LogInBacklight's product manager, Stephen Stanford, and account executive Bryant White dive into Backlight Gem – the narrative management solution that empowers game developers and narrative designers to collaboratively conceptualize, write, manage, and integrate complex narratives at any scale.
Introduction
Stephen: I'm Stephen Stanford, product manager at Backlight working on Backlight Gem. I studied film production and screenwriting at York University in Toronto. I was a founding member of Backlight Gem in 2016 when it was still an experimental product at Celtx.
Bryant: I’m Bryant White, account executive at Backlight. I’ve worked with the team for four years on pre-production solutions for film, television, and games. In my current role, I handle the entire life cycle of Backlight Gem accounts from start to finish, including implementation, training, and feature requests.
I have a B.Sc of Science with a concentration in Physics and Applied Mathematics from Memorial University in Newfoundland. A significant part of my studies included fluid dynamics and IC design, which lends itself well to explaining story permutations!
I joined Celtx four years ago as the head of sales and led the acquisition and merger into Backlight.
Work Organization at Backlight Creative
Stephen: We have Product Management, Product Marketing, Growth Marketing, Sales, Solutions Delivery, Engineering, and Customer Success teams that include representatives from each of Backlight's product lines. We're an internationally distributed team, so we communicate with each other with careful planning around time zones. We have team members all over, from Australia and Canada to the UK and Spain.
Bryant: We have a tight team with Backlight Gem. We’re in communication with each other via Slack and have weekly and bi-weekly meetings to review feedback from our customers.
Story of Backlight Gem Creation
Bryant: We originally conceived Backlight Gem as an additional product from Celtx, the script-writing software for storytellers, which for 20 years has been a world leader in pre-production for film, television, and in-house corporate video production. As a result of our expertise in screenwriting, we understood there was a gap in the marketplace for video games and interactive media.
After many years of R&D, we discovered that the knowledge of managing narrative at scale is reserved exclusively by studios. In many cases, internal tools are developed, and closely guarded, to gain a competitive advantage in the market. As a result of these trade secrets, downstream efficiencies to voice-over, animation/mocap, and localization pipelines are rarely achieved by internal tools.
So we created Backlight Gem, a tool that blends classic filmmaking techniques and game design and provides a comfortable, flexible, and collaborative environment where teams can write, plan and design immersive experiences together. Managing millions of lines of dialogue and voice-over is simple based on our REST API architecture.
Stephen: We had clients using our conventional screenwriting tools for video games going back to the mid-2000s. The original concept for Backlight Gem was as a scripting tool for 360 video back during the commercial VR boom. When we decided to explore immersive, non-linear experiences and narrative visualization, we realized that we were building something perfect for games. From there, we blended these new approaches with traditional film-style production and writing practices, and Backlight Gem was born.
Backlight Gem’s UI and Capabilities
Stephen: Backlight Gem combines a screenplay-style script editor with a node-based visualizer called a Storymap. The Storymap allows users to create structures that reflect extensive and complex narratives where things like logic and divergence come into play. It helps game developers by making it very easy to plan out these complex structures and then provides them with a comfortable, creative writing environment to populate those structures with content.
Workflow for Game Developers
Stephen: Writing and creating in Backlight Gem automatically generates a comprehensive and holistic .JSON data model that contains all the structural and narrative components of a user's story. This data model is flexible and simple to parse, making it easy for teams to integrate it into their broader development toolchain. We accelerate this process with a REST API, which makes the extraction and external manipulation of script data even faster. As for off-the-shelf integrations with Unreal, stay tuned.
Business Model and Community Engagement
Bryant: Our goal is always to be accessible and visible and to keep an ongoing conversation with our partners, customers, and community. We want to create and promote a platform that empowers professional game designers and those who are just getting started in the world of game narrative design. That’s why we offer different packages tailored to the unique needs of individual users, studios, and educational institutions. We've implemented special pricing and support systems for independent developers, and a personal plan will be available soon! We believe in nurturing creativity at all levels and strive to make Backlight Gem accessible to those who might not have the extensive resources of larger studios. By providing these flexible solutions, we can cater to a broader audience and support the diversity of the gaming industry.
To speak to the business side of things, more specifically, being visible and approachable is key. We actively participate in gaming conventions, conferences, and other events where we can showcase our platform and interact with potential users and partners. We’re also starting to invest more in educational content, like webinars and workshops that teach the craft of narrative design. We want to be more than just a tool – we’d like Backlight Gem to become an educational resource that helps to build the skills necessary for industry success. Watch this space for more!
Community feedback is also integral to our continuous improvement. Over time we will introduce increasingly more open communication channels through social media, forums, and direct support, where our users can ask questions, report issues, or just share their successes. We want to actively involve our user base regarding new features and improvements. Indeed, before launching Backlight Gem’s API, we collaborated with various studios, both users and non-users alike, to understand what they needed from the API and ensure it evolved in a direction that would genuinely support their creative needs.
Future Plans
Stephen: Our current roadmap is focused mainly on helping our users manage their voice-over pipelines. Voice-over is where every studio has the most problems creating, planning, and executing the work, and Backlight Gem is uniquely suited to helping users generate highly organized dialogue data. We're leaning into that with solutions for scheduling and organizing voice-over sessions, integrating dialogue-specific data into their asset management systems and engine environments, and empowering actors by making Backlight Gem scripts as familiar and easily read as possible.
Bryant: Our intention is to be the leader in pre-production for all interactive media. As such, in the coming months, we’ll start investing in other segments of the art, cinematic, and production pipelines to ensure Backlight Gem adds value to even more of the game development pipeline.
We’re always actively developing Backlight Gem, so we’ll never reach 100% completion. Backlight Gem is and always will be a constantly evolving product that shifts and adapts to meet the needs of studios in an industry that is always in flux. After all, that’s what’s so exciting about gaming; you never know what’s next. We’re thrilled to be a part of helping to define what’s possible and empowering studios to deliver even bigger, better, more exciting stories that take players for a ride.