Top 5 Game Design Tips

[Eiwynn]

I’m going to link other threads and posts that I think you should visit to start your process:

@malinryden

My goal was to write interactive fiction, not a game. That was the first choice, and it informed the others. That being said, I still needed rules to help me focus.

1. Trust. This was the first rule. I needed to build trust in the reader, and make them realize that there would be no game over in this book, no way to fail so badly you couldn’t get back from it. The only reason you would make a choice should be that it felt right for your character, and you wanted to see what happened. Not because you feared screwing up everything by failing.
2. Immersion. The second rule, and the thing that influenced my stats and flags. They should be there to help immersion, to enable me to to callbacks to earlier events, and to tailor text to the reader. While there’s an unusually fixed protagonist in Fallen Hero, I wanted variability in how they were presented. While things like cautious/daring influences success in certain fights, that’s actually a secondary function. Instead of trying to artificially have a stat chance with every choice to make it ‘matter’, I embraced the thought that the changing text itself did matter enough.
3. Consequence. That being said, I wanted there to be tension and nervousness, which meant that there needed to be consequence. This was tricky, especially over three books where a lot of the consequences won’t come until later in the series. We’ll see if I manage to juggle this in a good way. Writing fail states is a lot of fun though… and we’ll see the first big consequences of your choices so far towards the end of book two.
4. No lock-in. One thing I really wanted to avoid, even though it would have saved me so much work, was to lock people into certain paths. There’s no point in which a RO becomes locked in for good, and at the same time you don’t get locked out if you didn’t start a romance at a certain point… Same with your motivation, it can change over the series, as your character changes. Probably the hardest thing for me to balance, and as the series progress, it just becomes more complex. Still, not backing down in this one, it’s important.
5. Secrecy . One way I picked to help me heighten tension was to keep secrets from the reader, even though they played the main characters. What exactly did happen in the past? Do people suspect you? What is going on in the background? What really happened in the Heartbreak Incident? There’s a lot of things the reader doesn’t know, and one way of finding the clues is by replaying the story with different choices and characters. This is a mystery book, but the main mystery is your own character, and if you want to try to work it out you need to go looking. It was important for me to play fair as well, all the clues are there, in front of you, but it’s only when you’ve reached a new point of understanding that you can go back and see OF COURSE it was there all along. I wanted people to think DUH when something was revealed, not because of confusion, but because they realized that they should have suspected all along. I worked really hard on planting Chekhov’s gun in the text, and at the same time have the reader not realize it’s right there on the table until it’s fired. Which leads into the last part…
6. Community. This I did NOT know if was going to work or not, and I am so grateful it did, and it had nothing to do with me. In order for many of the things above to come to full fruition, like the secrecy, or the trust, I wanted readers to talk to each other. I wanted them to share characters and theories, so that even if they only played their one character along their single canon path, they’d get a feel for all the other things that were out there. Shared information is a powerful tool, and I could only give some hints to the options (through achievements), but by having people share and gossip and theorize, the story became so much greater than their single paths. That was the reason why I’ve been trying to reblog every single piece of fanart/content I can find on tumblr (not so easy since tumblr is finicky), to connect people and get them to meet each other, and see and share content. I am very grateful that people took it upon themselves to create a discord, because that’s a level of tech that just makes me go… yeeeeah nope. I’m old.

Game Design Roundtable featuring @dfabulich

http://thegamedesignroundtable.com/2014/07/02/episode-86-choice-of-games/ Check it out!

and most important for anyone beginning:

Writing for CoG-Games Nov 2016 rev

Once you digest all this, there are resources that you can be pointed to as needed.

I think @malinryden has covered the basics, so I’ll refrain from adding more at this time.