Gameplay and Story Work Together

Dialog isn’t the only way you can deliver a story. Neither are cutscenes.* When I made my previous interactive project, a 3-screen whodunit you can try out here, I used both audio of suspect interviews and items (visual, text and audio clues) to let the player try to determine who the culprit was. With that project, you had to take both the interviews and the items into account to make your choice. Because of this, you were pushed, if not forced, to listen to a suspect’s interview before looking at their items.

For “The French Inn” (which I’ll refer to as TFI to keep things short and sweet), I brought back the concept of delivering the story though items and interviews but I made it work differently. While the gameplay sometimes requires the player to use or get a certain item, other items in the game are just there to add to the world. An example is the a plaque in the Inn’s washroom. On it, there are rules for how guests of the inn should act (See image).

None of what’s there is crucial for the player to know to move forward in the game but reading it does give a pretty clear indication to the player that this isn’t a typical inn. I wanted to have some extra items and elements like the rules to offer curious players something extra to enjoy and to give the setting a bit more depth.

While I wanted give the setting room to grow beyond the plot, I also wanted to make sure that the story could be understood even when the player does the strictest minimum to play through the game. This is why, during the conversation segments of the game, where the player can ask non-playable characters certain pre-determined questions, the player cannot progress without asking every possible question and seeing the complete answers. Working off the assumption that the player is actually reading what’s on-screen, they will have gotten all I intended to convey or tell them by the end of the game.

And on top of all of this, there are cutscenes. While the game could have worked without them, it could have made the whole experience rather dull. The cutscenes include mostly the more action-intensive parts of the game, things that simple text stating [Character gets shot] or [Character is mad] can’t quite convey as effectively as seeing an animation of a character get shot or hearing a voice actor playing a character getting mad can. At the same time, the interactivity is integral to a good game. And there’s nothing quite like that feeling of figuring the next step in a game on your own. Cutscenes do add great production values to a low-budget game but letting the player enter a complete world and work their way through it is often better at making it all feel real.

Know Your Limits

If you’re working with little time and a small budget, like I had to work with, it’s very important to think about the limits of your production. It’s always easy when you’re just in the writing stage to not quite grasp how much work it might take to develop what you’re writing into a working game. This is probably even more true if you aren’t the person developing your game and you don’t have programming skills. You need to think about some time-saving measures as you write and design your game. One way to save on work would be to put emphasis on things you know how to do. If you’re more skilled at visuals or animation, putting a bit more of your story in the cutscenes might be a good idea if you think it will ultimately result in a better end-product or if you know you or your team will be able to create cutscenes more easily than other parts of the game. It’s just another thing you need to factor in when looking at the other storytelling possibilities I explained above.

Thinking of the game’s setting is also important. Since we would have very little time to make a complete game, I knew early on I couldn’t make a large, expansive universe for TFI. Because of this, the setting for TFI is… well, just one inn and the surrounding areas. To keep the story interesting and expansive, however, the backstory here is that all sorts of people come and visit the inn and it’s not in the safest of places. But how can you show this if the only play area available is the inn itself? On top of that, TFI is only about one pair of visitors who come to the inn. How can you show the eclectic group of people who apparently come by at other times? Well, you do it with stuff like the rules and you use the cutscenes to full capacity and show a lot of action in them. You can even do it with the characters. The Innkeeper, Leo, is young but he’s also bitter, angry, skilled with weapons, and has made many enemies. In other words, he’s had to deal with a whole lot of things despite the fact he’s never left the inn or the forest surrounding it. His character shows that the setting is dangerous with very little need to actually show too much of that danger.

Understand The Medium You’re Using

I don’t mean “understand the medium” just in the sense that you’re making a game. That is still important, though. You do need to understand that what you’re making has to be fun and interactive and that people can get that thrill of figuring something out. What I mean is understanding beyond just interactivity but also the kind of interactivity. We didn’t just make a game. We made an iPhone game. I will admit that I kind of dropped the ball here. When I was writing and designing TFI, I was working with the assumption that it would be people in my Radio and Television program who would be doing the programming. I think, because of this, I decided to keep any kind of complex touch interactions in the game to a minimum. We ended up not using an in-school programmer and TFI ended up being a pretty straight-forward point-and-click aim-and-touch game. No finger sliding. No multi-touch. No puzzles. In a way, it was probably good for keeping the overall complexity to a minimum. Even what we made required many, many graphs on my part and a paper mountain of a project bible to make sure it worked and made sense. But it still made for a more tamed experience that doesn’t really utilize the great features iPhones, iPads and iPod touches can offer. If you do make your own game, make sure you do think about the interface people will use to play it. Making better use of that interface will only make your experience more engaging.

Make The Story Engaging Despite the Complexity

You know all those graphs and that project bible I just wrote about? Yeah, in case you didn’t figure it out, working in a non-linear medium instantly makes things much more complicated. You need to figure out how players will go through your game, know when they will interact with what and often have to figure more than one line of dialog or text for the same character or object depending on what the player has or has not done up to that point. Because of all of this, I wouldn’t quite blame someone for loosing sight of any original ideas or plans and just writing in a more matter-of-fact tone. But you really shouldn’t. See, on top of all of this stuff I wrote for the project, I also created character profiles and plot summaries. Since I knew how to make a TV show bible, I used most of the elements you would find in one and created some background details for both the characters and the plot that, as I would write and design the game, would help inform me on how I would make the characters act and make their stories progress. Delving into who the characters in your game are and how you want them to act before you actually do anything is a good way to make sure that your ideas stick with you as you design your game.

In Conclusion

Writing “The French Inn” was definitely a challenge. Trying to make a story entertaining is hard in any medium but when you throw in the extra layer of interactivity, the need to make a low-cost game in very little time and the fact this was only really the second time I’ve tried making an interactive story, the whole thing became infinitely more difficult. It’s a real mind-bender trying to get into the head of the theoretical person who is playing your game and think like them. Keeping things up to interpretation for a TV show or a movie can be seen as artsy or clever. Not thinking about the 1000 and 1 ways someone might play through your game can leave many of your future players with anger and bitter dissatisfaction. Despite it all, I think I did turn out an interesting human story with action, suspense and intrigue and I certainly hope that when it comes out (fairly soon), you will agree.

*To go into more detail on how narrative works in games, I highly recommend this Extra Credits episode on writing. I would even recommend that you watch all of their episodes on all of their topics if you want to do anything involving game creation. They’re really the quintessential resource regarding everything about the games industry.