I’m planning a sort of quest game heavily depending on atmosphere and story. I have a plot written, but now I need to execute it properly. My goal is to make surreal story using allegory (so I don’t want telling the story directly, but rather using images and symbols). Like some sort of environmental storytelling
But I have a hard time thinking of ways to do this. So please, if you have any tips or examples in media, tell me
Have you actually looked into existing games like that?
I suggest play some similar games. You may get some ideas from them.
You should, of course, make whatever game you want to make. But do consider whether the approach you want to take is a good practical idea. By practical, I mean that the actual players of the game want that kind of experience.
I’m not entirely sure what techniques you want to use to convey your story, but my experience with games where the story is “subtle” is usually that I’m disappointed by it. One recent title comes to mind: Hob. I’d say this game is fairly atmospheric in its environments and the “ruins” you see around you throughout the game. I later discovered that the game has a full story to it, but it’s shown mainly like hieroglyphs on cave walls. When I later read the story (on a website), I thought it was pretty cool, and I got annoyed that the developers decided to put such a barrier in front of their story.
Anyway, I’d recommend really asking yourself how you feel this approach you want to take enhances your story. Anything you do to make the story more difficult to consume, you’re alienating players. You’re preventing a whole bunch of players from enjoying part of your game, because I don’t think most players want to work too hard to try to figure out your story. If you think it’s a good idea to add something to your game that only a tiny fraction of players will ever experience, that’s up to you. But it’s worth taking a step back and deciding whether players would enjoy your game better if you didn’t try to do something weird with the story’s delivery. It’s a shame to invest a lot of effort into the story of your game if the majority of your players never fully experience it. And especially if a large number of players don’t even realize there’s a story in your game because you made the story so cryptic.
That’s not making a story with subtlety, that’s hiding the story.
I agree. But that’s probably not what the developers thought. I imagine them saying something like, “I have this really cool idea for conveying the story…” It’s probably very temping to try to innovate on the basic story telling approach. But with millennia of story-telling behind us, it’s hard to diverge from the standard approaches.
That’s the problem, I can’t recall any similar game. The closest one is Control, but it’s still different
That’s strange, I always thought complex subtle stories generally attract people. However my goal isn’t to hide the story but tell it a bit more vaguely to give that feel of completing a puzzle in the end
It attacts some people. But in general, you may be overestimating how much effort a player is willing to put into enjoying your story. As a really simple example, consider an approach that a lot of games use: Story is conveyed through journal entries, or other pages of text you can choose to read or not. Most players will see some text, and just “Skip” it, ignoring it entirely. If that text had been spoken via a voice actor, they would probably have listened and enjoyed it. But even the simple effort of having to read some words is too much for a lot of people. Now, you want to go quite much further, and have to really puzzle out the story, instead of simply reading it.
If that’s the experience you want, I wouldn’t try to talk you out of it. But I wouldn’t be at all surprised if people them complain to you that your game doesn’t have a story, or if only 5% of your players actually experience the story. It seems…unfortunate…to invest so much into developing your story if most people aren’t going to enjoy it.
Anyway, I’d test out your approach on a small scale before fully committing to it. Make sure it resonates with people.
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Just want to point out this isn’t allegory. Allegory is when the things in your story mean something other than what they are, it’s not about “images and symbols.”
I have a song that uses the myths of Prometheus and Pandora to comment on fatalism and nihilism and tell a cohesive story related to that. It doesn’t use “images and symbols,” but it does use or is allegory.
Edit: To piggy-back off of dgoyette’s statement, you should make sure your surface-level story is compelling and compellingly conveyed, separate from the allegorical intent.
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Sounds like Myst
That game was extremely popular, but a lot of its popularity was the novelty of top notch (for the time) environments since the CD-ROM drive was new, and it was the first game to really design itself around it. So I’m not sure how well that kind of story telling works today. Though I remember really liking the game at the time.
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