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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 ou
by 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 agoYour games rule :)
- esperent 2y agoWhat game is it?
- spencerflem 2y agohttps://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 agoYou are too kind; thank you!
- chii 2y agoI 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 agoimo 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.
- suddenlybananas 2y agoI completely disagree, there are plenty of branching games which are extremely good and which would be severely worse if they weren't branching: Disco Elysium and Baldur's Gate 3 come to mind. We are very very far off from an AI being able to come up with compelling stories that are logically coherent.
- chii 2y ago> there are plenty of branching games which are extremely good i think you mean there's barely any good ones. The examples you come up with are the exceptions that prove the rule. Look at a game like Dishonered, where the story have _some_ branches, but it's half-assed imho. There's plenty more games where having gone for a branching story made the game more expensive, less deep, and harder to sell as a result.
- 2y ago