Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
Story Beginning
Non-Interactive Storytelling/Reflective Choices
Story-Branching Choice
Story Ending
“Shrub”
“Reconverging
Branches”
“Choices at
Ending”
Figure 7.7
Possible structures emerging while assembling a branching story.
Besides the quantity of story, there's the question of quality. No matter the path taken, we want
our stories to feel satisfying, with a plot and outcomes that make sense to the player's intellect
and imagination. In 2005, I was a game designer at a studio called Gamelab, working on the
aforementioned
Egg vs. Chicken.
Another team at Gamelab was developing
Plantasia
(2005),
in which the main character is a faerie who helps a gardener bring flowers into bloom.
Planta-
sia
's designer, Nick Fortugno, originally intended the game's story to culminate in a branching
choice: does the faerie pursue a relationship with the
gardener or leave the garden behind?
Ultimately, he decided that a choice
wouldn't
make sense in this story; the things the characters
had gone through, the way they had developed and the events of the plot, all pointed toward
a relationship as the ending that made the most sense. It wouldn't have been hard to create an
alternate ending where, despite those cues, the faerie decided to avoid romance, but in Nick's
opinion, it would have felt like an awkward, unsupported branch hanging off to the side, a
vestigial limb.
By contrast, Emily Short's game
Floatpoint
(2006) has a story constructed to lead up to a crucial
moment—again, near the end of the game. The main character is a human diplomat who's an
envoy to an alien planet. Through playing, the player discovers that this diplomat must make a
single choice that will send a message to the aliens and determine the course of their relation-
ship with humanity. Much of
Floatpoint
is spent exploring an alien city to learn more about
