On Monday we had a guest, Sarah Cole, give us a talk on A holistic design approach to narrative design.
Here are the notes I took:
Video games
- Variable flexibility
- Dependent on tech and narrative design
- Limited control of players reactions and timings
- E.g. In VR if something important happens, the players cannot be forced to look at the event
Board games
- Inflexible
- Players must self-regulate
- Riles can’t easily accommodate player of different experience and capabilities.
TTRPGs
- Inherently flexible
- Can modify and tailor narrative experience
- E.g. To hep players with cues, they can be introduced with a technically non-existent character to lead the player, like a survivor. Player will never know the character isn’t canonical to the story
The guest came around to talk to us, and we told her about our game narrative and mechanics and the issues we had previously. She told us that the narrative and sentence puzzle mechanic are linked together well to tell a story. She picked up on how our game has a lot to do with interpreting dialogue and social cues, so she told us it’s okay to sometimes trick the players into believing something that may be false or misleading if it plays into the narrative, such as giving instructions coming from the main characters own interpretation on how to talk to people, and that it’s something she believes should be done more as well.
I felt validated with this because I had been trying to pitch the idea of a tutorial that doesn’t directly tell you what to do exactly, but I was rejected because the tutorial is supposed to explain to the player what to do to prevent confusion and frustration, however I believed that the frustration is part of Backchat’s narrative.
Following this we had another discussion about the mechanic, and it was the week after the prototyping, where we fully decided that we were going to have to change the mechanic entirely. Cindy mentioned a friend’s suggestion for the mechanic. The words you put into the box would all have different points which would determine whether the sentence is successful, so the player wouldn’t have to include all the correct words to succeed, the full sentence would still appear afterwards. At first me and Nam were a bit sceptical as it could mean that the player could send in a nonsensical answer and still get points, or that it could mean that the player would never be able to get anything wrong as the sentences would always give points.
This is because we were somewhat set on the players having to form structured sensical sentences for coding purposes.
So I added to what Cindy proposed by making it so that the puzzle pieces don’t have to make grammatical sense when inserted, and the player would just need to include the most important puzzle pieces that form the context of the sentence, which would harbour the most points like Cindy said. For the puzzles to make sense without a structure they should include no definite articles.
E.g. Instead of “I like the park” or “I want to play cards” it would be “I like park” or “I ♡ park” and “I want play cards” or “I x/✓ play cards”
Like this even when rearranged they could still make some sense and the player would be more aware that what they put in doesn’t have to make grammatical sense. there would be options that disagree or agree, but use both in a sentence and the sentence will come out as nonsensical and either nullify the points in the pieces or give negative points, and there would still be “trick” words and pieces that would nullify all the points from the sentence as well, leading to a nonsense sentence coming out instead of the correct one.
Nam mentioned that the main reason we weren’t able to form a mechanic that truly worked, is that there is no structure in any of them. There should be a pattern that the player follows for all the puzzles, a pattern that also facilitates the code for the game. for example, the original word puzzles had no real structure to the answers the players could use.
I brainstormed ideas like:
- Only being able to enter pieces in specific structures and sequences which may change depending on the type of sentence, the player wouldn’t be able to enter things in any other sequence. For example, the player may pick what type of sentence they want to form, [comment][joke] etc. and the pick would have to make sense with the context of the conversation.
- Preset dialogue options that only represent MCs thoughts and what they want to say, and after that the player would complete the word puzzle to match like a hint.
- The MC has a though bubble determining what they want to say, but the player chooses whether the word puzzle will align with the thought or not. Why would any player choose to disagree? Introduce a system that subtly punishes the player for not aligning with MCs wishes. Symbolising masking and people pleasing at one’s own detriment. The player would have to maintain a balance between doing what MC wants and what NPCs want. By doing what MC wants a lot the player might find that the NPCs are more flexible than first thought but there MUST be a balance.
- Players only need to form sentences when the answer is longer than average. The shorter answers would be preset choices that the MC has already learned to use as a template.
- Tone indicator still takes the form of shapes, but they’re placed as the ends of the puzzles like sandwich bread engulfing the essence of all sentences, a good amount of the pieces would be drawings, and symbols.
The last one was my favourite as it was an interesting way to keep the shape mechanics that Nam came up with, and it also keeps the sentence puzzles. I tried explaining it to my teammates, but they weren’t really on board with it as they didn’t understand it. So, in the future weeks I aim to more properly conceptualise it so it’s comprehensible.
