Working on a single player story game recently and I wonder if it’s best to have your game project ready before or after writing the story and level objectives.
I’ve manage to finish many games in the past without a story(simulator or mobile fighter), this is my first time creating a game based on a narrative, does anyone here have experience creating a story game?
If the game is narrative based, I think it would be wise to at the very least have a rough outline of the story.
You need a prototype before all else.
With very narrow exceptions, minute to minute game play is what counts for players. Story is secondary. Your story should focus on enhancing the key game play, not the other way around.
If a player really wants a story experience they can get something better via a book or movie.
Do both at the same time, or else one will suffer in an entirely avoidable way. A good game is a set of fully combined and integrated elements, I don’t understand why anyone would avoid working on one of them at any point during development.
What does it mean for the story to ‘enhance’ the gameplay? What value does the gameplay gain from a story that is not the inherent value of the story itself?
Only if they want a non-interactive story, which is only a small fraction of what a story can be when you are acting it out yourself.
If your game is heavily story based, you need to make sure that story is worth the player’s time, and that’s harder than it seems. I’m of the opinion that the best games make you feel as well as think, and so I can’t really give you a straight answer (I also don’t know what type of game you’re making). It’s not as simple as story or gameplay, they both need to work together holistically.
The games we’ve played that had great gameplay and stories that were genuinely entertaining are (usually) the work of highly experienced people though, it has to be said. Not trying to put you off by the way - good luck & I hope it works out for you.
keep story loose and fluid – just stick to themes, archetypes, and very generalized act structure until you’ve got most the game blocked in. Finalize story in the polish phase.
Reason is because unknowns will change your development dramatically, adn you don’t want to rewrite the story every time.
Depends on what exactly you are prototyping. Typically a prototype is for testing a specific feature idea or some vertical slice of the gameplay, not a prototype of the entire game or of the story. You should not need the entire story locked down for something like that. Also, prototypes should be relatively quick to build, so as your ideas change for the game there is little loss throwing out anything developed in the prototype.
If it’s a “story game” then how will you test either without the other?
I totally agree. The equivalent of a greybox phase for a story is something like a synopsis, so it’s certainly not worth writing the family history of some NPC when you are still playing with untextured cubes. The point is to keep the resolution of each part of the game at a similar level at all times.
Do stories work like that?
I would agree if you’re making a game where the story is a feature rather than the focus. In that case, sure, don’t make it more detailed than it needs to be until you’re at the polish stage, makes total sense.
But in the case of a “story game” I can’t help but suspect that the details make a huge difference. The “why” of things has a huge impact when you’re getting the player to stand in a character’s shoes and make decisions for them, and filling in the “why” surely requires some level of detail?
Can anyone imagine Life is Strange with the story details removed being at all useful for playtesting? I can imagine it working with block-in art, no worries, but with the equivalent to a block-in story… not so much. Maybe that’s because I’m not a writer, though.
With Life is Strange, I suspect the devs would have worked on the time rewind mechanic in a prototype test scene to make sure the concept played well before locking down the entire story.
It definitely matters what kind of game you’re making. I was thinking of an rpg like mass effect or something like that, which I think represents kind of the median balance between story and game. A walking simulator which is heavily story based will be a different story, since the story is really all that counts there.
I must say that I think there’s a real issue to tackle with putting a detailed story into a game, simply because it’s very easy to write more story and much harder to create more game. As soon as you put too much story, all else being equal, the gameplay gets diluted and the player has to wonder whether or not it would be better to ignore the story in order to get on with gameplay, or else enjoy the story and forget about getting into the flow of the mechanics. The most obvious representation of this is cinematics, where it’s either/or, but also a story that’s superficially represented by the game world, and mostly told through dialogue and text, can be like that.
That’s why I think it’s always best to tell story through artwork and in-game events when possible. The thing is, most players don’t pay a lot of attention to the game world, because they are used to being funneled into a particular place the creator wants them to go. You have to really build the game so as to prime people to be aware of the story that is going on under the surface of the environment, and avoid the temptation to clarify everything with some bit of text or dialogue.
I think this is a huge issue when your gameplay and your story are separate from one another.
I used Life is Strage as my example because the mechanics are all about interaction with the story. The choices you make matter only because of the story attached to them. “Winning” is all about getting a story outcome which you want. Another example could be Heavy Rain. Compare those to something like Bioshock, where someone could play that game while completely ignoring the story - skip every cutscene, listen to zero logs, ignore every note - and just treat it as a shooter. The story in the game is cool, and having that story and that gameplay together does some really neat stuff, but you could completely separate the two and they’d still each work on their own without the other, and even in the game they’re two related things, rather than one truly integrated thing.
Pretty much, although I think the distinction is that it’s not so much that they are separate but that because one is easier (in terms of labor) than the other, it’s easy to say “ah I’ll just throw this part of the story in some dialogue, that’s interactive enough” when there are much better ways to do it, albeit more difficult.
Those sound like pretty story-intensive games (Heavy Rain looks cool btw, I might grab it), so I have no doubt you’d have to bring the story forward in terms of design.
But I think that generally speaking for games, there’s so much that you can do with simple drama and a low-resolution story that provides a sense of pace and meaning to what you are doing. Something more abstract, that can be told through game events, style, mood etc.
A lot of people think that Call of Duty games are very superficial (and in some ways yes) but I have rarely found a game that provides such a fundamental sense of drama through the environments and dramatic events surrounding you. I also really liked the way that the dragons in Skyrim increased over time, giving the sense that the world was descending into some sort of chaos.
These might seem too simple to be called part of the story, but if the purpose of a story is to provide meaning and a sort of current that pushes the player through the game, then it is necessary for the game world to be dramatically, dynamically shaped by the core structure of the story and its most powerful elements.
Too many times in games, the game world is too static, and a good story (often relegated to the game’s ‘history’ or ‘lore’ in order to avoid having to tell it properly) is undercut by the sense that nothing really changes over time, and the environment you’re in is frozen in time while you are trying to push something forward.
I loved Heavy Rain, with the exception of one bit that really undermined some of it for me. I think it’s a great example of a “story game”, regardless of the philosophical discussion about whether or not it really is a “game”. As an experience it’s great, and I’d love to see more stuff like it.
For sure. The ones I’ve played pretty much nailed what I think a story should be for that type of game. An important piece of context there is that the player is in the role of a soldier, so it makes a lot of sense that you get inserted into a situation with a clear goal and just have to deal with whatever happens, and that a lot of other story related stuff happens between those scenarios which you just briefly get told about. You’re a cog in a much bigger machine, so the level of agency you have makes perfect sense.
Depending on the context I think this can be ok. I defnitely agree that the story and the world as seen by the player should be in sync.
A couple of games which did a particularly great job of this are the recent Spiderman, and going back a bit the first Prototype. In both cases you start off in a relatively carefree city, and through the game’s events experience it’s descent into chaos.
Well it’s a linear game, no doubt about it, but that’s not exactly what I’m focused on.
To make it clear, I think there’s an important distinction to make between drama and literal story. Drama is what battlefield had tons of, and Skyrim I would say achieved it too - what kept me playing that game was the feeling that I was in a world where stuff was happening on a very large scale.
Drama is more like the moment-to-moment sequence of emotions that you make a player feel, that when done right, makes an instinctive and compelling sense, engages them and provides a sense of drive forward in the game.
Whereas literal story is more like lore - the specific details that you convey to a player about something in the game.
I think drama crosses between in-game events and story/dialogue. Both of these are designed to create drama, but in the immediate sense, only interactive in-game events combine drama and agency (the core of what games are all about) at the same time. Literal story (in the form of writing and dialogue) can provide meaning, but not in a concurrent way with the momentary experience of the player, which makes it weaker.
I was just recently looking very closely at Rebel Galaxy, a game that is relevant to my current project. It fared extremely well compared to many other space shooters in terms of sales, even though it’s not an incredibly big or polished game (they used a bunch of stuff from the asset store too).
When I watched some gameplay, I immediately noticed the Texan roadhouse music, GTA style. It does an incredible job of creating mood and atmosphere (in a word, drama) without resort to a lot of backstory. It conveys a sense of a lawless place full of random fights and people trying to make a dime in all sorts of illicit schemes without saying a word about it, and really fills in the spaces in the game. It’s something that many people commented about in the reviews as well.
That’s something that I think all kinds of games, big and small, fall short on. Even when they give you a great story, dialogue, and even a lot of player agency, they fail to show you emotionally what they are telling you about.
I’m pretty sure they prototyped the “Press X to Jasoooon!”-part. (HR) and of course the “Press X to pay respect” (CoD) as well.
BTW, I think in case of Life is Strange the prototype would consist of: character control, the time mechanic without much story, the dialog mechanic and the clue-combination-mechanic. These were crucial mechanical elements in the game.
But usually a company like that can start to work in parallel or they already started to work on either one because of the overlapping development (with other games).