline data in our custom import script that we used to bring content from articy:draft into Unreal Engine.
Articy: If you were to give a small piece of wisdom to a new studio, what would that be?
Jonas: Consider doing something easier, like brain surgery. But if you must make games, plan ahead as much as possible and assume everything will explode anyway.
The Talos Principle 2 is available: On Playstation 5 On Xbox Series X|S On Epic Games
