What game design factors make a good piece of Interactive Fiction?

Continuing with the dragon age example, I found party banter far more interesting/better at establishing relationships than a lot of the cutscenes. (I mean, there were then problems with “the person I hear banter is nothing like the person I deal with in actual romance scenes,” but that’s a different issue.)

I think that IF can take the same lesson, though – a bit of relatively low-effort flavor text can do a lot. And developing characters/relationships outside of designated “romance scenes” is really helpful in getting me invested in someone.

Hahaha got it :slight_smile:

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((Fenris??? Joking???))

This is a good point. I love seeing the other characters interact with each other. This is a sign of good writing. The game may revolve around the player character, but the world doesn’t. Good world building involves relationships that don’t involve the MC.

This is true for most anything in a game, video or otherwise. I mentioned this in the Bandersnatch thread, as well as a few other places. Sometimes, the most impactful "my choice actually matters moments are the ones that are small and just a nod to the fact that the player is, in fact, a person. It reminds me of the choice to water the plant/feed the rabbit in Life Is Strange. Sure, it didn’t change the fate of the world, but it was remembered by the game, and it was just a nice nod to player choice.

Bandersnatch remembering your music and your cereal choice was awesome, imo. In a lot of ways, the small choices give me the biggest smile - because it really signifies that the author put it in there for a reason - not to affect the story, but to make the story yours, and that’s what I mean by it being okay if a game is railroaded.

I mean, even Tin Star was railroaded. Every game has to be, to an extent. The Main Quest, if you will. It has to happen. You can’t just write an infinite storyline. You’d go insane.

Mood.

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I’m not a big fan of subroutines

(looks guiltily at code for TDUP)

Uhhhhhhh

Nah subroutines are the best! I’ve got like half the game under some sort of subroutine at any given time tbh

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Oh, there’s nothing wrong with subroutines, specifically! I just hate coding them lmao

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But yeah I love it when the game remembers the little details. The big sweeping stuff is alright, but the game naturally incorporating my character’s hairstyle into the action of the scene is on a whole nother level.

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I should mention that I’m grossly simplifying this and ignoring all the dialogue that your loved ones have across party banter and in the camp if you go and talk to them at various stages in your relationship.

For instance, Alister is very curt and quick to ask “What do you need?” when you first meet him, but as your relationship deepens into a friendship his dialogue slows down to an informal pace and he speaks fondly when he asks “Something on your mind?”. (I can’t remember if he prompts you this same dialogue if you’re in a relationship with him; it’s been a while since I played that game!)

What I’m mainly talking about is how there’s no storyline for characters beyond the romance in most interactive media. You initiate a romance, have sex - or maybe you don’t - and then that’s the end! Do not pass go, do not collect $200 dollars. It’s a let down after coming down from this possibly amazing romance to never have to acknowledged again in the story.

DA:O does avert by virtue of some characters themselves i.e. Sten or Wynne or Shale not even being romance option to begin with.

Other characters’ stories deconstruct this entirely by having the integrity of your relationship hinge on your actions in a relationship i.e. slaying Morrigan’s mother or killing Loghain for Alister or Leliana being utterly broken if you defile Andraste’s ashes. All of those are pretty realistic all things considered and I loved that about those moments because it really captured what being in a relationship can be like.

It’s a matter of giving and taking and sometimes something’s gotta give and your actions do have consequences. In those cases, the consequences just so happen to be if an NPC remains in a relationship with you.

But back to the topic at hand… In short, romance is a good selling point, but it has to be done well - like basically all things in writing! Romancable NPCs have to be characters first and then romance options second IMO and if that means that there’s occasionally some tension between the MC and the NPC, then fantastic!

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Everything about Alistair is my favorite, and nobody will ever change my mind, because yes I have licked a lamppost in winter, Ali, have u???

But no, I get exactly what you mean.

DA:O honestly isn’t the worst about this. Alistair has a decent storyline, with him being a bastard son and all that. I actually think DA:I is worse about it. Here’s looking at you, Cullen.

This is fantastic. I love the fact that your friends will literally abandon you, if you go far enough. They have some form of autonomy. They have power. They are, as much as lines of code can be, their own people. I respect this so much. (Creatures Such As We changed my opinion permanently on this kind of thing).

I’d say it’s probably the most important thing that needs to be well-done in a CSG - so many people play games specifically for the ROs (myself, included, lol >>); if not done well, it basically amounts to lying to your readers. If romance isn’t your forte, or you don’t like it, or you’re aromantic, don’t force it! Write what you know, first :slight_smile: There is always going to be an audience, no matter what you write. Just remember that :heart:

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Good point!

I think this kinda reinforces the moral of the interactive story in that your choices need to have consequences and that we, as the player, need to experience those firsthand.

No DA:I… you did not handle the possible fate Lavellan’s clan well at all. I didn’t even know that happened as a result of my actions because I stopped reading those stupid reports after the first five or so. (and that’s just the tip of that entire ice berg :face_with_raised_eyebrow:)

There’s a very fine line between having realistic consequences and having consequences that cause the reader to ragequit your game however, so that’s something to keep in mind.

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Absolutely agree. I believe @MeltingPenguins had a thread a while back about tracking a bunch of random conversation variables, and how many tracking variables is too many – my answer was and remains “the limit does not exist (contingent on you being cool with coding/managing them).”

Yeah, I’ve definitely started discounting the “there is romance!” bullet point in CSGs, which is unfortunate. I understand that folks may not want to write romance but feel pressured into including it, and I don’t think that really serves anyone.

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This is actually harder than it sounds because it depends on what kind of IF you’re trying to write.

Definitely, but there’s ways and ways of doing this. Some games are really stat heavy management games, and some are very light on the stats and focus on the story more. Either can do well as long as you pick your genre right.

Yes, but is is often far harder than you think. Signposting can be difficult to be clear about in some areas (some are easy, some are hard), without actually coming out and saying “There’s a branch right here!” which obviously breaks the immersion. Although I often prefer branching games personally, bear in mind most people are only playing them 1-2 times, so over branching will shorten the playthrough to total wordcount ratio leading to “too short” complaints, so it can be a bit of a balance. Personally I feel that the last part of the game should branch to lead to obviously different outcomes.

You wont find them in COGs and they can be hard to implement in HGs due to no supported way of doing them if there are a lot of stats and variables involved. They can be made, but there’s a reason why they’re not commonly put into HGs. In saying that, if you’re going to use sudden death choices, particularly later in the game, I’d recommend you think about making a system for it or at least a “do-over” choice.

Sorry if I’ve missed these mentioned in the thread, but I’d add well wrapped up endings. I kind of think “too short” complaints are exacerbated if the endings feel a bit rushed or unforfilling.

Personally I don’t really care about romantic options in most games, but if they’re not there, you’ll probably find it harder to get an audience/complaints/bad reviews. In saying that, if you overdo the number of RO’s and don’t flesh the characters out enough or just tack the romance scene on because everyone expects there to be one, that can in some cases make it worse than not having them there at all.

Consistant tone and pacing- This can also sometimes be hard. Keeping a balance between action and exposition. Remembering to use the right kind of language for the setting you’re writing for etc. (It can be quite jarring to hear a lot of modern terms, especially slang or swearing used in a game which is obviously set in a historical setting, particularly when the language goes back and forth between the two settings from scene to scene.)

Length and playthrough wordcount- see other threads for this, but it can be important. Something to bear in mind though is making something really long as is preferred by readers, can decrease the chances of a project being finished. The forums are littered with abandoned WIPs and I personally feel that’s part of the reason. The amount of work and time needed to finish a game increases exponentially by length, it doesn’t feel linear at all to me at least.

Fake choices- I know they’ve been brought up, but I disagree that frequent use of them is always bad. “Fake_choice” isn’t actually always “fake” (although it can be). You can use them to set stats and variables, or just to change the pacing of the story. Sometimes it’s handy just to keep the reader involved instead of having next… next… next… for ages. As long as they’re not abused, they’re very useful. I would argue that due to the branch and return nature of many games, the difference in impact between fake choices and normal choices can often be less than people think there is as long as there is different text after each type of choice.

Really? That hasn’t been my experience in the majority of the games I’ve tested and gone looking through the code for. I’ve found most do have flavour text +/- stat/variable changes. Guess there’s a lot of games out there though.

Lots of variables. Some people might disagree with me on this, but using variables to add flavour text and remind readers of past choices they’ve made can help with immersion. It can also be used to add delayed branching and impacts and affect the story line itself rather than just being flavour text.

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I don’t play the majority of WIPs a) because I don’t have time, b) because I don’t want to spoil them for myself and c) because, often, it feels more like an alpha than a beta (and I’m guilty of this as well, looooool, which is why I take longer to update, now)

Which, in my experience, there very rarely is. I don’t even necessarily mean *fake_choices - I mean fake choices, in general. There are choices that, unless you read the code, don’t seem to do anything or be any different than the other options. That makes the choice feel pointless for the player.

This is a big deal, too; I’ve noticed it in a few WIPs that I’ve read, but I tend to keep that kind of commentary/constructive criticism to myself, as it isn’t always taken well. It can also be incredibly jarring when someone’s speech sounds overly formal or stilted. Sometimes, there is a legitimate, story-based reason for it, but it oftentimes is just due to English not being the writer’s native language. Make use of the beta system, if English isn’t your native tongue. It’s invaluable! :slight_smile:

I think you’ll only get the bad reviews if you specifically promise ROs and don’t deliver/under-deliver. Some people may be upset that a particular interesting character isn’t a romance option, but that’s the case for most games, tbh (I’ve noticed that, oftentimes, ROs are these boring, bland characters that are just there to be pretty, whilst the sidekick types are fleshed out and interesting…and unshagable).

I agree that the audience will likely be smaller, especially because, at this point, the whole “play as male or female, gay/straight/bisexual/asexual!” is literally the first tagline for these games.

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“Game design factors” are like keys on a piano. Trying to figure out “what game design factors make a good piece of interactive fiction” is like asking what combination of notes makes for good music.

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Yeah, it can be hard to make all choices seem meaningful. I use a mixture of fake choices that range from a pacing/interest device with no long term changes and a sentence or two at most of different text, right through to a few pages of text with stat changes. Just as an example, this is a middle of the road one with a little flavor text and a variable set that changes text and choice options later in the chapter so it can be done and I do see them being used this way. So probably depends on the author and story :slight_smile:

Nope not true unfortunately. You’ll see games with poor reviews due no romance, that never promised RO’s (or even said in the description there weren’t any). Because so many games have it, it’s become expected and games that don’t have RO’s are frequently seen as 'lacking".

That’s true for COG’s, but not HG’s. Although many do, there’s a bit more variability there. TBH, not sure how many people actually really read the taglines though :slight_smile:

Aren’t we being philosophical today @Carlos.R :smile:

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Nah. I don’t think that radical subjectivism applies here as strongly as you’re suggesting. An IF game where most of the choices are fake, all the characters are boring, all the writing is too long and painful to read, and all the stats create more of a spreadsheet than a narrative would be bad pretty much universally on all counts.

It’s easy to make the argument “but maybe it could be good with the right writer” or if that’s the intention of the piece, but

a) making something intentionally bad isn’t an excuse
b) most people don’t intentionally set out to make something bad
c) Occam’s Razor: most of the time it’s not following some grand metanarrative about bad interactive fiction, it’s just badly made.

I think we should always be vigilant about the quality of the media we consume!

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Thank you for making this comment. I think it gets to the crux of the debate in the Historical CoG Games discussion, in that the thing about Interactive Fiction is that there is a sliding scale between story and game in each work. Most of the works on here lean towards the story-side of the spectrum, and the best ones tend to do what you recommend for those.

I’m curious, for Fallen Hero, were there ever any choices that would result in a bad end/fail state, or did you code the story to incorporate the reader making a “bad choice” (for lack of a better phrase) as part of the plot further down the line?

I’m conflicted about this. In terms of including Save Points, would it depend on how long it would take you to get back to that point of the story? I think back to games like Life of a Mobster where I didn’t mind restarting because I knew it wouldn’t take me that long to get back to the same point, but I know there are other stories where the word count was so high that I probably wouldn’t have even bothered restarting from the beginning had I reached a bad end.

Totally agree. This bullet point was somewhat redundant with the ‘Choices that noticeably matter’ one, but I when I thought back to ‘why do I replay certain stories,’ it was usually because I knew if I did X instead of Y, I would go down a completely different path (maybe not for the entire remainder of the story, but at least significant enough that I felt motivated to try it).

Obviously, pointing the branching out shouldn’t be immersion-breaking, but it could be as simple as a choice between going to Town A vs Town B. If I choose to go to Town A, and the story keeps going from there to the point that I never get to go to Town B, I’d probably replay the game just to see what I missed in Town B.

When I think back to why people got so cynical about Telltale games, part of it was that either there was no significant branching from choices, or it just didn’t feel like a certain choice caused any branching (even if it ultimately did) because the effects of that choice were so subtle.

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Something that’s important to me is that failures or bad decisions are interesting/amusing/entertaining. Tally Ho is one of my favourites for this - I never regretted my decisions because no matter whether I succeeded or failed, I was in for a treat. Similarly, it’s not a CoG game but is excellent in this respect - 80 Days allows for a lot of recklessness and is full of fun and interest regardless of success.

Basically I enjoy being able to make unwise decisions without it resulting in straight-up punishment.

Related: including a variety of paths or problem-solving methods which can all work well, is what I expect from a CoG game. I would find it jarring for one stat to be far more useful than the others, or to work hard at increasing a persuasion skill only to discover that you are obliged to fight a final enemy.

As ever, I recommend having a look at the design guidelines which include a lot of what’s been mentioned here and more, with examples from released games! I always find it useful to revisit them every so often: COG Game Design Guidelines

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Definitely this! It’s a reason Garrus was so beloved as a character in the Mass Effect trilogy because he was as engaging as a BFF for Male Shep as he was as a love interest for Female Shep. Same goes with Tali. Both interestingly were written as platonic allies in the first game and not considered as love interests until the second game as people responded well to them as characters.

@MrWolf101, Yes, I’m referring to how long it takes to get back. Dying in long games that I spent hours on (especially if I’m not even halfway through) is quite alarming and annoying. It would make me drop the game because I will not waste my time trying to make sure I have all my choices the same except the one that killed me. That stuff doesn’t fly with me, especially since there was no warning that I or anyone else would die because I chose to claim a power the author said I could. Which is then why I brought in the author bias thing. It was obvious they were pushing the light power, but I wanted the one for dark, so after me saying I want dark and getting the object, everyone is dead??? I don’t even know how that worked besides “oh you should’ve chosen light!!!”

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Oh, and before we forget:

Know the difference between author- character- and player knowledge.

Don’t spent a whole chapter alluding to something that the character (and the author) know, while leaving the player in the dark. (doing this for ~500 words tops is alright though).

It’s NOT an ‘awesome reveal’ when you finally spill the beans. It’s frustrating.
Because you spent pages telling the reader about how excited their character is about… something.
How amazing this… something… is gonna be.
But you never tell the player WHAT it is. Instead you’re all hint hint nudge nudge…
giphy%20(8)

Likewise… If you think the player will know something, keep in mind to give the character a reason to know this too if you have them act accordingly.

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I’d like to add an addendum to this: dramatic irony is a fantastic thing. If you’re one of those authors that likes to put cutaway scenes in (@Rohie comes to mind) : always remember that what the player knows, the character may not know. And, in the same vein, please don’t just suddenly make all the characters know something, if only the player knows. It gets really jarring and annoying.

EG: MC and Character A go have a conversation with NPC 1. A huge secret is revealed. They agree not to tell anyone, even in their party. 7 scenes later, somehow Charscters B, C, and D are chatting about the events with the NPC.
Like???¿¿¿??¿??¿?

Continuity is very important.

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