In this episode, host Kalie Moore sits down with James Nicholls, Studio Director at Scriptic, to explore one of the most fascinating intersections emerging in entertainment today: true crime, interactive storytelling, streaming platforms, and AI-powered production. Scriptic’s breakout title, Scriptic: Crime Stories, became one of the top-performing games in Netflix Games history by turning players into detectives investigating crimes through phones, voice notes, chats, and digital evidence. James breaks down how the studio built a new category they call “narrative play,” where stories come first and gameplay is designed to feel invisible, intuitive, and accessible to audiences far beyond traditional gamers.
They also dive into why true crime became the perfect genre to unlock mass-market interactive storytelling, how Scriptic’s TikTok strategy generated over 100 million views, and why platforms like YouTube Playables and streaming-first gaming represent a major shift in distribution. Along the way, James shares how Scriptic uses AI across its production pipeline without sacrificing human storytelling craft, and how the future of entertainment may blur the line between watching a prestige drama and stepping inside it yourself.
We’d also like to thank Dive for making this episode possible! With its fully managed analytics and LiveOps platform built for game studios, 95% of their clients grow revenue in one year. All of that without having to hire an in-house data team. Learn more here: https://www.dive.games/scale/.
This transcript is machine-generated, and we apologize for any errors.
Kalie: Welcome to the Naavik Gaming Podcast. I'm your host, Kalie Moore. Today's episode sits at one of the most interesting crossroads in entertainment right now, the collision of true crime, interactive storytelling, and AI.
And if you tuned into my last episode with Julia, the CEO of Dorian, you know, like I, like the rest of the world, am obsessed by micro dramas. Micro dramas are on track to be a $26 billion category outside of China by 2030. And true crime remains one of the most durable content genres in entertainment, and playable content is finally getting native distribution on platforms like Netflix and YouTube.
Sitting at the intersection of all three of these topics is Scriptic. Scriptic is a London-based BAFTA-nominated studio building what they call narrative play, phone-first, live action, interactive dramas where you investigate crimes through the victim's phone. Their breakout title, Scriptic Crime Stories, became one of the top performing games in the history of Netflix games, with over seven million downloads, more than 100 million TikTok views, and a top 10 ranking on Netflix games.
They've raised over nine million, with a16z recently naming them as one of the few studios shaping the future of interactive storytelling in the AI era, in the AI era. But what makes Scriptic unusual is what they've done since that breakout game. Since 2025, Scriptic has focused on prestige, cross-platform narrative games targeting streaming platforms, console, and PC, all while retaining their mobile expertise.
Their 2025 release, Urgent Cases, launched on YouTube Playables with a single build that dynamically scales from a phone inside the YouTube app all the way to full desktop browser. Most studios pick a platform and optimize for it, but Scriptic is doing the opposite. They're betting on a future of narrative play living across every screen at once.
My guest today is James Nicholls, who's the studio director at Scriptic. James has 25 years at studios from Codemasters to King and Natural Motion, and he now runs the day-to-day operations and product strategy at Scriptic. Today, we're gonna talk about what it actually takes to build an interactive drama for a mass market audience, why true crime is the genre that cracked this all open, what the YouTube Playables bet says about the future of distribution, and how Scriptic is using AI across the production stack, but without losing what makes their stories feel very human.
James, welcome to the podcast.
James: Lovely to be here, yeah. Thanks for having me.
Kalie: Of course. All right, let's dive in, because I have a lot of questions for you today. So, through your career, you've worked across mobile, PC, console, handheld, and now streaming and web. What made Scriptic the next move after 25 years across the companies that I mentioned?
What did you see here that you weren't seeing anywhere else?
James: Yeah, great question. I mean, it was really the, the type of, game and p- playable drama that Scripted were making was really exciting. I, I think the thing that I've kind of grown towards during my career is I wanna make games that reach huge audiences.
I don't wanna kinda make, you know, sort of niche things that only hit to a certain audience, and what the Scripted are trying to do is make playable dramas that, like, literally anyone can play really. So, it will start to kind of hint at why going to any platform possible makes sense as well. But yeah, I, you know, spoke with Ben and Hull, the co-founders at the beginning, was j- just really blown away with what they were trying to do and how they were trying to build these, stories that, like, anyone could pick up and play if they knew how to use a smartphone, basically.
And, and yeah, just really appealed the idea of being able to kind of shape, you know, how we work but also the creative and having a little bit of a say across everything really and, and getting us to, to try and sort of develop this, this new type of medium that we're building and sort of bring it to as many people as possible.
Kalie: Sc- Scriptic describes itself as sitting at the cross point between games and shows. And for people hearing about the studio for the first time, can you walk me through what narrative play actually means? And, like, where does this sit relative to a traditional mobile game, a Netflix limited series, or a micro drama platform?
How does this all fit together?
James: Yeah, it's a really good question, and it's sort of really central to what we do. So, we, we, we kind of want our stories to be the thing, right? It, it, everything starts with a really, really fantastic narrative. That, that's the through line for everything. And then we want everybody, you know, who would be interested in that narrative to be, to be able to engage with it and feel like they're shaping it.
So, the idea is that you, as, as a player, you feel like you've ended up inside your own kind of HBO miniseries or your own HBO drama or something like that. That's the feeling we wanna create. So, it's not about kind of hardcore RPG branching stats and that kind of thing. It should be really, really kind of light and easy to just go in and, and shape what it's doing.
And then the, the things you're interacting with are the things you'd expect to be doing. But it, it just changes from a, like a, if you're watching a TV show and you're, you're kind of a spectator looking in, it, it draws you into that feeling of you're actually inside the drama and you're, you're getting just enough ability to kinda shape the outcomes of that to feel that you're actually involved with it.
But it's not like one of these things where our players are, they're almost kind of gaming the system. They're always trying to, like, microanalyze what will this choice mean in terms of what score I'll get or what, you know, unlock I will receive if I go down this route. So, we wanna keep players in that place basically where they're just going with the flow.
They're just playing the, the story. They're just experiencing it. But there's enough cause and effect in there that it actually reflects your choices. It's not just a passive thing that's just bubbling along. You actually see the impact of what you did reflect within the narrative. It's really, really subtle.
It's, something we spent ages discussing and debating. We tailor it slightly depending on which platform it is. So, if it was kind of, you know, an absolutely mass market platform, it would be very, very light. If we're pushing it something towards PC, it would be slightly more challenging. But, you know, it's still in that same space of basically the narrative comes first and we're trying to get players to feel like they're just inside the narrative and shaping it as they go.
Kalie: Can you tell me a little bit about the demographics of the type of people who play your games?
James: Yeah, so we, we've done really well to hit what, you know, we kind of line up really well with, like, a true crime audience. So certainly for mobile it's been skewed female, and it's been kind of, like, gamers in their kind of, like, sort of around the s- middle of the bell curve, would be around sort of 35-ish.
So, it's, it's a, it's much more close to, like, a casual games audience that we've, we've hit in the past. Obviously that changes sometimes if we hit different platforms, but I think our strength is we're very good at targeting players that maybe don't consider themselves traditional gamers, but we can create something which they feel is, "Okay, cool, yeah, that's something I'd wanna play and, and get involved with."
And so that's, that's where we've lined up. And certainly for the, the, the stuff we did on mobile, it was kind of female skewed, and it was kind of, you know, it's a mid-30s kind of skew, so really interesting demographics to be able to get to.
Kalie: Yeah. That's, that's funny. I, I, in a couple of my last episodes, both with the Dorian founder and Fusebox Games, they also target… Their, their audience may be skewed slightly younger, but they also target this audience, and to me it's always so interesting. I am, am in the women 35 age group, and every single woman I know plays a mobile game on her phone, at least one. They're really excited about it, and not one woman I know would consider herself a gamer, which is so wild to me.
It's such a huge demographic of people who are not just playing games, but, like, actually spending a lot of money in games, but don't think of themselves as gamers. Super interesting.
James: Exactly. And, and I, I've been kind of in games long enough for me that's really exciting. I can remember kind of how excited people got when games like SingStar on the PlayStation started to kind of nudge out beyond the kind of core gaming demographic and other people started playing games.
And, and, you know, the work I did at, at King was like this, you know, being able to work on games like kinda Candy Crush and Farm Heroes and stuff like that, where you, you actually saw, you know, regular people playing, playing the game. They wouldn't consider themselves gamers, but they, they get huge, you know, value and enjoyment out of these, these experiences.
And yeah, that, that's what really excites me really, the idea that games has got to that point where y- it, it can be for everybody. That it, the, the things that make a game work brilliantly are pretty universal. Then, then it's about finding the right, you know, style of that, the right application of that for the audience.
But yeah, the, the most exciting thing for me is seeing, like, big numbers of players playing games and people that maybe don't traditionally consider themselves gamers getting value from what you've made. That's, that's the, the best bit of games making for me.
Kalie: Absolutely. Okay, so I wanna move o- on a little bit.
So, your CEO, and I know things have changed slightly since this comment, so your CEO said, I wanna say a couple years ago, that the goal has, was to become the Roblox of narrative, which is a really big ambition. How do you translate that vision to day-to-day product, and also how has that changed since you've expanded to different platforms?
James: Yeah, absolutely. So, the, yeah, the focus for the mobile platform we built out was very much pushing in that direction. So, what we were trying to build for our mobile platform was a, a, a free-to-play platform with lots and lots and lots of small stories on it. And we were building towards getting kind of user-generated content on there as well, and that's where that, that kind of framing comes from.
So, the idea being that you could both, you know, consume premium stuff that we've made, but also kind of play things that other, other people that were fans of that audience have made as well. It's a really, really ambitious goal. Since early 2025, we've been focused on kind of more of like prestige kind of narratives.
So, we're going for more of like a, a premium quality narrative, and we're targeting, say, streaming platforms, PC, console, mobile kind of, and, and very kind of like, you know, single bespoke stories really done to a higher standard. I think we feel that's like, you know, where our strength is, and we're, we're kind of pushing in that direction now.
And yeah, we're just starting-- you're starting to see some of those, pieces start to come through now. There's little kind of tidbits of some of the things we're working on. We've put like, you know, YouTube Playables game live to, to start to explore what your sort of streaming first games might mean for us and how that would work, and we're, we're really accelerating now in that direction.
Kalie: Great. I-- we'll get a little bit more into the platform breakdown and layer thinking, but first I wanna talk about true crime as a through line. So, I, I am a true crime fan. I've been listening to My Favorite Murder podcast since it launched 10 years ago. And as you know, I don't know if all the other viewers are avid, but true crime is one of the most durable content categories in modern media, from the podcast that I listen to, to Netflix documentary, to TikTok deep dives.
Why does this genre work so well for interactive drama, and what does this interactivity unlock that a documentary can't?
James: Yeah, it's a great question. I mean, we, we spent a really long time studying this and sort of we, we did a lot of kind of interviews and surveys, people that were in-into true crime as well, and, and really trying to understand it.
I think there's probably two bits to it. There's probably the true crime itself and why that's kinda durable and exciting, and why does it work for games. I think for-- I think true crime as a genre, it's got that really kind of interesting, accessible kind of idea about it, right? There's, there's a, a fairly good and a bad framing.
Normally, you're trying to find out what, you know, somebody did that was really bad and how that happened and, you know, what the outcome was. There's a very human connection with the, the story and understanding what, what happened there and trying to get to the bottom of the mystery. I think for games that then set, sets you up really nicely as a player.
You're in a position of, say, being a police detective. You're on the side of good. You're trying to solve the case. You're trying to solve a puzzle and bring that together. So, it really sets us up really nicely for, for games as well. I think the, there's flavors of true crime obviously as well, that you can go really, really serious, very kind of artistic end of the spectrum.
It can be very kind of pulpy and very casual as well. There's quite a lot of space to play in there. And then what's interesting, we, we did play around with some other genres as well early on in our, in our kinda free-to-play platform. We looked at kinda some horror things. We looked at some romance novels and that kinda thing.
But true crime, w- w- it made the best stories for us, the, the things we could tell. We were really kind of excited about telling that type of story, and we felt we did that really well. And it just seemed to have that kind of, level of hook and engagement with players that, that others didn't quite, quite capture.
And for us, it was just the sweet spot of all the things we did. And then obviously the type of game we then made, we've, we've created gameplay where you're kind of put in a position of maybe reviewing evidence. So maybe you're getting to look at somebody's phone and, like, what happened to them before a crime got committed or after a crime was committed to them.
And you're getting to go through basically evidence that's on there. So, it's like this really perfect fit for kinda it's basically like digital forensics that you're doing in the game, and it fits the, the platform's absolutely perfect as well. So, there's a, there's a few things kind of lining up there to make true crime games and narrative work really well.
But, you know, for us, it's, it's been the sweet spot, and it's the, the area that we're really pushing into now is true crime and then, you know, trying to bring it to as many screens as we can.
Kalie: And I know I mentioned this in the intro, but Scriptic: Crime Stories became one of the top performing titles in Netflix games history, seven million downloads, top 10 game, 100 million TikTok views.
That kind of breakout on a single platform is, you know, what a lot of studios spend a decade chasing. From the inside, what... I'd love to hear more about the formula and what drove it. I, I, I'm pretty sure it's a mix of the IP, the format, the platform fit, and of course, the moment. I feel like we have reached maybe peak true crime, maybe it's coming.
And I also want to know about how, how much the success on Netflix games shapes the confidence that that format could travel to different platforms.
James: Yeah, great question. I mean, I think for Netflix games, there was, there was a moment of timing where we joined Netflix games and we, we, we just really went for that platform and we, and really created an original experience for Netflix games.
So there, there's quite a few games where Netflix were on that kind of style of gaming and platform where they were licensed games, they were moved over to Netflix games from another platform or something like that. So, they weren't kind of necessarily, you know, completely made for that. And yet we've made this experience, I mean, building what we've just been talking about, the audience and, you know, the kind of line-up for that audience.
I mean, if you've got a bunch of Netflix subscribers getting, you know, messages that these games are available and so on, it's a really great audience line-up there. So I think if you're gonna get a kind of proof of the thesis of what Netflix were pushing at the time, that people in our subscriber base will want to leap over and play games, that was a pretty, you know, pretty good fit, I think, at the time, and probably backed up by the numbers there.
And then the type of thing we made wasn't just, you know, kind of a throwaway experience. These were really, really high quality stories. They were really resonant. They were really kind of sort of capturing a zeitgeist feeling at that moment of time of what those stories were about. And that, that, you know, maybe people will give it a try, but they're not gonna play all the way to the end and then play the second episode and that sort of thing, unless they're really actually enjoying it.
So, we, we obviously connected really well there. And obviously for Scriptic, that allowed us to hone our craft, to try things out that worked and didn't work, to learn about tutorials and pacing and what kind of branching works, and even some of the technical stuff behind the scenes of how to build these kind of stories.
And then we, we had the opportunity then to start to experiment with, you know, out on a free-to-play platform, try loads of different things and push things really far and try advertising our games. I think the TikTok story is incredibly interesting in terms of like what, what things cut through. I mean, the, the huge numbers that we were able to do were very much sort of specific stories and things like our, our Dispatcher series that we had on the, on the free-to-play platform, for example.
They, they put you in a position where you are kind of like, you're responding in the moment to, you know, something that's happening to you. You're literally put on the spot. You are, you know, having to make a call of like, you know, what to do with somebody who's on the line and making a call. And putting those into TikTok videos went really, really viral.
You know, real huge numbers, tens of millions of some of the individual videos because they created a scenario where someone was like, "Oh my goodness, this is, yeah, really interesting," or it's really, could this be real? Is this really happening? And people talking about this online. And it's obviously kind of- It kinda shows that that premise, that style of game is re- like instantly appeals to people.
P- it's something that people understand,, has an emotional reaction before them. Immediately they want to, you know, engage with that thing. And then we're obviously doing that kinda thing in our game. So, we're, we're putting you in the position of being, you know, a police detective or we're putting you in the position of being an emergency responder or something like that.
You are, you know, instantly as a player going, "Right, cool, I know what I need to do here. Like, I've seen this in a drama. I've seen these shows before. I know kind of the, the template here, so I know what's expected of me as a player. I don't need to kind of spend half an hour learning the controls, understanding the scoring system."
And you're just, you're straight away in that experience. You know what you need to do, and you can kind of be as a player ready to just make a gut instinct reaction to what's on the screen 'cause you kind of know, you know the setup, you know what's, what's expected, and you can get on with enjoying it.
So, I think those, those early signs show how powerful this kinda combination of sort of interactive drama with the kinda true crime and kind of that kind of space can be and, like how quickly it can connect with people and then, you know, how well it can extend out to audience. When it finds that kind of like lineup of, of audience and gameplay, it can really explode out.
So yeah, we've, we've been on that ever since, and we still hold all of those ideas true. You know, those are the types of game we're now building, but we are targeting ... We, we, we sort of spent -- We, we got really kinda excited looking at where streaming seems to be going. I mean, if you think from our perspective of we wanna get people that maybe don't consider themselves gamers to be playing these games, you've got Netflix, you've got Amazon pushing really, really hard into kind of the streaming space, trying to get, you know, games basically playable on TVs, on smart TVs, like directly where people are kind of, you know, consuming their, their dramas in the living room and that sort of thing.
And again, it's that, it looks like an emerging opportunity where maybe there's th- this audience is out there of, you know, people that wouldn't consider themselves gamers but would want to play this type of thing. So that's what excites us. We've been pushing really hard towards that, trying to learn how to do this on big screens and so on, but that's, that's how it's kind of evolved all the way through.
So, the same proof points from the beginning but starting to expand out to different platforms and different screens now.
Kalie: Can I ask you a little bit more about your TikTok strategy? I'm curious of how much of it was w- was planned, I'm assuming you worked or maybe you didn't, w- worked with different types of content creators, versus how much of it just went viral from a U- a UGC perspective just because there were so many people, one, playing your game, really liked it, the content, like you said, is kind of a natural format for TikTok, and,, true crime on TikTok is such a big genre or niche. Like, what did that balance look like?
James: Yeah, it, it was very mu- I mean, the, the videos we created were created in-house. We, we didn't use an agency. They're literally, you know, representations of content we've made, and it was, you know, a period of e- us experimenting with how to, you know, tell people about our games, get people interested in our games and so on.
And, and honestly, it was, it's like genuine kind of, you know, viral success. It wasn't like a "Right, we need to get, you know, 10 million people to view our TikTok this month." It was like, "What works? Let's try loads of things." And there were examples of things that didn't connect and people were less excited about, but, you know, certain topics and certain types of premise just engaged people and, and got them, you know, really, really interested.
And yeah, there's, there's something about, I think, these kind of fairly realistic scenarios where people will maybe share it, they'll comment on it, they'll react to it, you know, the ... And there's, there's certain types of, like, certainly the, the Dispatcher series that we did that really just blew up, like absolutely unbelievable numbers in terms of, you know, how much people engage with them.
So yeah, I, I think it just, you know, it, it shows that we've got like a kinda good gut instinct for what type of stories we should be telling and what kind of premises we should be setting up, and to be able to basically represent those same, , scenarios in a, in a, a social media post and get people to actually go, "Oh, that's really cool.
Look at this. Look at what's going on," and, you know, then, you know, come and view the game and tr- and sort of carry out those exact same kind of scenarios in a, in game play form is really, really cool. That's what we've been trying to build out ever since.
Kalie: Yeah, I was gonna say next is I think you have a really good gut instinct on the core loop that works as well.
So, your phone first format, which is investigating through someone's, like, texts, voice notes, surveillance, it's now associated with Scriptic. How did you land on that core loop specifically, and like, where do you think it could go from here where maybe it hasn't gone yet?
James: Yeah, well, I, I think our founders, Ben and Hall, have wanted to make these types of games, like, since the very, very start of even thinking what script it could be.
Like, you know, sort of sketching out and planning ideas and trying to build prototypes in their kitchen, like, before the company even got going, you know. They've had this really clear view of wanting to make that type of interactive show and so definitely for a true crime focus r- right from the get-go.
So, it's a bit that idea has been there from the beginning, and I think what they both bring to the party which is unique is they haven't come from a traditional gaming background. They've come in with, you know, stories that they wanna tell. So, they haven't approached it perhaps like gamers would approach it.
So they haven't come in from the point of view of like, right, you know, let's spend weeks mapping out all these cool game mechanics, interactions, and all these kind of things you're gonna be able to do as a player, all these verbs you're gonna get to be able to play around with. They've come at it from the point of view of what's the, you know, what's the story, what's the interactions that you would be doing as a detective in there, and also how to make it as close to what you would do in real life as possible.
And so you, you get from that, you know, if, if basically you've got, say, a phone that you're interacting with, and then on that phone are a bunch of apps and they work pretty much the same as your smartphone apps, you've basically collapsed all of the tutorial aspects of the game down to zero, right? It just works the way your smartphone works.
You don't have to learn a new game and a new ge- set of game mechanics, and that kind of thing. And in particular, what we did for storytelling was, you know, kind of it's chat interactions, right? It's things coming and going through your, through your kind of like, you know, equivalent of a WhatsApp or a, you know, messaging service or something like that.
You're, you're basically talking back and forward with your police team and making plans and making executions. So again, there's no like, "Right, here's how you control your team, and here's, here's how you issue orders, and this is what the menu..." It's like none of that is there at all. So, you just, even if you knew nothing about the game, you could probably just, you know, bash your way through it and, and make some great progress, which, you know, all good casual games achieve, right?
And that's, that's kind of, I think, why it kind of connects and works really well. So yeah, I think that's, you know, that, that's certainly the starting point. That's where it came from and, you know, from a core mechanic point of view, that's where we, we based everything out from. Then the challenge for us is now, you know, as we start to look at new screens and new platforms, we do need to still engage with the, the, you know, the platforms and the controls, right?
So, you know, for example, if you've got, you know, if you're playing on one of the streaming platforms, typically you're playing with a phone in front of you and a TV screen behind you. So, we've got to think through what's on which screen, which, which, what's r- playing which role, and that kind of thing.
And if we're doing things on PC, and, and that sort of thing, we need to think about how to kind of maybe make the game mechanics a little bit deeper without kind of breaking up the accessibility. So, we, we're trying to kind of experiment with things where maybe the player is kind of building up theories about the case and actually kind of visualizing those theories and then bringing those theories to the team.
That's a little bit more kind of, you know, that's more like two steps rather than a direct gut instinct interaction with your team. But that's because, you know, we think a PC or a console audience can, can handle that level of kind of multi-step play. So, you get the feeling, it's kind of... Without going too specific, we're sort of taking that core formula, we're keeping that alive, and we will always make games in that way, but then we're sort of adapting softly to each platform as it comes up.
Kalie: And that's a perfect segue, 'cause I wanna talk about the different platforms. I wanna start with YouTube Playables. So, as you mentioned, Urgent Cases is on YouTube Playables, which I think is a pretty fascinating product decision. Can you walk us through why YouTube Playables? Like, why now? And then also, do you have any learnings that you would like to share with any other game developers who might be considering YouTube Playables?
James: Yeah. So, we'd, we'd made this decision that we wanted to kinda start to target, sort of more premium experiences, and we wanted to do a kind of... We're really, really interested in pushing to sort of streaming platforms at that point in time. And it was, it was quite a bold strategy 'cause there wasn't-- At, at the time we're talking about, so early 2025, it's not like there was a plethora of streaming platforms all out there targeting casual teams, right?
So, it was a, it was a bit of a kind of long-term plan this. It was, it was thinking ahead to where the market's going rather than responding to something. W- we got invited to be part of YouTube Playables' kind of open beta that they did, and it just, it felt like everything was lining up, basically.
There was this new, platform that was delivering games over the air to players, and it was gonna allow us to, you know, be early movers. A bit like we were able to be an early mover with Netflix games and that sort of thing. We, we were kind of hopeful that, you know, that would be an opportunity for us.
And more than anything else, it really allowed us to kind of develop these new storytelling muscles, you know, work out what that type of game was. So, we took a formula. The, the Urgent Cases formula is like a distilled, kind of, police, um, police case, police drama that we've done. But, but kind of adapt that to a new, you know, sort of streaming-first platform.
So, we had to work out things like if you're playing it on a phone, we, we kinda know that experience pretty well, right? You've got like a kind of an interaction with your police team, and then you flip over to, like, a suspect or a victim's phone, and you're investigating sort of digital evidence on there, and then you come back to your police team.
But for-- If you put it on a desktop and you expand that out, what, what are you looking at? Are you just looking at, like, a phone in the middle of the screen? It's gonna feel a little bit kind of- a bit forced and, and a bit stretched. So we, we were able to make this kind of like police desktop that you can actually, like, pull out on the- on your browser full screen, and it's, it's like you're basically playing through a police, you know, computer, and you've got, like, your chat running live, and you've got the, the forensics all over your desktop, and you can rummage through that, and you can bring that back to your team.
And, you know, we, we had to build that, ... We had to build a really, really interesting kind of tech- tech- technology stack to allow our team to do that i- in a kind of realistic way. So, the, the way that we build this stuff internally is very much closer to how you would build kind of web pages and websites.
So, we're, we're fortunate to have some really talented game artists, and they've come from a web background. So, for them, it's super natural to lay things out in that kind of adaptable web style where, you know, a, a page is not a fixed size and resolution. It kind of stretches and grows and needs to have some limits, but not, you know, too many, and that sort of thing.
And th- we coupled that with new tech that Unity made available, and it, it just flew. Like, the, the UI team were able to just build screens for this game without having to kind of take every step through an engineer to see their stuff on the screen. And we basically built that kind of style of work out and out and out ever since.
So, YouTube Playables was, like, this brilliant kind of test for us in terms of how do we get our game, built for that kind of interface and that style of play. And we learned loads and loads and loads by doing that, so we're really glad that we, we took, took that chance and built for it. For anyone else targeting that, I think, There's obviously the web, scalable, you know, kind of interface stuff that I've just touched on is really difficult, especially if you wanna do, you know, things with a, a detailed user interface.
That's really hard. The platform seems to be going very much in the kind of hyper-casual direction as well. So, you need to do all the things that hyper-casual games do really, really well. So, you need a hook that grabs people instantly and keeps them around and then, you know, you need to try and lightly, you know, keep that, that core going.
But it's a very, very difficult space to get into. And then the other side of it was sort of building basically for web-based technology. So, it's kind of like built around WebGL, which is really has its own kind of like limitations on how you can build for that. So, it needs to be kind of a certain size of download.
There's certain rules about what you can and can't stream into the game. We, we had all kinds of fun with like, when you start it on a phone on certain devices, like say like Apple restrict what kind of interactions you can have with web pages by default. So, we can't just like play audio on the phone or have haptics running.
You have to kind of get the player to actually interact before those things can come through. So, all of those things were like rapid learnings and, you know, for anyone going into that space, it's, it's worth kind of experimenting with what you're allowed to do on WebGL and kind of get to learn that first 'cause it's, it's definitely got its quirks.
Kalie: Sounds like it. Is there any platform that you're, that you're particularly focused on right now? Or what's next from a platform perspective?
James: Yeah, so I mentioned we're, we're, we're pitching very much towards the streaming platforms and premium sort of experiences. So, it's a, it's a blend. We're looking at kind of streaming platforms that k- Amazon are pushing and, and Netflix pushing, and particularly like the, the Game Night representations on both.
So, something where there's no barrier to entry at all, and players can just come in and start enjoying these experiences. We are also developing for kind of PC and console-type experiences into premium mobile as well. It's not like an either/or thing for us. These are... I mean, basically the connecting between all of these is widescreen versions of the, the, the types of, you know, experience we've built before, but like really going for kind of very kinds of premium story.
So, you know, recorded live action content. In the case of one of the things we're developing, you know, we've got Hollywood talent in Ralph Ineson attached to the game. You know, you can look at some teasers for that on our website and so on. So, you know, we, we're pitching for those kind of experiences, tailoring for the, the needs of each platform.
The streaming stuff really excites us, like I mentioned, because it's that same thesis of just being able to reach everybody that wants to play these kind of dramas, right? If you've got the ability to watch Amazon Prime or Netflix in your living room, you've probably got the ability to play these streaming games.
If you've got a phone, you've already got the controller. So it's kind of, again, it's that really interesting space where it's starting to just open up a whole bunch of people that maybe wouldn't have traditionally wanted to play a video game, but you know, they maybe watch TV drama and then, you know, they've got the option on their screen of like, you know, if you scan a QR code, you can start playing this game, and they, they actually do fancy doing that in the living room.
Or maybe they're playing it together with their family, and the family are all piling in and telling you what choice to make on the screen, that sort of thing. So, we're, we're really excited about that space. But, you know, we wouldn't, we wouldn't kind of completely, you know, cut off doing premium experiences on other screens as well.
Kalie: All right, I wanna shift gears to the topic of the day, which of course is AI. So, I know that Scriptic was using AI in production since 2021, which is definitely earlier than most. Where is AI making the biggest difference in your day-to-day production of like a sc- a Scriptic title, and where has it just not lived up to the hype?
James: Yeah, so you, you're right. We, we were really early adopters and we're really bullish on AI and AI usage. I mean, our-- I th- I think a lot of the dialogue is, is you kind of expect it goes kind of like to extremes, right? It's either every-everything AI all in, or it's like no AI at all, don't touch it. And it's the-- we're, we're kind of in the middle of like, we use it everywhere for all kinds of things, but we use it as a tool, and it's, it's a way of getting our stories told.
It doesn't replace human craft, definitely. You know, it's something where we have a clear view on what we wanna do or tell or what, what we wanna create. We, we create these stories by hand. They're very much a, you know, crafted narrative that takes huge amounts of human effort to get to the standard that it's at.
And then we augment that with various, you know, AI technologies to either build the thing, like in terms of like tooling and production and that sort of thing, or even create assets as well. So, we, we, we make a mixture of things. So, what we've done, and you can see examples of this in the work we've done is, is quite often it's kind of composite things.
Maybe we've had, perhaps the most sort of spectacular example was on one of the, videos we had on one of our shows on the, the, the free-to-play mobile platform, where we had a live action sequence, and we composed together that with some effects that we built in-house with like traditional kind of after effects stuff, and also an AI kind of video, like to do a transition and turn around that scene.
So, it's like, it's not one thing. It's kind of like a mixture of all of those different techniques coming together and kind of making the, the vision that we wanna make. And we'll, we'll use AI to create, you know, maybe images on a suspect's phone and sort of fill out the, the, the space. We'll use things to maybe expand, you know, for recording options, what we can do in terms of maybe special effects or things happening in the background and that sort of thing.
So, we had an example last week where We're recording a kind of a, a TV show type, scene, and basically using AI to expand the scene around what we've recorded to full, you know, production, physical, human recorded show. But then the outside of that is expanded using AI effects. So much like, you know, traditional film and TV might use CGI, we're kind of using AI.
It can be really useful for audio, but it, it's very trial and error. You know, like our team will take, take these tools, try to use them, see if the quality's there, and ultimately it comes down to is the quality there for the storytelling, right? If it's gonna be distracting, it's gonna clearly not be of quality, then we, we still might be using human recording or do something like that.
So very much a blend for the, the creative of what we create. And then internally from a tech point of view as well, we, we use AI really heavily for boosting our production. So, we c- we can go kind of in depth on that stuff if you like. But, you know, we, we're using-- Like every member of our team uses some form of AI, whether it's kind of the engineers using it for kind of code assistance and code generation.
But we use it for generating placeholders. We use it for kind of helping us with like laborious work where you've gotta, you know, move 100 files from place A to point B and change the formats. Like those are the kind of things. But basically anything which is repetitive, you know, grunt work, we, we try and get rid of that and use AI to, to lean-- to help with that side of things.
And then anything that requires quality control, human taste, craft, that's the stuff we want our team doing as much of as possible. So, we try and kind of get them doing that as, as much as we can and remove all of the kind of boilerplate where we can with AI.
Kalie: I think there's a real tension right now between game studios using AI, especially to scale content and audience perception.
As I mentioned, I have had a couple other interactive storytelling games guests on the platform, and depending on their audiences, you know, there's been some real backlash against AI, or there's also just been fans engaging much less when they detect that AI is used. Like, are you seeing that when it comes to Scriptic titles?
Like wh- what has been the audience reception, or do they not really care 'cause people are just more immersed in the story?
James: Yeah, I think, I think it, it comes down to the quality side of things, right? What we're not doing is kind of like just, you know, auto-generating a bunch of content and just, you know, give me a, give me a crime story, press enter and see what...
Like, we're not-- We're still crafting the story. So, you know, we've been using AI in everything we've made to some extent, ever since the get-go. Like it's, you know, there'll be some images, some pieces of the story which are, you know, there that have been AI generated. It's just we're not doing it for the whole thing, and we, we're not doing it just for the sake of doing it.
We're using it as a, a production aid. So I think that's the, the first thing is that the quality comes first and, you know, the, the, the success, the success speaks for itself. I mean, we haven't had a limited uptake on what we've done based on having AI content in our game. I think the... we have to be careful within the games industry not to kinda get too into it with this.
There's a very, very strong reaction, particularly from core gamers, and I, I understand why. You know, inside the core gaming kind of, circles, there's a really, really strong negative reaction against AI, and I think a lot of kind of traditional PC and console developers are very, very tentative about even talking about having AI production aids, let alone any kind of like images that are player-facing.
But I, I don't think that reflects the general public's view on, on kind of AI and content. Like, if it's a good quality story, and it's not an obvious thing that, you know, visually this thing was created with an AI production process as opposed to like a, you know, a Photoshopped, you know, production process or something like that, I don't think for most players it matters.
What will matter is if it's kind of clearly a poor quality video or it's, you know, an inhuman performance or, you know, there's a kind of uncanny valley in what's gonna... Like instantly players are gonna be switched off by that, and that's the stuff that directly affects our storytelling craft and will have a negative impact on the quality of our game.
So, you know, basically the quality is the, the thing that drives out. We've got, you know, brilliant writers and people directing our, our content that are, you know, reviewing, editing, improving, and if, if it doesn't meet the bar, then, well, when we move that content, we won't put that through to player-facing.
But, you know, I also wanna stress that we've spent the la- literally last two weeks in recording studios recording , like forty or so phone calls with human actors doing the performance in an ad-libbed way where our, you know, directors are performing that with a v- Like it's, it's a very human process at the core of it, and then we use AI around to build out the scene, to create images, to create e-extras in the video and so on.
We don't feel it needs to be this kind of either/or debate. Basically, AI is an accelerant. It's something that we just build into our process and just use as a natural part of what we do. It's not a kind of AI maximalist thing where like everything needs to be auto-generated by AI or, or nothing at all.
Like I don't think it would create a very good experience anyway.
Kalie: I completely agree. So, as I mentioned, I, I think in the intro, a16z has called Scriptic one of the studios shaping the next generation of interactive storytelling in the AI era. And as you know, this is a very crowded space, especially with all the entries in micro drama.
What's the bet that you're making that other studios aren't?
James: Yeah. So, I think, I think I've just hinted at it really, is like we're not seeing it as a kind of either/or thing. We're using AI to accelerate really, really great storytelling craft, right? So, it does-- the storytelling craft is at the core and it will never be diluted down.
So the, the, the quality of the story comes first, and then we have to kind of create really clever ways of building, like from a production perspective and also kind of like how to develop that from a kind of a content creation point of view as well. And yeah, I think that's probably our secret formula.
It's kind of like we're, we're-- as a, as a team, we're able to kind of punch miles above our weight. You know, we can produce these huge, like complex, fully, you know, kind of voice fully character, fully filmed scenes and, and do it on fairly modest production budgets and do this kind of, you know, with a really, yeah, sort of amazing ability to build out a much bigger world that you're interacting with.
I, I think that's our kind of the thing that we've done really well. I mean, we've just got a lot of experience with it now as well. We've been doing this for quite a few years now, of kind of how to fuse together a bit of AI, a bit of live action, a bit of traditional storytelling craft, a bit of kind of modern, kind of games development and sort of free-to-play development and new platform development, and all in that kind of fusion is what makes Scriptic really special.
And we've kind of, we've elected to kind of follow a, a sort of a, sort of more like a film studio kind of model as well. So, we're deliberately keeping the, the team lean and a core team of people that the people inside Scriptic are like really unusual kind of T-shaped people. They don't have like a single thing that they do and nothing else.
They're able to move between lots of different kind of areas of work and try new stuff out all the time. So, we're constantly, you know, reinventing and evolving our workflows, trying new tools out, trying the latest video generation system, trying a new way of building data for the game. Like, we never sort of just sit on one thing and start to sort of factory produce it.
And what we then do is kind of we have this like really kind of core team that are really talented using this, you know, amazing new tech as it comes through. And then we augment that with external teams or, you know, production partners for filming, whatever. So, we, we grow when we need to with those partners, and then we shrink back down to the core team when we don't need that level of production.
So, I think that kind of mixture of things is what makes us really unusual. And yeah, from an AI point of view, it's just we're not, we're not intimidated by it. We're using it as a, you know, accelerant for what we do really well, which is great story craft at the core of it. It's, it's really astonishing what our team's able to do.
You know, we've got people who are You know, who've come in doing sort of narrative design and that sort of thing, building, building their own tools like in software and, you know, creating new work processes and that sort of thing without engineers having to help them much with that. You know, we've got people able to now end-to-end build the user interfaces that appear in the game without an engineer needing to piece that user interface together.
You know, our creative team, we've built tools for them where they can really, really quickly kind of lay the call out that they're working on or the narrative scene and sort of play with it and change it really quickly and make another cut and then put that into the game without it going through some super long-winded build process.
So, it's enabling us to work at, you know, an incredible speed. And then, like I say, when we need to pulse bigger, we, we kind of work with external partners to do that and then, you know, kind of keep the, keep the core team really specialized on what Scriptics does really well.
Kalie: You guys have had a lot of success.
As you mentioned, you're moving incredibly fast, especially for such a small team. What can you tell me that's on the roadmap for, let's say, the next 12 months that you can talk about? Any, like, new titles or new formats you can share with the Naavik audience?
James: Yeah, so we're not quite ready to announce one of the deals that we've signed that we're working on, unfortunately, but it is for one of those streaming platforms, and we're building a, a streaming-first game.
We're, we're sort of midway through production on that at the moment. That's the, the one I'm talking about doing all the recording for and all of that hard work that the team are doing right now. We've also got-- You can kind of get hints of another game that we've got in development, which is on our website, which is kind of more of like a PC and console kind of premium experience that we've, we've developed up, and, and this general pattern is what will be Scriptics' kind of, you know, work, for the coming sort of 12, 18 months now is kind of building those types of experiences now kind of one after the other.
That's gonna be our, our focus and very much kind of IP-based sort of development for, for the foreseeable future.
Kalie: And so, you've worked in the games industry for, I think, about 25 years now. We've talked about the companies and the games that you've worked with before. What's the piece of conventional wisdom about how a studio that should, should be built that you're most glad to leave behind?
James: Yeah, I think that I was sort of like kind of what, what I'd say not to do anymore, do you mean, in terms of leave behind?
Kalie: Yes.
James: Yeah. Okay. I mean, I think, I mean, AI is changing a lot of things. Like I'm, I'm super excited about what is gonna become possible. I, again, I understand it's a really controversial topic for some people, but for me it's just a super exciting time.
I mean, I look back to when games were built by quite small teams traditionally, you know, even, even at inception there were one or two people, and then it grew to teams of like 10 and then 30, and then suddenly it's hundreds and then thousands of people building games. And I, I don't think it's scaled very well against the hardware that's been available.
As the hardware's got more complex, we've tried to build these high definition games and basically, you know, the, the, the, the game production is bogged down. People end up doing quite kind of unsatisfying slices of the game. You know, you're building 100 wooden crates or 500 ammo clips or something like that.
It's not, it's not kind of, you know, you're not getting that kind of creative stamp that you, that you used to be able to get in smaller teams. I think that's starting to reverse. I think that the, the potential there is that sort of AI-based workflows could really, really change that. And you, you start to get back to small teams, maybe not quite in the traditional shape that we're used to.
You know, maybe the, the traditional roles will break down on the road a little bit. But if you, if you set yourself up in a smart way, I think we could end up in a situation where pretty, you know, relatively small teams are able to make fully crafted games, you know, fully 3D games, large, expensive stories.
I think that is gonna be possible. It's not gonna be just like I rock up to, you know, Google Gemini or, Core Code and just go, "Make me a 3D game," and it just spits the game out. Never gonna happen. Like, it's gonna take a lot of craft and planning and iteration and, you know, really careful building. But I, I think that is kind of upending a lot of the traditional knowledge, if you like, of how to, how to build and run a studio.
And I think it's gonna create disruption and rifts. I think there's gonna be studios that cling onto what they know for as long as they can, and it's gonna be very hard for them to, to evolve. And then there's gonna be incumbent studios that just, they just go with it. They grab hold of the new wave and, and just go with that wave and, and they really thrive and, and have a lot of fun doing it.
I mean, for me it's, it's super fun- getting your assumptions challenged and beaten. Like I, I, I actually really enjoy that. So, we've had a few instances in the last couple of months where I would make an assumption about how to build maybe a tool or, you know, a, a pipeline for building content. We've tried it out with AI, and you know what?
Actually, it does a great job. So, stop fighting it. Stop trying to, you know, hammer it into the traditional way of building the thing. Like build an AI skill that can do this and, and repeat that process over again and enable somebody to do that work that isn't an engineer and, you know, free up the team to start working in that way.
So I think that's the overall kind of pattern, I would say, in terms of how things are changing is like, I think from a studio leadership point of view, you've gotta be, you've gotta be okay with the fact that some of the old rules are getting broken down, and you're gonna need to be able to, , challenge yourself, challenge your assumptions, maybe build a team that's not the traditional shape.
Maybe take a little bit of a risk on production in certain places, like try some things out and understand that they may not work all that well. So I think that's the overall theme for me in terms of things I'd, I'd kind of leave behind is don't just kind of try and rinse and repeat the same old, you know, production scaled up kind of model that you've used in the past 'cause it may not quite apply in the, in the future-facing kind of way of building games.
Kalie: Is there a recent risk that you've taken that you'd be willing to share?
James: So I think I've touched on some of the kind of tooling and pipelines and that sort of thing, and also kind of how we've built up our tech internally. I mean, it's, it's always risky changing something that kind of works but maybe has its inefficiencies to something that is, has changed differently.
We've taken a pretty big punt on how to build our tech in a way that frees up our content makers and our artists to basically build stuff directly for the game. So that firstly the risk is you're trusting them to take ownership of that and do a really high quality job and not kind of put stuff in the game that breaks the game and that sort of thing.
But also you're changing, you know, how you build, you're placing emphasis on different areas of the team, and you're kind of-- you're asking all of the team to adapt. You're asking the engineers to let go of stuff that they had full control over. You're asking the, you know, content makers or the artists to not, you know, just give something to an engineer and trust that it gets done from there.
They have to own it all the way through into the game. So that, that, that's a risk, right? That's a, you know, it could not work. You could end up in a situation where, okay, we're, we're halfway into the game and we've created a big mess and we don't know how to finish this. But, it's working brilliantly for us, and it-- What, what it-- What I love is you get these kind of moments where the team are all working in parallel, like they're all able to move forward, they're all able to contribute.
You haven't got that kind of waterfall thing where the kind of maybe the creative team have done their bit and they've handed it over and now they're kind of twiddling their thumbs while people are sort of assembling that and putting it in the game, and then there's a kind of testing phase where everyone's kind of waiting for the QA process to finish.
Everyone's on it. So, we, we do things that are, I think, fairly non-traditional in, in games where we've embraced other kind of the old adage of, of kind of some of what Agile was built to do. So, in terms of kind of we, we work to goals, rather than kind of like very, very micro-grained tasks, for example.
And the whole team are responsible for the quality of the game as well. So, you know, we don't normally have QA in the team as a, as a general pattern. We, we bring QA on at the right times, you know, for certain pieces of the project, but the whole team are responsible for testing the game, for finding bugs, for playing it together.
No one has the excuse of like, "I've done my bit of whatever, you know, user interface, and I'll leave that to the QA team to test it, and they'll come back to me if there's a problem." Everyone plays the game, everyone logs bugs, everyone's involved in the triage of this thing. So, what you get is a collective ownership of how is the game coming together?
Are we on target? You know, are we happy with the standards of, of what we're putting out there? And you get a kinda shared understanding of what you're building. So that, that's risky as well. If you had a team which was, you know- they don't care or they were disengaged or they were just there to sort of go nine to five and, and clock off at the end of the day, then that kind of level of engagement wouldn't work.
But for us, that works, you know, really, really well for kind of driving up the internal quality of what we do, and it keeps everyone kind of focused on, on what we're building. So yeah, we've, we've taken a few, I think what would be seen as risks in terms of production. Like for me, that's, that's the fun part of game making and, you know, that makes perfect sense to me.
But I think sort of traditional production would say that's, that's a bit of a risk, but, you know, I think it's working brilliantly for us at the minute.
Kalie: Yeah, it sounds like it. I have two final questions for you. So, if you were to imagine the playable narrative category 10 years from now, what do you hope it means for storytellers or players or even people who are working inside the industry?
James: Yeah. I mean, 10 years is a very, very long time, but I mean I would, I would hope that a lot of what we're, we're going after starts to become true and it's just become really normal that there's a category of narrative dramas which are playable ones, and maybe then it starts to become a natural extension of, you know, the kind of the shows maybe that you, you're regularly consuming.
So maybe it becomes normal to have, you know, kind of a high-end, you know, Netflix or Prime drama or something like that that you watch on your TV, and then the normal thing to do at the end is to start sort of playing in that universe as well. And it's just like, it's not like a separate thing that you go and do.
It's like the kinda interactive part of the show that happens after the main drama has concluded or something like that. So hopefully th- those boundaries just continue to collapse down. Hopefully that's the kind of thing so that more people are playing this, this type of interactive narrative and it's, it's very kind of normal and widely accepted thing that, that loads of people do.
That would be, that would be the ideal really. And, you know, w- who knows what platform that will be on or what medium you'll be experiencing that through. But, but hopefully that's the kind of direction of travel for some interactive narrative.
Kalie: Well, James, thank you so much for joining us on the Naavik Gaming Podcast. It was a pleasure to have you on, and we'll make sure to link to Scriptic in our show notes.
James: Thank you so much. Yeah, it's really fun sort of talking about what we're up to. It's, really nice to share.
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