Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
player's role and the kinds of gameplay that he will experience in that role. You
may make a list of episodes or levels that you would like to include in the game
during the concept stage, and you can think about what the player may do in each
level, but you must not write the whole story yet. (To reiterate, you will need to lay
out the structure of a branching story before you try to compute the budget for the
entire project, but you should not actually write the story itself.)
We want you to wait to write the story because, until you know what gameplay the
game will offer, you do not know what kinds of challenges the player will face and
what sorts of actions she will be permitted to take. Even more important, you don't
yet know what sorts of actions she won't be able to take. It's easy to write a story
that includes too many different kinds of actions—actions that the programmers
may not have time to implement in software. If you've written a story that includes
the player's avatar riding a horse as well as traveling on foot and only later decide
not to implement horseback riding for technical reasons, you've wasted a lot of time.
The task of writing the story falls into the second major stage of game design, the
elaboration stage. You should begin writing after you define the game's primary
gameplay mode, and preferably after you define all the major gameplay modes you
will offer, because the details of those modes will tell you what sorts of actions the
player can take and under what circumstances. In reality, writing the story will be
an iterative process that takes place in conjunction with level design because level
design creates the moment-by-moment sequence of experiences that the player can
go through. If a game presents narrative only between levels, you can write a story
with large granularity, in pieces after completing the design of each level, or even
after all the levels are designed. But if narrative events can occur within a level,
then you must write the story as you design the levels.
Other Considerations
This section wraps up the discussion of interactive stories by addressing the frus-
trated author syndrome and episodic and serial delivery, and includes a few thoughts
about how the industry may tell stories in the future.
The Frustrated Author Syndrome
Game designers who would really rather be authors in noninteractive media—
would-be movie directors, for example—often make a couple of key mistakes when
writing interactive stories. First, they tend to write linear stories while pretending to
themselves and to the players that the story offers more agency than it really does,
promising a big role for the player and then actually giving him almost none at all.
The game Critical Path illustrates this problem; its introduction suggests that the
player gets to do all kinds of exciting things when in fact its story is so rigidly linear
that the avatar dies every time the player deviates from the storyline in any way.
(Rumors say that the developers named the game Critical Path in an effort to justify
this weakness.)
 
 
Search WWH ::




Custom Search