I agree very strongly with just about everything you wrote, except for this bit.

So instead I would like to focus on how to think about designing games with an emergent narrative, which is something that I think is less well explored. Not a procedurally generated script, or a randomly generated storyline, but games that, through the course of playing them, leave you with a story at the end just because what you did in the game made sense as a story.

The thing is, I don't think you can tell a story that way. You most definitely set themes for your game by the mechanics it has, but themes are not a narrative.
Now, there are already games that don't have an explicit narrative. They just have their mechanics and the themes those mechanics produce. Dwarf Fortress comes to mind. However, the stories that come from playing Dwarf Fortress don't come from the game itself. They come from the players. It is the players of Dwarf Fortress that take the themes of that game (the biggest one being 'Defeat is Inevitable') and craft them into stories. That's fine for players that want to craft stories from prefabricated pieces (i.e. the themes of the game), but those who want to be told a story will be left unsatisfied.

The question you have to ask is who do you want to be the author of the story(s)? If it isn't you it will be the players... or there won't be a story at all.


EDIT: I should add that it is great to be able to talk to someone else that has taken the time to think about the thematic power of gameplay mechanics. It's not something that seems to be commonly understood.

A more realistic take on the 'rain pummels you to death' thing would be if there were hailstones mixed into it. In the real world rain won't batter you to death, but hailstones can.

This is a topic near and dear to my heart.

This is a problem especially with games that have dialogue as I don't want the player to feel like they're playing a character in a set-in-stone story. I want the player to feel like they ARE the character, or that they're exploring or learning the story along with the character, at least.

This is something I want to see done in games more. So few games let you feel like you are a character in a story rather than controlling a character for the non-story bits.

That said, I don't think it can be done while letting the player character talk.
Think about it this way: Is the dialogue important to the story? Presumably it is. Since it is important to the story, the player must handle it, or the player will feel like he has lost control of the story bits (which he has).
Is the player choosing what to say? No. Even if you give the player a list of options to choose from, the player doesn't get to choose what options are on the list. And even when the player might completely agree with an option, the player character will probably say it in a way that the player wouldn't.
(This is why I chose to try and tell the story completely without dialogue in my current game.)

You can definitely still make the player empathise strongly with the player character (or at least strongly encourage them to), even with dialogue. You just need to make sure that the desires of the player and the desires of the player character are consistently aligned. If the player wants to get stronger, then the character must want to as well. If the character is afraid of something, the player must be made to fear it also. If the player enjoys killing his enemies, then the character must do so too.
Everything in the gameplay affects the player, and therefore will affect the character of the player character. How does the player character feel about dying? Is he only helping people for the rewards they offer? The answers to these questions depend on what story you are trying to tell.

Stories tend to be written backwards. That is, the author generally decides what he/she wants the ending to be, then decides on a series of events that will cause it to happen. For a game, I recommend that you figure out what you want players to experience at the conclusion of the game, and then find gameplay that will encourage that emotion. Do you want the player to finish the game feeling triumphant and powerful? Relieved? Angry and bitter? Sad?

This reminds me about the time I was asked if I thought young kids would like the game I was making. After a bit of thought I replied that I think that kids would love it... but I'm not sure parents will.

I didn't have a clear audience in mind when I designed my game. I still don't. I guess I mainly made this game for me (or maybe a younger me). It's possible that this lack of a clear audience will come back to bite me when I find almost nobody else is interested in it, but... I didn't get into making games for the money, but because there are games that I want to make. If I didn't make games for me, then I wouldn't want to be making those games.

This might be different when your're part of a team instead of a solo developer, but even then I have trouble imagining that I would collaborate to design a game that didn't appeal to me. Your target audience must always include yourself, or you won't put in the care that art needs from it's creator. Besides, how else will you know if you are making something that the target audience will like?



Regarding cultural responsibility in games... I tend to regard the problem as being that not enough people, particularly game creators, regard games as art (or at least, don't regard their games as art). Art communicates to people on an extremely profound level. The 'It's just a game' defence can only be offered up by someone that doesn't believe the game is saying anything.

So I've hit a bit of disappointment over the last week. I was hoping to add normal mapped shading to my sprites with a neat tool called Sprite Lamp. I was holding off on posting here until I had something cool from it to show.
Unfortunately, it's proven to be more difficult than I had hoped. I'm currently waiting to see if the developer for sprite Lamp can put together a single-pass lighting shader (which he apparently intended to do anyway), because Unity can't do sprite batching for anything that uses multi-pass shaders. I'm heavily relying on Unity's dynamic batching system to keep the draw calls under control, which basically means that multi-pass shaders simply aren't an option for the terrain tiles.

The short of this is that I don't know if I will be able to add in the cool lighting that I wanted to do, and it will be at least a week until I find out. I've already spent a week to get this far and don't have anything to show for it (yet). So for now I'm working on things which will improve the game and don't rely on any particular way of doing lighting.

This is what I did yesterday:


In game terms it's just a gate that uses fire as the key, but I'm finding that it's a neccessary thing to have to make sure players don't accidentally miss picking up the ability to breathe fire.

I had originally named my game Dragon's Passage, but at the urging of colleagues I changed it. I ended up going with the name Dragon's Wake, which I actually like better, but I would be interested to get extra opinions.



The game itself is a 2D adventure platformer where you play as a newly hatched dragon. You have to learn to fly and breathe fire while on an adventure to find/make a place for yourself in the world.

Thanks for the encouragement.

I didn't take any photos of the both myself (which was a serious oversight... I'll have to fix that next time), but the AIE have some people who did a short overview video of the games hosted by the AIE at PAX Prime. You can see the video here. The Dragon's Wake section starts about the 3:30 mark.

Your game references reminded me of something. When I was at PAX Prime people would see the points in the game where the dragon takes a nap a when he wakes up he would have a slightly larger sprite, and they would say 'Oh, he evolved!'. And my reaction would be 'He's not evolving. He's just growing up.'
I blame Pokemon. 

I have recently been able to confirm that I will have booth space to show Dragon's Wake at PAX Australia on Friday Oct 31st, and the morning of Sunday Nov 1st. I'll be sharing space with a bunch of other games being promoted by the Academy of Interactive Entertainment, but hopefully I won't be too hard to find.

I have interesting plans for things that I intend to change from what I showed at PAX Prime, so if you saw it there it should still be worth your time to check it out again.

That's all for now. I hope to see many of you there!

This looks really nice. How many people are there working on it? And congratulations on getting onto steam. I think I might avoid playing it before it's done so as to give myself the best experience when I do play it, but I'm definitely looking forward to it.

It's been confirmed. I have a booth to show off Dragon's Wake at PAX Australia. I'll only be showing for the first day and a half (Friday and Saturday), so if any of you are going to Melbourne for this and you want to have a try of the demo be sure to look for me on those days.
I haven't yet been told what booth number I'll be given, unfortunately. I do know that I will be packed in with a bunch of other games that are being made by AIE graduates. The AIE is hosting us, so just keep an eye out for banners or posters promoting the Academy of Interactive Entertainment.


No new stuff to show off just yet, so have an animation of something that's been in for awhile.



Remember, rabbits are food, not friends!

One of the great things about Unity is that is has built in functionality to allow users to rebind their controls, including controller input. I couldn't stop players from rebinding the controls for Dragon's Wake even if I wanted to. Getting the default controls right is still important though.

My current project is a 2D Adventure Platformer where you play as a newly hatched dragon. It's a story driven game with a focus on telling the narrative through the gameplay. As you explore the world you have to learn how to fly and breathe fire while figuring out the world around you.

So here we go with another pretty picture.



Awww, he's all tuckered out.

And there we have my first animated GIF. I'll be creating more of these. In fact I'll try to avoid still shots as much as possible from now on.

This scene is something I have had in the game for awhile now, but I think it really captures the mood I'm trying to set (which is why I have another version of it in the

. It's really sweet and innocent... from the perspective of a dragon.

It's not really useful for me at the moment since I have chosen to forgo conversations entirely in my current game, but it is definitely interesting.

I personally find branching dialogue to have problems with immersion. It means that the player cannot himself be the protagonist of the story. Instead the 'hero' of the story is a character that the player has a limited amount of control over. This can still be fun and interesting (and very versatile), but I think it lacks the power of an approach that causes the player to identify more closely with the player character.

So this is a topic near and dear to my heart. I've seen numerous threads and articles about it scattered around the web, but it hasn't quite yet exploded into public awareness, and even most developers that I know don't seem to think about it too much.

The idea is simple at heart. Games aren't movies or novels. Instead of trying to tell the story, or show the story, we should let the audience play the story. When we do that we will finally start realizing the full potential of our medium.

Of course there are some games that do in fact already do this, but they tend to be the exception rather than the norm. Games like Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons, LIMBO, and Shadow of the Colossus. Thomas Was Alone and The Binding of Isaac also probably qualify.


Of course just because the idea is simple, doesn't mean that it is simple to do. For example, I have chosen to avoid using text or speech to tell any of the story in my current project because I think it creates a more compelling experience, but it has made conveying certain concepts challenging.

Are there other developers here that are attempting to use the gameplay as your primary storytelling device? I hope so. I would love to see more games like that.

I'm feeling like sharing so I thought I might do a quick bonus update.

Today I took a loving mother, gouged one of her eyes out and carved up her corpse so that it looks like she was in a fight.

In other words, I drew this:



EDIT: Somehow I completely failed to see the earlier post by TheAnndddyyyy. To answer your questions, I'm going to focus on getting basic versions of the remaining levels done first, although there will be a bit of bug fixing and minor adjustments/bits of content mixed in.

The PAX booth I was in was 6002. It was a booth that collectively held several games made by groups that are part of the AIE (Academy of Interactive Entertainment) Incubator program. We were kind of tucked away in a corner so we didn't get as much traffic as the Indie Megabooth, but at PAX even a 'low' number of people kept us plenty busy!

Well, like I predicted in the last post, I haven't managed to get much development done this week. So instead of talking about technical stuff I will talk about something near and dear to my heart - stories in games.

Sometimes I tell people that I love games for their storytelling, and then they give me odd looks. This is understandable since most games don't have a story much more advanced than "These are the bag guys. Kill them."
But there are games that have affected me powerfully, and done so in a way that could not have been done through a book or movie. When I think about why I am a gamer, why I love this medium so much, these are the games that I think of. Games such as the original Prince of Persia, and Shadow of the Colossus. More recently there is Thomas Was Alone and Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons.

The thing that games can do that other mediums can't is gameplay. At the moment most game designers have in their heads this weird separation between gameplay and story. This can be seen in how the games tell their stories (i.e. here have some gameplay. Now have a cutscene. Have some more gameplay. Have another cutscene.). Few studios seem to understand that the gameplay should be part of the storytelling.

This is part of why I chose to avoid using and text or voice acting in Dragon's Wake. By taking those tools away I am forced to rely on other ones to tell the story. I am also avoiding cutscenes for similar reasons. They interfere with player immersion, and are often just clumsy. Players know that they aren't going to die during a cutscene so they relax, often at the times when the story is saying they should be the most tense.

Back to gameplay. What does it mean to tell a story through gameplay? Let's take an example from the original Prince of Persia. In one of the early levels of Prince of Persia you find the level exit, but you still need to open it. So you go find the switch that opens the exit and backtrack, only to find that a mysterious mirror has appeared and is now blocking your path. In order to continue you have to jump through the mirror, but instead of breaking it you simply pass through and a shadow version of yourself pops out the other side.
Would it have been the same if the designer had just used a cutscene at this point? No I don't think so. If this had happened in a cutscene it would have been something that happened to someone else. The shadow clone would have resulted from the actions of the player character rather than the player. It would have created distance between the player and the important moment in the story.


Sorry for the rambling wall of text everyone. I promise to have some pics in the next update!

I have returned from PAX, and it was amazing. I attended the two days of PAX Dev that ran just prior to PAX prime and heard a lot of interesting speakers. The most entertaining one was the '10 Rules for Writing Rules'. The most informative was probably 'Indie Game Marketing 101', from which the speaker has kindly posted the slides on his website.

PAX Prime itself was crazy. Being a one-man-team I had to man the booth showing Dragon's Wake myself for essentially the entire time. I did snatch a few hours to check out what was going on elsewhere, but for the most part I only got to have a quick look at things before moving on.

The general reaction from people to Dragon's Wake was positive. A lot of people did walk by, glance at the game and move on, but with everything there was to see at PAX it's hard to say that means they didn't like it. The people that did play (and there were a lot of them), tended to really like it. A common comment I heard was that the game was much more fun to play than it looked. At an estimate, I would say that most people that started playing would play for about 15-20 minutes. Almost all of them accepted the business cards I had printed, which will hopefully remind them to vote for the game on Greenlight, and to talk about the game to their friends.

There were of course bugs and problems with the game that I hadn't anticipated. One annoying one would cause players to get stuck because the save systems sometimes thought that they had completed things that they hadn't reached yet. Another one would cause most of the music to stop playing if they played using a save slot that had previously completed the demo. And there were a number of points where players became lost and struggled to find where to go next. This is all good stuff because it means that I now know about these problems and can fix them. I now have a better idea of what the player experiences when they play the game.

Even though I didn't have a lot of time to do so, I was able to check out a few of the booths being run by other indie developers. The highlights for me were meeting with Red Hook and getting a chance to play an alpha version of their game Darkest Dungeon, as well as playing a demo of the game Below. Both are amazing games and I can't wait for them to released.



What lies in the future? Well, for the next couple of weeks I'll be catching up on things that I let slide during the build up to PAX. That means I probably won't be getting much development done. That does not mean, however, that you will be hearing less from me. In fact I am going to make a commitment to posting here at least once a week.

[clear]

The problem as I see it is this - we have the breeds of lizards. The idea is that the player should be able to learn the behavior of each breed. "Greens are slow and dumb" for example, or "Blues can't take much abuse, but can climb walls". What I worry about is two scenarios. One is that individual differences drowns the breed traits, so that everything becomes a random sludge. The other is that in order to not end up in the random sludge, we will need to make the individual traits so very small that they are actually not significant in any way, and then the effort was in vain.

One solution is to have the differences be purely cosmetic. Short tail, long tail, that sort of stuff. This is safe, so I think we might do this kind of stuff regardless.

Another is to have somewhat rare, but very clear unique individuals that appear late in the game when you've already come to know the categories. That would be stuff like "It is very clearly a blue lizard in every part of its behavior, but it's large as a green lizard". The kind of stuff that can be easily understood by an experienced player. This solution would probably take on a bit of a flavor of "bosses", as these deviant individuals are likely going to be mostly harder than regulars, and the element of unfamiliarity and surprise will play in their favor either way.

A third option might be to have one set of traits that varies by breed and a different set of traits that can vary by individual. So brains, toughness and speed could be determined by the breed, but the sharpness of their hearing and/or sight, or their agressivness could could be up to the individual.

In preparation for making the most out of my time at PAX I have launched a Steam Greenlight page for Dragon's Wake. Unfortunately I can't embed trailers here so you will have to follow the link. And maybe after you view the trailer you might think about giving the game a vote.

Creating the trailer took more time than I expected it to, mainly because Adobe Premier decided to be... uncooperative. But it is done now, and I am quite pleased with the results.
A special thanks goes to to Kieran Roberts who is doing the music for Dragon's Wake and contributed a modified version of one of the tracks specially for the trailer.