Storytelling in Theory - The Game Maker's Companion: Game Development - page 195

Figure 8-3. Branching out your story can quickly get out of hand.

There are different ways of tackling this problem. One obvious one is to kill the player every
time they make a choice we don't want them to. But that's a poor solution and not very fun for
the player.
Another way to do it is to write the branches so that they meet every now and then. Say Flynn
had stayed on the merchant ship and gone to a different port than the pirate town. He still has to
gain information to find the Pirate King. So we let him find it in this other location and then send
him to the entrance of the cave. Now we have a point where the branching stories have come
back together and that makes it a lot more manageable to write the different versions of the story.
Instead of a tree structure that branches outward forever, we now have something like the
structure shown in Figure 8-4.

Figure 8-4. The branching is now under control even though the player can still get a vastly different game
depending on his choices.

This structure is a lot easier to write a satisfying story for and the player is still allowed to
influence the story.
These are two examples of how the story can pan out interactively. There are plenty of other
structures that you can use. But they all have three problems, or challenges, that are worth
considering when you make a game:
• Did I miss out?

• Interesting choices

• Wasted content