I really enjoyed this, because I’ve always been curious as to how the other authors go about their work, what design philosophies / perspectives they come into CoG with, what Jason sounds like, etc. I’m really curious now as to which CoG partner/team member handles which CoG author – Adam handled my work with Slammed!, and now I work with Becky.
Can’t resist chiming in on a few things too!
Random Elements - There are certainly types of games that would benefit from the addition of random elements, and there are ways to do so that would not undercut having meaningful choices – for instance, not having randomness in the skill checks, but in external events that would force players to adapt to situations they could not have foreseen, even if they’d played the game before. One point that I don’t think has been brought up yet though, is that in games without a save/checkpoint system, the effect those random elements would have on end-game scenarios would have to be minimized, because otherwise they could be highly frustrating to players, especially for games that are “long” as opposed to “wide.” And if the random elements would only affect not-so-important parts of the game, it becomes a question then if they’d be worth the additional effort of coding them in, if the player isn’t going to see significant changes to the experience.
Creative Gameplay Elements - While not related to random factors, wasn’t an official CoG multiplayer game in development? That certainly seems to be something that will push the IF envelope.
Booloean vs Stats - I track Booleans a lot, even if I don’t end up using the flags, because they help personalize the experience, especially when it comes to relationships. If a character remembers what you thought was a throw-away line, or the way that you completely whiffed a skill-check in hilarious fashion, and brings it up later on, it makes those relationships seem more real. There are call-backs I made in the final match of Slammed! to what seems to be a fake_choice made early on in the game, a promise you make to yourself before you’re a pro-wrestler at all, and I think that sort of thing is important to players being able to own their characters/experience.
Stats are a great shorthand for a lot of things that you want to track the general condition of, like attraction, reputation, physical condition, skill sets. They really do make the branching easier later on.
The problem with stats though, when we deal with stuff like player morality/attitude, is that usually value is placed on reaching the extremes – ultra good, ultra evil, or sometimes dead center – and what that does is take away any incentive the player may have in playing a character who changes over the course of the game. The example was given in the talk about, I think, someone who played a non-ruthless character being blocked from taking a ruthless choice late in the game, but there’s also a good, interesting, story to be told in a character who is changed by his/her experiences such that they go against their “established” character at the end. This can be done with stats, but not purely with stats, as it’s impossible with those to distinguish one who went from super good to almost bad, to someone who alternated good and bad moral choices all game.
It’s something that I’m going to try to address with my current project, so here’s hoping…
