Laying out the Storyline Narrative

The narrative is arranged out of a series of chunks (plot nodes)?. These chunks are the basic building blocks of each piece of narrative that is going to be told. They can stretch over multiple locations, as the player may move from one location to another to resolve the chunk.

Using the ideas mentioned in the previous blog entry, the plot nodes can be though of as being placed in a random fashion and arranged to make a web-like structure. Each node may have an effect on other nodes that the game will lay down in the narrative.

These relationships will then require definition. I'm going to have to investigate systems such as using tags that are shared between nodes that the system then uses to create links between the different nodes. I found this, which has given me a great deal of thought on the possiblities of this system.

From Brian L. Price:

Still, in order to form plots, relationships between plot nodes must be defined. The primary relationships are: exclusion, dependance, time frame acceleration, time frame deceleration, probability increase, and probability decrease. That is, the transition from non-existant to existant of one plot node will: cause the removal of all plot nodes which are related to it by exclusion, the existance of all dependant plot nodes, a time frame shift toward or away from the present for all plot nodes related through time frame acceleration or deceleration, and the alteration of the probability for future existance of all plot nodes related by probability increase or decrease.

Plot nodes are broken down into smaller units, such as scenes. Each of the Plot nodes should have a weighting as to how likely they are to appear, as well as being conditionally based. e.g. 'This node' will not trigger unless the player has fulfilled 'this condition'.

Some plot nodes are concerned with long term goals, and they will need to be set early, as they could contain information such as the games finish conditions. However, other events, such as the death of a character, is likely to be outside the basic plot node structure, as it would be directly driven by the game-play actions, rather than the narrative. A character may be killed by a plot node, but this would be the exception, as it is constraining the system, which should be driven by the game actions, rather than an outside design wherever possible.

For example, the plot nodes currently in play would have no mention of any characters being killed. The player kills a random member of faction A. This acts as the trigger for a new plot node: the random choice is for the faction to take revenge and send a hit man to attack the player.

The current pet project that I am working on is a story system to handle stories in a dynamic way. It's related to the TV-style content that I mentioned in a post in March. Anyway, while doing some research for this, I've veered into a look at procedurally generated systems - mainly through a blog post on The Age's website which was written by an old work colleague, James "DexX" Dominguez, on these types of systems.

This lead me to this image from Introversion's current, in-development game, Subversion which can be seen here (the thread on Introversion's forums about this cool city system which creates this image is here).

It's interesting, but seeing this spiderweb-like, image made me think of using a similar structure for narrative, where the 'nodes' of the story are interlinked, allowing the player to find their way through their own story. It does make me wonder though, if you were using this sort of abstract, visual representation, is the player starting in the middle of a web (from a fixed starting point) working their way out to one of multiple endings, or are they starting at one of multiple starting points working their way through to a fixed conclusion?

I think that the latter is more in line with the systems that I am visualising, where the point of the system is not to create infinite choices for the player, but to handle their game decisions dynamically so that the game feels that the story is reacting to the player, rather than funnelling them down a fixed tube ('tubes=evil' in my current thinking, which is probably just the response to a difficult project!).

Casual games shouldn't be dumb

Talking to my producer, he had the point that games companies make games that they want to play, which is not the same as what consumers want to buy. We were both agreeing that this ties into the current thinking about the Wii.

Developers are not making games that capitalise on the Wii's market strengths, because they don't think like the Wii's market. And that goes back to a misunderstanding (or mislabeling) of what the 'casual' market actually is. I consider myself to be in that market these days because, being married with two kids, I don't have time to sit down and play through an epic 20-40 hour storyline.

But I don't want to play some game that is just "press the space bar to win". The challenge as I see it is to produce a game that lends itself to an experience that is not time pressured; that I can come back to when I have the time.

Hmm. Hang on. I just read about that point here on next-gen.biz where he talks about the universal pause. That's one of the things that drove me made about Zelda: Twilight Princess. I'd be halfway through a dungeon, only to have to go look after my kids, and would just lose twenty minutes of gameplay.

Making a game that relies on a player being able to dedicate a solid hour of uninteruptible time in order to make progress just comes across as rather self-indulgent to me. Especially when there is not even an in-game justification for the lack of saves. It just feels like an arbitrary decision because (I assume) Zelda games are always like this.

Big sellers for 2008

This list of the top selling games for 2008 did the rounds at work the other day, which provided some interesting discussion points, as will the follow up analysis. It's the usual depressing list of mediocre film tie-ins, licensed IPs and sequels! Who keeps buying the film games? Shrek! Transformers 3! Spiderman 3! I shudder. Maybe there out to be a law about grandparents buying games for presents.

Though as an aside, I overheard a very interesting conversation a couple of months ago between two people of grandparently age who were buying DS games for themselves, and talking about the games that they enjoyed playing with their grandkids. The times they are a-changing.

Interesting that Assassin's Creed did so well. I don't know why, but I just got the impression that it had kind of flopped.

The other thing that struck me about the list is the games that we don't talk about. There are a lot of games tucked away on that list that would have been would have had a very different development process to make (by which I mean - get this out the door quickly and we don't care what it looks like!), but have done quite well.

• Any of the High School Musical games.
• Hannah Montana
• Imagine Fashion Designer

Spot the connection! I know that talking about the 'girl' market has been done to death, but when you look at the 'quality' of the products offered, it's just astounding. The games are just vomited into the market place, safe in the realisation that their basic IP will override any flaws in their game design.

I've just encountered another example of this today. We're looking at horse-riding at the moment, and got a few of the 'targeted at the tween girl' horsey games.

There were three of us in howls of laughter at how bad the controls were. It was incredible that any game could ship with something that unplayable. Though I think it's the usual explanation: the developers would have become quite accustomed to using them as the controls and game were developed incrementally, without any outside feedback.

The same thing happened to me once when I was the QA test lead on a certain project. To us, the game was ridiculously easy, and we could finish the entire game in under an hour. But new players struggled to get out of the first room. The problem was that we new exactly where each creature was going to spawn into the game world, so they were all killed before they had a chance to fire at the player. If you didn't know where they were going to appear, you found yourself being shot at by a dozen enemies that were all around you, resulting in a deadly crossfire.

I've been a firm believer in rigourous focus testing ever since!

I suppose that this is all relates to this discussion here on gamasutra.com: Why do good people make bad games. It's a risk averse industry that is happy to take the easy money by making a cheaper product that has a guaranteed return, knowing that spending more money to make a better, or more polished game will not significantly increase sales. But the big downside to this is that there are certain markets, such as the teen/pre-teen girl market that just get crap foisted on them that the prestigious titles for the prestigious markets don't get. Sure there are crap shooters, and crap roleplaying games, but there isn't a AAA fashion game!

Zelda has gone back into its box

The chance of finishing Zelda have greatly diminished!

What with being sick over the last two weeks all interest totally disappeared. I've picked up a My French Coach for the DS and am ploughing through that on the train trip to work.

It's not too bad, but I wish that it contained the masculine/feminine articles with the nouns. I've always had terrible trouble keeping all the le's, la's, du's, etc. straight and at the point that I'm at so far (just over a quarter of the way through) it hasn't really helped with that.

Still, it's not a bad system for reinforcing a lot of basic vocabulary, and I'm finding it quite challenging now that I'm approaching the half way point of the lessons.

Movie vs TV storytelling

Traditionally game story telling usually uses a film model of storytelling - there is one big overwhelming foe to fight, and the player's character (or characters) develop until such time as the can challenge foe is a suitably dramatic location.

The recent project I was on (that just got canned) was a fairly traditional 3rd person action game. Now, when development started there was an assumption right from the start that we'd just be using the same old method of storytelling: here's all the cutscenes laid out at the beginning, let's just string some gameplay together to link them up.

There has to be something better than that.

Id like to see more games move to something more akin to the television model used in series like those produced by Joss Whedon. What frequently happens in his series is that each season there will be a group of episodes at the beginning that just establish characters. Foreshadowing of the future BBEG (Big Bad Evil Guy) starts to take place with the main characters encountering minions performing tasks that will be part of the overall plan, until the BBEG is revealed.

The BBEG wins a few battles to unsettle our heroes/heroines (now that's a revolutionary concept in games, and I know - it's hard to pull off without disenfranchising the player) until the heroes come to the climactic battle.

But in between the main story arc episodes there are numerous 'filler' episodes that take the characters away from this plot and break it up.

New locations are added every season to the basic group of sets that have been built for the show, increasing the variety of locations that can be used.

I think this could serve as a much better model for episodic content, with player's downloading the equivalent of a season, rather than an episode. It would contain a new BBEG for the player to fight, a new set of 'filler' episodes that could be thrown around (ideally in a random order, but I've got more details of that system to come), and slowly add new locations, while still keeping the story around those used previously.

Just about to finish Zelda: The Phantom Hourglass

Almost finished Zelda: The Phantom Hourglass on the DS. It's the first game in ages that I've come close to finishing, but that final slog is pretty hard. Not in an "oh my god, I'm so crap at playing this" way. Hardly that.

But I've found myself asking "do I really want to keep going with this just to see a couple of boss sequences, and a cut scene".

The ending of games always seems to be a disappointment. Flashy movie then it's all over.