Apologies if I’m in the wrong spot for this, please move.
Unity provides a lot of API documentation, which is great, and lots of one-off examples of how to do things within Unity, which is also great, but one thing I never see (or I just haven’t found yet) is how to stitch all of the things we’ve created together to actually make a game. Specifically, a game that is story driven and goes from part A to part B to part C.
I’m embarrassed to admit but with all of my simple projects over the last few years of learning Unity I’ve never really gotten past the whole ‘character running/jumping around on a terrain’ single scene type of game. I want to build something bigger in scope but I’m not really sure how to do that. Is this where Sequences and Timeline come into play?
I know this is kind of an open-ended question, but I feel like I haven’t made any forward progress beyond a simple mini-game and I don’t understand how to scale things up.
You are just missing a little huge concept called state machines or FSM. These are used everywhere in the engine, for example in animation systems, that’s why they might seem related.
The nice thing about them is that you think of your game with diagrams. For example your game intro is a state, running thru the world is another, then entering a house, or talking to characters. All of these states require different interactions, and you switch between them with an FSM.
Story Starts With Gameplay. “The most common mistake new game writers make is they create a story that isn’t related to the second-by-second gameplay.” [Here’s where your existing character-running-on-terrain skills pay off.]
The Story Isn’t The Words. “Beginners will often focus all of their storytelling skills on their cutscenes and their dialogue, but the words are only a part of the story. In fact, the story encompasses every single aspect of the game, from the writing, to the gameplay, to the environment art, to the enemy design, and on and on.” [That said, there are some good options on the Asset Store for writing dialogue that can interface with enemies, environment, etc., for a holistic experience.]
Writing Is A Form Of Feedback. “Players can’t play the game and read at the same time…[W]riters need to be careful of two different things: when their writing is presented to the player and how much writing is given to the player at once. Writing at the wrong moments breaks the flow of the gameplay.”
Focus On Environments, Not Sequences. “[V]ideo game stories - unlike stories in every other storytelling medium - are not inherently a sequence of events… Being a storyteller in games is about creating an environment - how does the world of the game (and I’m including the characters as a part of the world) react to the player’s actions, and why does it react the way that it does?”
I write all this to say that, in the big picture, storytelling in video games isn’t really about conversation trees and state machines, although those are ways to accomplish narrative experiences. But all your existing skills are also ways to accomplish them. Kuelz says it better in his article, which is worth reading.
It sounds like you’ve been following basic tutorials, but now need to take that next step into actually designing and understanding what you want to build.
There’s the tech side, and the narrative side. For the tech, you’ll need to figure out what kind of gameplay you want to make, and then break that down further into features - “chunks” of functionality. Then do some reading & experimenting to build those chunks and get them working the way you want.
For the narrative, there are a lot of approaches, but the basic approach is similar - decide what kind of story you want to tell, write down an outline, sketch, or notes for yourself, and then figure out how it will blend with the interactive/gameplay elements above. @TonyLi gave a good article link on this blending part. [Using Love/Hate & QuestMachine w/ AdventureCreator :chef’s kiss:]
No one - incl Unity - knows what the game in your head is, so you can’t really look it up in a tutorial. You’ll have to decide on each ingredient that will go into the game, and then you can look up / ask for help with each of those constituent parts. That’s the challenge, but also the fun part Good luck!
Good luck!