Hi Genvid Fans,
We’re excited to announce to you our latest and greatest title: DC HEROES UNITED.
This awesome new interactive streaming series and mobile game based on DC comics is launching November 20, incorporating many refinements to our format thanks to YOUR feedback about prior experiences. Check out this story trailer:
Featuring a major update to Genvid’s MILE format – an innovative blend of social metas, gameplay connections and interactive narratives – DC Heroes United integrates storytelling with gameplay in ways never before seen in entertainment.
Ahead of its worldwide release, the DC Heroes United Story and Narrative Design team are sharing some insights behind the project and what fans can expect as they dive in.
We hope you will enjoy this insightful roundtable discussion between DC Heroes United Showrunner Stephan Bugaj, and Writer-Designers Martin Montgomery and Chris Schroyer, all of whom are ex-Telltale.
STEPHAN: Before we dig in to telling the audience about our own work, let’s talk about the inspiration DC’s long history of creativity had on us.
What got you excited about working on a DC project in the first place?
CHRIS: To tell a great story, you need great characters, and Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman are the greatest that comic books offer. Over generations, these characters have shown audiences of all ages what it means to be a Super Hero. We feel for them when they fall and celebrate their victories because they represent the best parts of us. Being able to create an interactive experience with them is an honor! Also, and I swear this isn’t a humblebrag, DC Heroes United is the third time in my career that I’ve been fortunate enough to contribute to a DC comics project. DC has always been and continues to be one of my favorite creative partners. This is an opportunity to explore fascinating narrative and interactive spaces with some of their most beloved characters. I could not be happier with the support and trust they share with us.
MARTIN: Who wouldn’t jump at the chance to write for arguably the most iconic characters in comics? Many have been part of stories for over eighty years, and I find it an exciting challenge to write a new story that hopefully feels familiar yet fresh.
STEPHAN: For me, I was excited to work with highly recognizable characters and to bring back the classic optimistic, heroic tone of the Golden Age while also integrating more contemporary sensibilities and style to the project plus adding our own spin that still honors the classic characters.
With that in mind, who is your favorite member of the DC “Trinity” of Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman? How did you put your own spin on who that character is in DC Heroes United?
MARTIN: I grew up on Bruce Timm’s Batman: The Animated Series, so Batman will always be my favorite. However, unlike that series, where Batman is sort of fully formed when we meet him, DC Heroes United begins at the dawn of Super Heroes, and our Caped Crusader still has a lot of rough edges. These surface mostly in his relationships with the other Super Heroes, in particular Black Canary, who he tries to mentor. As a recent dad, feeling the weight of responsibility for guiding and mentoring, while also feeling out of your element hits pretty close to home!
CHRIS: This is a question I think about daily, and my answer changes from moment to moment depending on what scene or decision I’ve worked on most recently. For right now, I have to go with Wonder Woman. The decisions she faces ask her to navigate complicated dynamics between her role with A.R.G.U.S., manage old friendships, and act as a responsible representative of Themyscira. In our story, she’s one of the more established, publicly known Super Heroes, so some other characters also rely on her for guidance. Exploring and influencing that careful balancing act is something I’m really excited about. I can’t wait for our audience to decide what matters most to Diana.
STEPHAN: I’m going to use Showrunner’s prerogative to cheat my answer and say Lex Luthor. I’m really excited about the characterization of Luthor as an ego-driven optimist who genuinely wants to do good but always needs it to reflect well upon himself. This to me is a much more interesting kind of “good guy who might possibly go bad if he’s constantly rebuked and mistreated” than the more typical “they just pushed him too far” type of anti-heroes and “born bad” villains. I hope audiences will also enjoy that, because we are an audience-focused company. That’s why we listened to what did and didn’t work for our fans on past projects and incorporated those learnings into DC Heroes United, delivering a more focused experience with weekly top-quality episodes, and one more substantial and enjoyable integrated game. We do still have the challenge of designing for a social meta stemming from all the players competing (and collaborating, especially via rallies) to make decisions, and a long gap between the setup of a decision and the payoff of that decision in the next episode (rather than setting up and paying off within seconds inside the same scene).
How has this format caused you to adjust your approach to narrative design?
CHRIS: The most significant change is the pacing of decisions and the timing of their consequences. In a single-player console experience, time can be used to pressure the audience into making an immediate decision out of fear they won’t make any decision if they don’t act fast enough. This is certainly a valid approach for some stories and platforms, but this format presented us with the opportunity to rethink how our audience can interact with serialized stories in new ways. Considering the comic book roots of these characters, it feels more natural to allow our audience to consider all possible repercussions as a community before making a collective choice. For example, Superman is faster than a speeding bullet, so it’s not really a matter of IF he can do something quick enough. But there’s only one Superman in the world and he can’t be everywhere all the time, so WHAT he chooses to do in any given situation can have a massive effect on people around him. The Justice League is made up of legendary characters with extraordinary powers, but the thing that makes them true Super Heroes is the choices they make. My favorite parts of this series are when we give the reins to the audience and allow them to determine what kind of heroes they want to be.
STEPHAN: I think that making the gap feel natural, either through use of cliffhangers like TV episodes do to build a week’s worth of anticipation, or through situations wherein the character is naturally interrupted, and the story compels them to defer making the decision or answering the question, are the most unique challenges in dealing with the time-spanning issue. As for social – it’s still about making choices worth debating, but in the Genvid format those fan arguments happen before the decision is finalized and drive story outcomes. I think fandoms who are accustomed to debating these kinds of situations will find it thrilling to be able to hash out these arguments in a way that then impacts the canon storyline forever.
Speaking of story, how has this new format of the interactive streaming series where we’ve got one full episode per week in the app (rather than daily mini-episodes that stitch together weekly) impacted the way you think about structure?
MARTIN: The bite-sized story structure was often difficult to write for because you need rising and falling action to make a great story. You’ll have quieter moments that build to something big and satisfying. This meant you might tune in to SILENT HILL: Ascension and not get a very exciting watching experience that day because we were building to a big moment. With DC Heroes United’s longer runtime, we can take the audience on a more familiar, intact journey, where you’ll get quieter character moments AND bombastic action scenes all in the same episode.
CHRIS: With the longer runtime, we can tell a broader range of stories featuring longer explosive action sequences and occasionally take a break to highlight more relaxed story moments. It feels like painting with a bigger canvas that lets audiences bask in larger-than-life set pieces and discover the small details that remind our audience that these Super Heroes are people too. One of my favorite examples of this is how we see the relationship between Superman and Blue Beetle begin with a mentor-mentee dynamic that can become more personal, like they’re “Superbros.” Of course, the audience’s role and agency in all this is still THE driving factor. When characters grow closer or further apart, it’s because of their decisions. It must feel earned.
STEPHAN: My feeling is that the DC Heroes United format brings us closer to television with the weekly full-episode approach, allowing us to apply more traditional TV structure approaches to the overall character arcs and throughlines. Of course, we still need to account for branching structure not just in the immediate payoff scenes, but as callbacks that alter later story beats based on prior audience decisions. We’ve also got input coming in from the EveryHero Project game, which creates another dimension of audience impact that’s quite different from Quicktime Event-style gameplay in most interactive narratives.
How does the whole gamut of audience input – decisions, gameplay, social communications – get factored into your narrative thinking on a project like this?
CHRIS: When I design decisions and choices for this project, the biggest thing on my mind is how the audience uses a currency they’ve earned in the EveryHero Project to support the outcome they want to see. It sounds simple, but it’s vital to an experience like DC Heroes United. This isn’t an experience with a reset button. There is only one “canon” run through the story. There is no way to tip the scales without the community’s collective effort. It means every decision counts and every choice must be equally logically viable and narratively compelling. I use this reminder to help refine the decisions the audience interacts with and ensure choices reflect the spoken dialog from our cast of characters as closely as possible. So much of this experience rides on just a few words.
MARTIN: It’s our job to make you care about these characters and the journey they’re on. If we’ve done our job right, you’ll want to go and debate what happens next with other members of the community. At Telltale, we made single player experiences, and after you were finished, there were active forums where you could discuss and debate with other fans. I think integrating that experience directly into the project and making that discussion and debate have a meaningful impact on the story is exciting.
STEPHAN: I think it’s an interesting challenge to make the audience input have impact while keeping the story coherent and producible. For DC Heroes United we took prior learnings and developed a focused concept of audience impact that hinges around social engagement and rallies, and the narrative connections to a single highly engaging mobile game. Social in general is all about what various things the audience can debate – decisions, for sure, but also hero builds and tactics in the EveryHero Project. And letting gameplay have impact is a matter of finding the right moments of connection that pay off the conceit of Lex’s EveryHero Project in satisfying ways without it taking more precedence than it was designed to. It’s been a lot of fun to make DC Heroes United, and we hope that you’ll all have a lot of fun experiencing it.
Any last words for the fans?
MARTIN: We are massive fans of these characters, and we hope you feel like we’ve honored what you know and love about them – while also giving you something exciting and new to experience!
CHRIS: Writing and designing for these characters is an incredible honor. I hope fans can see this team’s love and respect for them on screen. From a narrative design perspective, there is no better form of applause than seeing a community engaged with a story and championing for their preferred choices. So, I hope to see you in the chat when we launch on November 20.
STEPHAN: Thank you all for being a part of this experience with us, and we hope you’ll invite all your friends to join the fun because given the social meta of our interactive streaming series – the more the merrier.
DC Heroes United is launching on November 20, 2024, with episodes available to watch via Tubi, the DC Heroes United app, DC’s Official YouTube channel and DC.com.
Pre-register now on the Apple App Store and Google Play!
