Gigantic

@feeltraincoop Nobody survives the exposive enchantment of the Tower of Devaedra! Your hubris will be your undoing. pic.twitter.com/VBFILFCLpZ

— House Devaedra (@HouseDevaedra) July 27, 2017

Brief

The folks at Perfect World came back and asked us to build another bot for them as part of the launch of their game Gigantic. The twist on the last bot we did? Two bots with distinct personalities that would each talk to the user in different ways based on which account the user chose to follow.

Implementation

This was our first time being provided short animations as our primary assets. Evaluating and tagging these for their various properties (“angry”, “dismissive”, etc) was surprisingly more time-consuming than doing the same for a bunch of still images. We also were technically making two separate bots that would tweet at a player, so we had to write two full sets of tweets for each bot: essentially, one set of positive templates and one set of negative templates. And we had to make sure that the templates didn’t really overlap because every user would get two tweets in a row and if it were redundant it would break the magic of the bot.

Post Mortem

This project ended up having a surprisingly long timeline -- we were commissioned by the publisher’s marketing department as part of preparations for launching the game, and our initial guidelines for writing and worldbuilding were very high level. We’re used to working with properties like Dungeons & Dragons that have decades of lore preceding the project, so it was a little intimidating to be told that we could kind of make things up as we went along! However, getting feedback and sign-off on what we’d written became (understandably!) more difficult as priorities shifted for the team actually finishing the game in time for launch in the development studio. Something to keep in mind the next time we have stakeholders in a project we’re not in direct communication with.