It is hard. I don’t have any good methods or recommendations but this topic been covered directly or indirectly in other threads that I can throw some links at you to review!
I recently finished playing and reviewing every Choicescript game. Based on what I learned, I feel like it might be helpful if I share patterns I noticed in popular vs unpopular games. It helps that I have written what is possibly the least popular Choice of Games title of all time, In the Service of Mrs. Claus. So when I talk about what doesn’t seem to do well, I talk from experience!
First, a few caveats:
I was writing a post in the Disliked Elements thread and decided that perhaps having a discussion on this would be valuable, so I am making a new thread for discussions and am adding a poll so that I can gauge some things.
I was wondering about how important branching really is in these stories. If a player knows going in that a lot is predefined, would it still put them off to have choices limited to more key aspects rather than being able to choose a lot of reactions or the like? I know I mys…
Apologies if a thread like this already exists, but this is an offshoot of a discussion in Historical CoG Games about the balance between game design and story in Interactive Fiction.
That conversation got me thinking about what game design factors make a good piece of Interactive Fiction, specifically when it comes to Choice of Games.
So far, I’ve come up with:
Easy to understand stats
Stats that noticeably matter
Choices that noticeably matter
Branching that is obvious
Obviously, these le…
How much do you think a story can branch? How divergent can a story be? And should the branches generally conclude around the same point/should they be given the same amount of effort? Could some diverging storylines involve genre shifts or large toss-ups to story structure?
Straight to the point:
What defines story branches for you? What is just flavor text?
Going by the CoG guidelines, there’s a bit about choices being ought to take the reader to a meaningful difference.
To me, that is what would be one aspect of branching whether big like a different bit of story, or small, like the outcome of a check
I’ll use the hostage situation at the station from Hero Unmasked! as an example:
For those that haven’t played it:
At the beginning of the game, one of the vi…
Does anyone have any good tips for setting up the massive tree needed for a decent Choice game, and any others for making stat progression meaningful and spaced correctly?
I’ve been messing around with a graphing program to plan out the branches, but i wanted outside opinions.
And i’m not really sure how i’d properly manage stats.
The question of game length (in terms of words) vs writer effort and branching seems to be one of the hardest to get right. I have been struggling with this myself (a branching game is nice, but so much more effort than a more railroaded approach, and writer fatigue can easily signal the death of the project). In a separate thread Jason recently commented how “the minimum word count of 20,000 for Hosted Games is total word count, not average play-through length”.
My feeling, however, (reading …
Okay so I’m currently writing a ChoiceScript game of my own, I heavily underestimated just how much work would need to be done in order to write the game the way I want to. To make matters worse, I can’t bring myself to dumb down the game just so that it becomes easier for me to continue writing.
So right now, I’m trying to write this big fight between the player’s team against some bad guys. I’m trying to provide different branches and I’ll try to sum it up here before continuing.
The context…
TL;DR because I know I ramble: Is there such a thing as having too many branches in the story? Does it bother the reader to have so many paths they could take?
In 2012 started writing a novel, and couldn’t decide on an ending. Wrote up four drafts, about 40,000 words each, and then discovered CoG. So perfect! I can take each of those endings that I loved and make it into a CoG possibility!
So, like a year ago, I started typing. I absolutely love doing choicescript work–i love debugging and sol…
A sort of vague question, I know, but I’m curious as how various authors have gone about plotting their games (and haven’t been able to find a similar thread). I’m familiar with plotting for books, but I found once I tried to start writing choice games I ran into some trouble. For one, I personally have been unsure how to include choices and major branches into a larger narrative that still flows smoothly.
So how have you all tackled plotting? Have you just gone in for it and winged it, or do y…
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