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[teatreegames]

There are a lot of games out there without any actual story, per se (or at least not a very solid one), that seem to be doing well for themselves. Most of these tend to be management type games.

[loottheroom]

Well, i made all the characters on paper, and made some of the mechanics. But, what really matters for me is the story. But i can't just give the characters i made roles. That's the problem.

If you don't have an idea for a story/plot or a world yet, but you do have characters, you can use them to help you develop your story.

A very straightforward exercise for doing this is to ask two questions for each character:

• What does this character want?
• What (or who) is preventing this character from getting what they want?

With just those two questions answered, you've got some conflict - and conflict is a great tool to drive story. From there you can start fleshing things out and thinking about how they interact with the actual gameplay elements of what you're making (you say you have some of the mechanics, so I assume you know what kind of game you want to create).

[Eigen]

Oh the naiveté of a 13 year old.. but we've all been there. Dream of making a game that makes itself never dies.

[pelle]

Book of Lenses (look it up, Im on my phone) has a chapter more or less explaining to the novice designer why open world creating its own stories can not work. Great book!

Also look up the books by Chris Crawford. Early game designer that did a lot of pioneering thinking 30 years ago. Then he kind of disappeared and spent forever sinking his money into developing Interactive Storytelling. He wrote an interesting book a few years about how that failed. Not that he has abandoned the idea, but it shows the surprising complexity of it all.

Not saying I did not also think I could do it when I was 14.

There is some experimental little game that actually do generate a plot they say. But it is some minimalistic thing where you talk to two persons and a simple story unfolds. Quoted in some books, but I never saw it. The step up from that to open world is not trivial. But it is a fun problem to think about.

[JWK5]

Imagine a movie where the cameraman walks away from the set and just wanders off out a nearby field with the camera flailing about as he goes because, due to an overwhelming attention deficit issue, he has lost sight of the job he was given and really isn't paying attention to the camera anymore. Every now and again the camera swerves through the air has he suddenly spins to observe some random thing that has caught his eye but it always turns out to be nothing noteworthy. Welcome to open world gaming without a point.