Hello there,
i’m just searching for a good practise how to tell a story and develope a quest system.
Haven’t found anything in the learn or documentation section.
Imagine the storytelling like in Skyrim. You start the game and a person comes and talks to you and you get a quest. But what’s the best way to do that? Only scripting and unity3d? Or third party programs like fungus, iClone, Crazy Talk…).
I found some introductions for 2D but i’m searching for a 3D method without text bubbles.
Bethesda is notoriously bad at storytelling, so using something like skyrim is as desired quality standard (in storytelling) is not a good idea.Try shadowrun: Dragonfall isntead. Also, you won’t be able to mimic skyrim’s approach without army of voice actors.
RPG or Quests at their core are fairly simple and have small number of elements (“initiate dialogue”, “check number of items in invnetory”, “go to location”, “initiate combat”, etc), so you could write your own system using C# scripts, or use some 3rd party solution.
Alright, that’s what i thought anyway but i just want to make it with a good quality standard and in the correct way and not quick and dirty. That’s why i’m asking.
You should read a book about story writing / screenplay writing. “Story” by Robert McKee is pretty good, as far as I know. Writing good stories is a craft that needs learning and practice. Most writing done by people who think everyone can write stories - but don’t have gone through any form of learning process - is cringeworthy as hell. I think by reading a good book on the topic, your writing will improve a great deal.
Yes, they’re the only company I’m aware of that is getting progressively worse at it with each release. Oblivion is generally the game that is pointed to regarding stories as some of the quest lines were really interesting (one of the quests was based on The Shadow over Innsmouth by Lovecraft). The Dark Brotherhood quest line was really popular too.
Even Oblivion wasn’t exactly great. its main selling point was “it is big” and “it is pretty” (and later : “mods!”). The interesting thing with TES series is that bulk of the amazing lore was written back in daggerfall times.That includes pretty much ALL their books. As far as I know the designer responsible for bulk of the lore is no longer in the company.
That’s a broad question. Interesting stories don’t have to be “save the galaxy” stories. In fact, my favorite stories in games are more focused and intimate. Since this is a Unity forum, what about these Unity games: Gone Home, Lifeless Planet (I enjoyed the sci-fi premise), or After Life? (After Life is on sale on Steam, and made with the Dialogue System btw.) Or, if you’re looking for something even more offbeat like The Stanley Parable, there’s Grimsfield (also made with you know what - not to plug the Dialogue System, but these are good story-based games that I happen to be familiar with). Firewatch is still on my “to play” queue, but I’ve heard people like the story.
Steering this thread even further off the rails, I just started reading Tynan Sylvester’s Designing Games: A Guide to Engineering Experiences. For gameplay, I normally recommend Scott Rogers’ Level Up! The Guide to Great Video Game Design. Sylvester’s book is different. It focuses on interactive writing techniques (versus static writing like books or movies) to engineer the player’s emotional responses. I mention it in this thread because the best quests do this. If you understand how this process works, you can design quests in which players will feel emotionally invested.