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[Armageddon]

I think a lot of people making games here at TIG are more interested in mechanics based games than narrative focused ones. Or making narrative games where the mechanics enhance the narrative in some meta way. But uh, I dunno. Anyways, I'm wanting to make this short narrative game. It's kind of like Gone Home in that it takes place in one location and exploration/secrets progress the story. Gate and key system.

Trouble is I've started narrative games before and given up because it gets to a point where if you rewrite it just totally ruins everything and you have to remake huge chunks of the game. Especially in choice based games where you're tracking the players choices.

I've tried writing the entire story beforehand but that never ends up not working because it doesn't fit when implementing it in-game. I find it's best to develop the story along the game in a linear fashion but that's also never worked out. I've considered doing it totally word/dialogue free like Thirty Flights of Loving, that could be interesting but one location you don't really have the ability to tell different emotions in one environment maybe. I guess I shouldn't restrict myself this early.

Any ideas where to start?

[Mittens]

I also wanted to make a narrative game (still kind of do) I started by opening Twine and writing out the story/character interactions.

I still haven't been able to bring myself to actually code and art the game I planned because I find it really hard to get excited by a game without novel mechanics or multiplayer

I've not shifted my focus to trying to make a narrative game which is multiplayer and has novel mechanics, maybe then it will get done :S

[Armageddon]

I kind of agree. I just really hate programming mechanics and once I get them working I don't know how to wrap them around anything or extend them to make a full game. Just don't really have the interest in that. The main thing I don't like is like, a top down shooter you have to tweak the player movement speed and the way the mouse look works and the distance of the camera and the shooting speed and damage. I know there's no 'right' way for it all to be set but it's so tedious playing around with them I'm never happy with how it feels when doing stuff like that.

[s0]

maybe interactive fiction is the right format for you? in IF, writing the story and making the game are more or less the same thing, or at least tightly interTWINEd, so you don't have to rework lots of other stuff when you rewrite parts ot the story. remaking large parts of your gam is a fact of game development tho once you start working on more ambitious projects. doesn't matter whether you're making a linear narrative game or a complex nerdy simulator.

I kind of agree. I just really hate programming mechanics and once I get them working I don't know how to wrap them around anything or extend them to make a full game. Just don't really have the interest in that. The main thing I don't like is like, a top down shooter you have to tweak the player movement speed and the way the mouse look works and the distance of the camera and the shooting speed and damage. I know there's no 'right' way for it all to be set but it's so tedious playing around with them I'm never happy with how it feels when doing stuff like that.

i think this is totally normal. it's hard to assess your own game from a player perspective. that's why you want playtesters.

[Armageddon]

The problem is I really don't enjoy playing IF games. I also don't read many books. It seems pretty hard to make a game in a genre you have no interest or experience in, you wouldn't know the pitfalls or tropes and whatnot. I dunno I'll look into Twine again and think about all that. No reason I can't make an fps that plays like a Twine game.

[Terrytheplatypus]

twine games are bad when they have no pacing, which i am completely guilty of, i like making them sometimes as a cathartic thing, and i like playing IF games that have a strong sense of pacing and/or depth, or enough silliness to make up for not having depth or pacing. i just screw around with things i like, that's how i do pretty much anything. Usually around one core thing that means something to me. Some IF games you may enjoy: With those we love alive, The Gostak, Blue Lacuna, and Aisle. Increpare really has clear ideas about how to set up intriguing narratives in non-IF games, even ones that aren't exactly "narrative games," puzzle games like English Country Tune. I usually don't redo large things because learning anything takes many failures, and you have to finish lots of games to learn how to finish them. If you really really feel the need to redo stuff, possibly you can make your ideas more modular, with small pieces of interdependent situations, but not a really big complicated thing that stretches across the whole game.

[gimymblert]

If you have already written the game, parse it into sequence of stake, then for each stake build the "mental model" that is passed to the audience. This mental model will tell you how the elements of facts mesh together and will allow you to translate it into gameplay.

What's a mental model, it's the facts conveyed by the narration, but as a graph of how they build bigger facts (insight) that drive understanding. It will allow you to find which facts are parallel and which are dependent outside of flavor. This dependency graph will tell you where you can hook player action and gameplay and how to translate it into an actual game.

[s0]

The problem is I really don't enjoy playing IF games. I also don't read many books. It seems pretty hard to make a game in a genre you have no interest or experience in, you wouldn't know the pitfalls or tropes and whatnot. I dunno I'll look into Twine again and think about all that. No reason I can't make an fps that plays like a Twine game.

you could prototype it in twine then turn it into a FPS in unity.

[Monstro]

The problem is I really don't enjoy playing IF games.

I'm not entirely sure what your actual question is. But if you're looking to design a game driven by a narrative, IF is the perfect vehicle. It doesn't matter that you don't enjoy IF: it's a great way to prototype the story and player interaction. Compared to building the game in, say, unity or RPG maker, it's a really cheap way to string together a narrative.

Consider it a prototyping tool and once you have an interactive narrative you're happy with, you can think about the best way to realise it into a graphical game as a seperate project. The IF basically becomes your design document: it will help attract developers to your team (if you want to try and build one), and ensures everyone's working towards the same goal.

On a wider note, no matter what you do, the narrative will almost certainly evolve and change as the game takes shape. This is inevitable. Even if the plot and characters stay the same, you'll end up adapting the script a) to fit the game engine and b) in response to player feedback.

[s0]

Also if you're making a narrative game, you probably won't enjoy playing your own game regardless of format.

[saluk]

Consider the tools that are employed in non-game-engine narrative storytelling: scripts, storyboards, and animatics. This lets you find out what is working and not working in your story while still using some visual language to give you a way to understand the emotions you are going for, without building it up front and finding out that it doesn't flow as well as you wanted it to.

[Armageddon]

I don't have anyone I can show it to to get feedback though.

I've started doing a thing in Twine I'll try to finish. And I've been writing film scripts for a while but I don't think that format lends itself to writing games.

[Mittens]

Show it to me then

[halk3n]

If you have already written the game, parse it into sequence of stake, then for each stake build the "mental model" that is passed to the audience. This mental model will tell you how the elements of facts mesh together and will allow you to translate it into gameplay.

What's a mental model, it's the facts conveyed by the narration, but as a graph of how they build bigger facts (insight) that drive understanding. It will allow you to find which facts are parallel and which are dependent outside of flavor. This dependency graph will tell you where you can hook player action and gameplay and how to translate it into an actual game.

Yea, this is great advice.

I suggest checking out Samuel R. Delany's About Writing. It's for fiction, but the level of detail is more in favour of game narratives imo. Delany talks about countertext (beyond context and subtext) that is described as being a story automatically present no matter what the words are in the story. Very interesting concept. I find it fits even more so with game design.

Countertext in a game design sense is about what is present there with object, space and time. What does it all represent even without a consciously driven context on top? I suppose lore is another way labeling countertext. If you were to write a story for the game (using language as a tool of conveyance), what would happen if you were to remove it alternatively? Is there enough countertext placed there that would convey the message without the words on its own?

Another interesting concept is automation. I find narratives can be more immersive if you give the player less control. Paradoxical concept, I know but if you think about it, there's a lot of sense in applying the main theme of your game automatically so that whenever the player engages the world, that theme is ever present and is a major driver of context and meaning.

[Armageddon]

What does sequence of stake mean? Also are there any example graphs like that?

[gimymblert]

When you have a typical story, you have a "conflict" the conflict is define by an overall stake, however each scene also has its own stake, for example let's take the overuse tropes of "save teh world", scene by scene the stake can be escape the attacked village, gather a troop of hero, defeat the evil. Stakes define consequence of what will happen if the need of the protagonist is met or not (in typical game term: winning or losing condition), which can also be branching condition. Stake set the tension of a scene and define the progression between losing and winning, by giving concrete metric to evaluate for the audience or the writer and orient all action in the story toward it.

For exemple, let say you have a serial killer (established in the previous scene) tailing a young woman we introduced for the scene. The distance (the metric) between the girl and the serial killer is implicitly about a stake of threat, the closer he get the more danger we feel for the girl, modulating the distance became modulating the tension. If the girl stop to chit chat on her phone, or to buy some hot dog, they are no more superfluous actions but actual  modifier of tension. Because is oriented such a way it allow to build suspense but also break expectation, let say the serial killer close on the girl in a dark alley where there is no witness, the audience anticipate her death, but what happen is that the girl recognize her fiancee and they kiss ... Stake also work to understand punchline in humor! You can also stack stakes to create dilemma or increase tension.

This lead to the second element, facts and insight, above the fact we know is that the guy was a serial killer, but we didn't know the status of the girl until the end, all come around when we have all data. Let's take a famous example and look at just the premise of "romeo and Juliet". What are the facts? Romeo like Juliet, Juliet like Romeo, Romeo is a Montague, Juliet is a Capulet, Capulet hate Montague, Montague hate Capulet. Now if you have both facts of "Romeo like Juliet" and "Juliet like romeo" they fuse into a higher "IMPLICIT fact" call insight ie "Romeo and Juliet have reciprocal love", the next insight is "Capulet and Montague hate each other", finally once you introduce the last batch of facts you final insight of "forbidden love" which is a "deep insight" as it is a conclusion you can't have without the previous one. The thing is that facts can be ordered in any sequences (which is a good property to translate a story into a open world), what matter is insight, remove one fact from this Shakespearean premise and it does not hold up insight is the revelation of the audience and all the insight and facts form the "mental model".

The mental model is the key, how you build it is how you control the audience perception of you story.

edit:
I have no example of graph, all people use different personal notation. The graph is more of a metaphor of the structure of the mental model to steer you in the right direction.

But let's say you write a story snippet like:

"The princess ruto has been eaten by the god jabu jabu when she on duty to feed him."

In a game you break it into a series of facts that you distribute spatially to many npc, possibly smartly gating them through some activity or mini games, as the player explore all the nook and cranny he build the mental model of what happen what to do.

- The king says: his daughter has disappear (fact) he is worried about her (flavor or maybe fact depending if you use it or not)
- npc 1: Ruto is our princess
- npc 2: ruto was last seen when she was going toward the jabu jabu
- npc 3, after a fishing mini game: you are as good as ruto (flavor but implicit fact that ruto  fish)
npc 4: jabu jabu is our god
npc 5: ruto was on duty to fed the god
npc 6: jabu jabu really like fish from this pond (where the mini game happen)
npc 7: the jabu jabu is hungry, you can hear his splash when he is hungry
place 1: you can go to see the jabu jabu, he has a big mouth that can gobble anyone entirely.

If the player give the jabu jabu fish the jabu jabu eat him and the player is locked inside his body. By now the player guess what happen to the princess and try to find her inside the jabu jabu.

The stake of this snippet is not on the player, however it has been established that the player need the royal seal to progress, obviously the king is too sad to think about the seal, so the stake of the scene (the disappearance ) became the player's stake by proxy (the need to progress). Notice "the quest" isn't given to the player, he understand it through the mental model.

Similarly in our serial killer example we can establish the killer ki_ll girl who frustrate him, now if his fiancee has a friend who push her to leave him because he is kind of a jerk, the audience can anticipate what will happen, imagine a scene where the girl decide to go and pack it up, as she finish to pack up, she want to write a break up letter, just before she start writing the letter her boyfriend learn the news and walk furiously toward the house, as she try to write the letter, she realize she don't have paper, she spend time getting some paper, then the pen broke, each step the boyfriend get closer, some dude stop the friend to chat unknowingly, etc ... The anticipation of consequence define and build the emotion.

The mental model is not just for the audience it's also for character to anticipate their reactions. The mental model is not just for negative tension, it works too with positive emotions, for example a mother who tease her daughters with a big surprise. It's all about modulating the emotion the base of facts and insight create inside the head of character and audience.