8 ms·

Standard patterns in choice-based games (2015)

254 points by Ariarule 2y ago

flpm 2y ago
This is very interesting, thanks for posting! Makes me think of the big choice diagrams in Detroit: Become Human. I wonder if there is any literature about this?
- the__alchemist 2y ago
  I'm curious about Alpha Protocol. Probably the #1 game I've played for choices matter. Detroit is interesting, in that it includes some choices made by passing or failing QTEs. They really did the "You will get emotionally stomped if you screw this up!" well in that game. I don't know its structure well, as I only played it once. (So experience only one path.) Unless you count time caves like The Stanley Parable!
- photonthug 2y ago
  > I wonder if there is any literature about this? Came here looking for the same.. some kind of map from the game design angle more towards game theory. Fun semi related tangent, I was curious to know authors background, and the About page quotes Borges “garden of forking paths” which jives nicely with tfa. Cataloging rather than inventing is an underrated activity in math sometimes, and we need to do both. Game garden taxonomy!
dejobaan 2y ago
This is great. I've been a game dev for about 30 years, much of which I've spent working with narrative design/writing teams. One thing I've learned to watch out for, especially among junior designers, is what the author labels the "Time Cave." Narrative branching, done well, is fantastic—it gives the player agency and lets them make the story their own (as it were). But when you're creating the story graph, it's easy to get lost in it and lavish care on one path at the exclusion of the others. You can easily end up with one or two long, greatly-detailed paths, and (because dev time is finine, and you need to move on to writing other parts of the game) a pile of other paths that are shorter and less interesting. If the player takes one of the shorter ones, they end up missing out on all your coolest stuff. The tools I would design for the kinds of games I created specifically made it easy to create a main story trunk with side paths (that rejoined the trunk), and more difficult to branch/loop/etc. Of course, that's not the only (or even the best) way to do narrative design—Disco Elysium is a masterwork because it did the branching, merching, loops, jumps, random checks, and so forth, so well!
- spencerflem 2y ago
  Your games rule :)
  - esperent 2y ago
    What game is it?
    - spencerflem 2y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dejobaan_Games https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dejobaan_Games Played so much AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! back in the day, still never 5 starred everything. Holds up IMO. Their other games are cool too
      - dejobaan 2y ago
        You are too kind; thank you!
- chii 2y ago
  I think it's a mistake to try get a story-focused game to have branching paths, akin to the old choose-your-own-adventure books. Until LLMs can proactively create new stories for the player to enjoy dynamically, i think it's always fraught with peril that the player fails to get the full story (or have to repeatedly play it and choose something else to try). My personal preference would be to have a single, on rails story, where the player don't truly have a choice. It's an interactive movie. Or, pick a sandbox mechanic, and let the player do what they want directly, and compute the consequence (the most common type being the physics system).
  - spencerflem 2y ago
    imo its not necessary to get the "whole" story, or replay it to see every possibility just seing "my" story is enough interactive movie type games are great but they're a different experience from choice style games which are also great, (and ofc the article shows that there's many styles within this too, all with a different experience) I don't believe LLMs can recreate the same authored experience that has a point of view. I think they'll be okay at genre work soon enough though, for better or worse. But thats not a type of game I'm personally interested in.
codazoda 2y ago
This is fantastic. Does anyone have any book references that help you do writing in some of these formats.
- egglemonsoup 2y ago
  not sure if this perfectly addresses your question, but "Designing Games" by Tynan Sylvester is a great resource
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- livrem 2y ago
  There is this collection of 1980's internal design documents from Flying Buffalo that you can buy: https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/296847/t-t-solo-design-guidelines-how-to-write-a-solo https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/296847/t-t-solo-desi... It is old, but I do not know of any other books really on this topic. I enjoyed reading it anyway. One of the documents in it describes a simple manual algorithm for how to number the sections in a reasonable way (just randomly assigning numbers is not very reasonable, as anyone will learn from reading a book where the author did that). I implemented that in a simple pandoc filter: https://github.com/lifelike/pangamebook https://github.com/lifelike/pangamebook
kelseyfrog 2y ago
Reminds me of Disco Elysium Explorer[1]. Conversations 7, 8, 9, and 10 are great real life examples. 1. http://134.0.119.41 http://134.0.119.41
quotemstr 2y ago
Nier Automata is my favorite example of the relatively rare "Loop and Grow" pattern. You play through the game three times, with each iteration enriching and elaborating on the story and characters. Brilliant and weird narrative structure.
- twic 2y ago
  Isn't Loop and Grow roughly the same as Metroidvania? Or does Metroidvania not require an actual repeating loop, whereas Loop and Grow does?
tunesmith 2y ago
This is fun, and holds true in the creative writing group I run. We use a website I programmed that helps us collaborate on writing branching fiction. We have a mapping utility that creates graphs like in the article, except more animated (d3.js, elkjs). As different authors can start their own new stories, one thing I often have to deal with is that they want to design their story to have both long path lengths (multiple chapters before an ending), and also high choice count. Those of you who know something about geometric series know that this causes problems. I often have to tell them they can't have everything they want, which causes minor drama. :) As a result, one of our stories basically shot its "choice budget" in the first few chapters, leading to many linear paths in the latter parts of the narratives, which is fun in its own way. Another of our stories has just started playing with the "gauntlet pattern" as the article describes. For this one, we decided that all chapters must be in the "same universe", just following different characters' perspectives, and are planning for certain "anchor chapters" where all characters come together for a meeting. Probably the detective questioning them as a group (it's a murder mystery). All of our stories are supposed to be literary, so usually in third person, sometimes first, never the second-person. So we don't tend to use choices and chapters as directions and rooms; it's all about how the plot moves. We also don't track state; they're designed to be able to be printed as books people can page through. Overall a super-fun project for me and a handful of other writers, it's been a consistent way to spend a few hours of fun each week.
- withinboredom 2y ago
  You can still track small state via the reader. I vaguely remember a choose your own adventure as a kid: If you picked up the key earlier, turn to page XX Otherwise, turn to page YY It was entertaining to a) suddenly realize I had missed an important detail or b) allow me to “escape” if I can’t find the key or just don’t like that part of the book.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - dasfsi 2y ago
    One book I read did a similar thing, but managed to do it spoiler-free. There was a magical crystal, I think, that did some magical things. When you pick it up, the book says "To use the crystal, look at paragraph (current paragraph + 20)" and the author actually managed to do that for the most paragraphs from then onwards
Over2Chars 2y ago
gauntlet looks like GTA V's story mode pattern. GTA2 with it's competing gangs seem to have a "state" tracker in the form of reputation scores with the game, while having an open world map. As your reputation/state changed opportunities would become available/unavailable. I still think GTA 2's system is impressive.
ninetyninenine 2y ago
Ai can produce a new type of game where choices are dynamic and outcomes are generated by LLM agents. Fiction is an hallucination and LLMs are master hallucinators. Basically LLMs have to be given assets and game components that they can easily compose.
- withinboredom 2y ago
  Having had an LLM tell me a story, my answer would be that this is a dumb idea. LLMs have no concept of realistic cause and effect.
  - ninetyninenine 2y ago
    Nah I think not considering this idea at all is the extremely dumb and brain dead opinion. LLMs can tell stories. Realistic causes and effects aren’t even consistent in human stories. A good story isn’t 100 percent dependent on this. The LLM walks the line between hallucinating too much and sometimes not. Either way you can pretty much guarantee that almost all stories made in games now are already mostly written by an LLM. It’s just the writing is edited and curated by a human.
    - woolion 2y ago
      I've done a short LLM-powered VN, and LLM actions were restricted to local interactions only because of how weak it is at making up the story. It's great at removing the parser-based interactions, but I think that's it. There's a second technical problem that such stories are represented by a form of state-machine and that you would need to recompile it on the fly, making many checks very difficult (you would need to be able to check reachability on the fly, chunk transitions, etc). I think it would take years to get to the level of some of the great IF games with an LLM, and not just a cool PoC.
    - usrusr 2y ago
      As a grumpy old symbolic ai hand I do wonder if it was possible to build a (perhaps crude) ontology based simulation with consistency, cause and effect and so on and then use the results of that for prompting an LLM. But as a consumer, I lean far to the side of "give me a handcrafted tunnel experience with the illusion of choice" in the divide between consequences yes or no. I don't think I'd actually want this "simulation behind an LLM facade". If I'm in the mood for reading (or for listening to voice actors reading to me), I'd rather have it be something more meaningful than just a game state. But to those on the other end of the spectrum, this might actually be the holy grail of game building.
andrewstuart 2y ago
Nicely timed I’m making a CYOA game right now so very interested learn more.
- ardleon 2y ago
  Hi, I've just ‘finished’ an app to make interactive text stories/games and I'm looking for people to test my app with real stories, if you're interested I could help you with your story so you can publish it online wherever you want.
  - andrewstuart 2y ago
    I’d give it a look my email is in my profile
    - ardleon 2y ago
      ok, the only thing is that the application is in Spanish, at the time I did not contemplate that it was multilingual, among other things because I made it for me, if you are still interested I will write you and send you a link.
orthoxerox 2y ago
I don't quite understand what "floating modules" are. Is it something akin to sidequests in a CRPG or a "sandbox VN"? One interesting (and very complex) approach I've seen in VNs is multiple interleaved paths. Each path looks like a branch and bottleneck, but at certain points a decision taken on one path blocks or forces an outcome on another. You can linearize it into a single "branch and bottleneck" with extensive state tracking (this is how it's implemented, after all), but it's far easier to model it as multiple paths.
numbsafari 2y ago
I loved the Lone Wolf and associated books as a kid. One of my favorite things about them was seeing glimpses of possible story paths as I flipped around the book. When I would get to the end knowing I had missed some enticing possibility in the story line, I would immediately flip back to the beginning and start over.
eugenekolo 2y ago
This was actually a really cool analysis. Fun to see how these things can be broken down so cleanly into graphs.
tantalor 2y ago
Here's the story map for The Stanley Parable: https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fmp4ilh2s22ly.png https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fm... Looks like a "Time Cave"
yapyap 2y ago
could chess be considered a choice-based game?
rzzzt 2y ago
IIRC in one of the "Fighting Fantasy" books the hero is captured and can choose if they want to spend the rest of their lives in a standing-only or a sitting-only cage - the story ends badly either way. I was a bit angry reading it as I didn't have a "save state" earmarked with the index finger.
hcs 2y ago
I picked up some TutorText books recently, a programmed instructional series from the late 50s to 60s. At the end of every section there's a multiple choice question, one answer leads to the next section, the other to an explanation of why that answer was wrong. Pretty pure Gauntlet, I don't think there's any follow up questions on a dead end path, though I haven't mapped them all out fully. I like the idea of tailoring explanations to specifically anticipated misconceptions. Indexed here: https://gamebooks.org/Series/457/Show https://gamebooks.org/Series/457/Show And some exposition from Hackaday a few years ago: https://hackaday.com/2020/08/28/a-tale-of-tutor-texts/ https://hackaday.com/2020/08/28/a-tale-of-tutor-texts/ It looks like I need to take a closer look, that last article says > often the wrong answer pages take you on a detour path to correct your thinking before rejoining the main line of the book. which is what I was hoping to find.
chrisjj 2y ago
> To avoid obliterating the effect of past choices, branch-and-bottleneck structures almost always rely on heavy use of state-tracking (if a game doesn’t do this, chances are you are dealing with a gauntlet). I do not see that branch-and-bottleneck relies on use of state-tracking any more than gauntlet.
timonofathens 2y ago
Always nice to share: the Grim Fandango Puzzle Document (pdf): http://gameshelf.jmac.org/2008/11/13/GrimPuzzleDoc_small.pdf http://gameshelf.jmac.org/2008/11/13/GrimPuzzleDoc_small.pdf Perfect example of the "Branch and Bottleneck". It even includes similar graphics at the start of each act.

254 points by Ariarule 2y ago

flpm 2y ago

This is very interesting, thanks for posting! Makes me think of the big choice diagrams in Detroit: Become Human. I wonder if there is any literature about this?

the__alchemist 2y ago
I'm curious about Alpha Protocol. Probably the #1 game I've played for choices matter. Detroit is interesting, in that it includes some choices made by passing or failing QTEs. They really did the "You will get emotionally stomped if you screw this up!" well in that game. I don't know its structure well, as I only played it once. (So experience only one path.) Unless you count time caves like The Stanley Parable!
photonthug 2y ago
> I wonder if there is any literature about this? Came here looking for the same.. some kind of map from the game design angle more towards game theory. Fun semi related tangent, I was curious to know authors background, and the About page quotes Borges “garden of forking paths” which jives nicely with tfa. Cataloging rather than inventing is an underrated activity in math sometimes, and we need to do both. Game garden taxonomy!

dejobaan 2y ago

This is great. I've been a game dev for about 30 years, much of which I've spent working with narrative design/writing teams. One thing I've learned to watch out for, especially among junior designers, is what the author labels the "Time Cave." Narrative branching, done well, is fantastic—it gives the player agency and lets them make the story their own (as it were). But when you're creating the story graph, it's easy to get lost in it and lavish care on one path at the exclusion of the others. You can easily end up with one or two long, greatly-detailed paths, and (because dev time is finine, and you need to move on to writing other parts of the game) a pile of other paths that are shorter and less interesting. If the player takes one of the shorter ones, they end up missing out on all your coolest stuff. The tools I would design for the kinds of games I created specifically made it easy to create a main story trunk with side paths (that rejoined the trunk), and more difficult to branch/loop/etc. Of course, that's not the only (or even the best) way to do narrative design—Disco Elysium is a masterwork because it did the branching, merching, loops, jumps, random checks, and so forth, so well!

spencerflem 2y ago
Your games rule :)
- esperent 2y ago
  What game is it?
  - spencerflem 2y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dejobaan_Games https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dejobaan_Games Played so much AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! back in the day, still never 5 starred everything. Holds up IMO. Their other games are cool too
    - dejobaan 2y ago
      You are too kind; thank you!
chii 2y ago
I think it's a mistake to try get a story-focused game to have branching paths, akin to the old choose-your-own-adventure books. Until LLMs can proactively create new stories for the player to enjoy dynamically, i think it's always fraught with peril that the player fails to get the full story (or have to repeatedly play it and choose something else to try). My personal preference would be to have a single, on rails story, where the player don't truly have a choice. It's an interactive movie. Or, pick a sandbox mechanic, and let the player do what they want directly, and compute the consequence (the most common type being the physics system).
- spencerflem 2y ago
  imo its not necessary to get the "whole" story, or replay it to see every possibility just seing "my" story is enough interactive movie type games are great but they're a different experience from choice style games which are also great, (and ofc the article shows that there's many styles within this too, all with a different experience) I don't believe LLMs can recreate the same authored experience that has a point of view. I think they'll be okay at genre work soon enough though, for better or worse. But thats not a type of game I'm personally interested in.

codazoda 2y ago

This is fantastic. Does anyone have any book references that help you do writing in some of these formats.

egglemonsoup 2y ago
not sure if this perfectly addresses your question, but "Designing Games" by Tynan Sylvester is a great resource
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
livrem 2y ago
There is this collection of 1980's internal design documents from Flying Buffalo that you can buy: https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/296847/t-t-solo-design-guidelines-how-to-write-a-solo https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/296847/t-t-solo-desi... It is old, but I do not know of any other books really on this topic. I enjoyed reading it anyway. One of the documents in it describes a simple manual algorithm for how to number the sections in a reasonable way (just randomly assigning numbers is not very reasonable, as anyone will learn from reading a book where the author did that). I implemented that in a simple pandoc filter: https://github.com/lifelike/pangamebook https://github.com/lifelike/pangamebook

kelseyfrog 2y ago

Reminds me of Disco Elysium Explorer[1]. Conversations 7, 8, 9, and 10 are great real life examples. 1. http://134.0.119.41 http://134.0.119.41

quotemstr 2y ago

Nier Automata is my favorite example of the relatively rare "Loop and Grow" pattern. You play through the game three times, with each iteration enriching and elaborating on the story and characters. Brilliant and weird narrative structure.

twic 2y ago
Isn't Loop and Grow roughly the same as Metroidvania? Or does Metroidvania not require an actual repeating loop, whereas Loop and Grow does?

tunesmith 2y ago

This is fun, and holds true in the creative writing group I run. We use a website I programmed that helps us collaborate on writing branching fiction. We have a mapping utility that creates graphs like in the article, except more animated (d3.js, elkjs). As different authors can start their own new stories, one thing I often have to deal with is that they want to design their story to have both long path lengths (multiple chapters before an ending), and also high choice count. Those of you who know something about geometric series know that this causes problems. I often have to tell them they can't have everything they want, which causes minor drama. :) As a result, one of our stories basically shot its "choice budget" in the first few chapters, leading to many linear paths in the latter parts of the narratives, which is fun in its own way. Another of our stories has just started playing with the "gauntlet pattern" as the article describes. For this one, we decided that all chapters must be in the "same universe", just following different characters' perspectives, and are planning for certain "anchor chapters" where all characters come together for a meeting. Probably the detective questioning them as a group (it's a murder mystery). All of our stories are supposed to be literary, so usually in third person, sometimes first, never the second-person. So we don't tend to use choices and chapters as directions and rooms; it's all about how the plot moves. We also don't track state; they're designed to be able to be printed as books people can page through. Overall a super-fun project for me and a handful of other writers, it's been a consistent way to spend a few hours of fun each week.

withinboredom 2y ago
You can still track small state via the reader. I vaguely remember a choose your own adventure as a kid: If you picked up the key earlier, turn to page XX Otherwise, turn to page YY It was entertaining to a) suddenly realize I had missed an important detail or b) allow me to “escape” if I can’t find the key or just don’t like that part of the book.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- dasfsi 2y ago
  One book I read did a similar thing, but managed to do it spoiler-free. There was a magical crystal, I think, that did some magical things. When you pick it up, the book says "To use the crystal, look at paragraph (current paragraph + 20)" and the author actually managed to do that for the most paragraphs from then onwards

Over2Chars 2y ago

gauntlet looks like GTA V's story mode pattern. GTA2 with it's competing gangs seem to have a "state" tracker in the form of reputation scores with the game, while having an open world map. As your reputation/state changed opportunities would become available/unavailable. I still think GTA 2's system is impressive.

ninetyninenine 2y ago

Ai can produce a new type of game where choices are dynamic and outcomes are generated by LLM agents. Fiction is an hallucination and LLMs are master hallucinators. Basically LLMs have to be given assets and game components that they can easily compose.

withinboredom 2y ago
Having had an LLM tell me a story, my answer would be that this is a dumb idea. LLMs have no concept of realistic cause and effect.
- ninetyninenine 2y ago
  Nah I think not considering this idea at all is the extremely dumb and brain dead opinion. LLMs can tell stories. Realistic causes and effects aren’t even consistent in human stories. A good story isn’t 100 percent dependent on this. The LLM walks the line between hallucinating too much and sometimes not. Either way you can pretty much guarantee that almost all stories made in games now are already mostly written by an LLM. It’s just the writing is edited and curated by a human.
  - woolion 2y ago
    I've done a short LLM-powered VN, and LLM actions were restricted to local interactions only because of how weak it is at making up the story. It's great at removing the parser-based interactions, but I think that's it. There's a second technical problem that such stories are represented by a form of state-machine and that you would need to recompile it on the fly, making many checks very difficult (you would need to be able to check reachability on the fly, chunk transitions, etc). I think it would take years to get to the level of some of the great IF games with an LLM, and not just a cool PoC.
  - usrusr 2y ago
    As a grumpy old symbolic ai hand I do wonder if it was possible to build a (perhaps crude) ontology based simulation with consistency, cause and effect and so on and then use the results of that for prompting an LLM. But as a consumer, I lean far to the side of "give me a handcrafted tunnel experience with the illusion of choice" in the divide between consequences yes or no. I don't think I'd actually want this "simulation behind an LLM facade". If I'm in the mood for reading (or for listening to voice actors reading to me), I'd rather have it be something more meaningful than just a game state. But to those on the other end of the spectrum, this might actually be the holy grail of game building.

andrewstuart 2y ago

Nicely timed I’m making a CYOA game right now so very interested learn more.

ardleon 2y ago
Hi, I've just ‘finished’ an app to make interactive text stories/games and I'm looking for people to test my app with real stories, if you're interested I could help you with your story so you can publish it online wherever you want.
- andrewstuart 2y ago
  I’d give it a look my email is in my profile
  - ardleon 2y ago
    ok, the only thing is that the application is in Spanish, at the time I did not contemplate that it was multilingual, among other things because I made it for me, if you are still interested I will write you and send you a link.

orthoxerox 2y ago

I don't quite understand what "floating modules" are. Is it something akin to sidequests in a CRPG or a "sandbox VN"? One interesting (and very complex) approach I've seen in VNs is multiple interleaved paths. Each path looks like a branch and bottleneck, but at certain points a decision taken on one path blocks or forces an outcome on another. You can linearize it into a single "branch and bottleneck" with extensive state tracking (this is how it's implemented, after all), but it's far easier to model it as multiple paths.

numbsafari 2y ago

I loved the Lone Wolf and associated books as a kid. One of my favorite things about them was seeing glimpses of possible story paths as I flipped around the book. When I would get to the end knowing I had missed some enticing possibility in the story line, I would immediately flip back to the beginning and start over.

eugenekolo 2y ago

This was actually a really cool analysis. Fun to see how these things can be broken down so cleanly into graphs.

tantalor 2y ago

Here's the story map for The Stanley Parable: https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fmp4ilh2s22ly.png https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fm... Looks like a "Time Cave"

yapyap 2y ago

could chess be considered a choice-based game?

rzzzt 2y ago

IIRC in one of the "Fighting Fantasy" books the hero is captured and can choose if they want to spend the rest of their lives in a standing-only or a sitting-only cage - the story ends badly either way. I was a bit angry reading it as I didn't have a "save state" earmarked with the index finger.

hcs 2y ago

I picked up some TutorText books recently, a programmed instructional series from the late 50s to 60s. At the end of every section there's a multiple choice question, one answer leads to the next section, the other to an explanation of why that answer was wrong. Pretty pure Gauntlet, I don't think there's any follow up questions on a dead end path, though I haven't mapped them all out fully. I like the idea of tailoring explanations to specifically anticipated misconceptions. Indexed here: https://gamebooks.org/Series/457/Show https://gamebooks.org/Series/457/Show And some exposition from Hackaday a few years ago: https://hackaday.com/2020/08/28/a-tale-of-tutor-texts/ https://hackaday.com/2020/08/28/a-tale-of-tutor-texts/ It looks like I need to take a closer look, that last article says > often the wrong answer pages take you on a detour path to correct your thinking before rejoining the main line of the book. which is what I was hoping to find.

chrisjj 2y ago

> To avoid obliterating the effect of past choices, branch-and-bottleneck structures almost always rely on heavy use of state-tracking (if a game doesn’t do this, chances are you are dealing with a gauntlet). I do not see that branch-and-bottleneck relies on use of state-tracking any more than gauntlet.

timonofathens 2y ago

Always nice to share: the Grim Fandango Puzzle Document (pdf): http://gameshelf.jmac.org/2008/11/13/GrimPuzzleDoc_small.pdf http://gameshelf.jmac.org/2008/11/13/GrimPuzzleDoc_small.pdf Perfect example of the "Branch and Bottleneck". It even includes similar graphics at the start of each act.