Tanya X. Short & Rob Auten

We're all about ARGs and procedural generation on this week's discussion with Tanya (designer on Age of Conan, Dungeons of Fayte, The Secret World, Shattered Planet and Moon Hunters) and Rob (writer on ALFA-ARKIV, Gears of War: Judgment, The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, Playmation, and Battlefield Hardline). Our sprawling conversation includes chatbots, transmedia narratives, creating mythologies, binary morality systems, pacing in a procedurally generated game, why haven't we moved past cutscenes in games, how procedural and systemic gameplay affects development and writing, and games based on information retrieval.

Our Guests on the Internet

Tanya's Website and Twitter

Rob's Twitter

Stuff We Talked About

Moon Hunters on Steam

ALFA-ARKIV app

itch.io

Chatscript

Versu

The Fake 'Terrorist' Conspiracy Game That Fooled People For Years by Patricia Hernandez

GDC Talk: AI-driven Dynamic Dialog through Fuzzy Pattern Matching by Elan Ruskin

Our theme music was composed by 2Mello, and our logo was created by Lily Nishita.