Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
You should play with the audience using their little weaknesses (as already men-
tioned, greed). A hint that an item is very important for a walkthrough of the game,
imbue that it is really precious thing the players should be hold dear, keeping like the
apple of their eye. And after that, take away the item by forcing the player to use it
much earlier than somebody may expect. This will be a very dramatic moment, full
of doubts and emotions, because only you as the author know that the thing is not
really important, and it is not precious at all; however, the player does not have this
information. Here's the illustration. At one of the first levels of the Trans-Terra Ex-
press, you may let Anna-Amelia find a propeller. The player already knows that this
item is extremely important to fix the airplane. It looks like the key element for the
entire game, but we should construct the plot in a different way. The correct propeller
would be found much later in the game, so the current one is fake in a global sense
since you simply force the player to use the propeller to fix an air-driven draisine.
Monologues
It is good when characters make some commentaries about game situations or
simply share their opinion using short and pithy phrases. This practice has several
advantages. First of all, this is the way to express somebody's personality; secondly,
the phrases can be considered as the voice of the game. The latter one can speak
with a player through the environment, but sometimes the faster way is through
words. For example, we are talking about a locked door; when the protagonist
touches it, the game reports about the door's state by playing the sound of a clanking
lock, displaying a short animation of a shaking door handle (an environmental an-
swer), and forcing the main hero to say, "The door is locked" (verbal answer). Choos-
ing between these two types of answers, you see that the second one is more simple
and at the same time very convincing. This does not mean that the environment re-
action can be neglected; both types should cooperate to achieve the best results.
One of the creative objectives is to reduce the sameness of phrases. The character's
speech about the same situation should be diverse; a special text array can be cre-
ated, and each sentence can be chosen randomly. The larger the array is the better.
Here are a few examples of different phrases in an array:
•
Locked door
: "It is locked," "I need a key," "Why don't they keep it open?" "I
need to figure out how to open it," and "A locked door cannot stop me!"
