Interactivity. Divergence. Continuity. Quality. We all want to see that game where you can directly affect the plot progression and yet somehow maintain continuity, or even more unlikely; quality. I thought it couldn''t be done. Then I started to think it could. Recently, I''ve seen some games that don''t quite meet the goal, but they definitly have at least some of the tools we will need to do so. The Design Forum is nice and all, it will always be my first love. But let''s face it... if you''re here in the writing forum you must be smart. You must realize that eventually all the eye-candy in the world will fall to the game that has both the eye-candy and a really good writer. Or maybe it''s the other way around. Maybe you''re like me, a writer who sees vast untapped potential in games as a bizzarre new medium, and you want to go down in history as one of the first people to screw with it. Hard core. Maybe you''re both. One of the games thats''s caught my eye lately is Shen Mue. it''s a dreamcast game, set in Yokosuka Japan in 1986. It is a near clone of my favorite game of all time, Panzer Dragoon Saga. It made some massive revisions, and those revisions could well be the tools we will need to find the Holy Grail of Gaming. SMALL SETTING Shenmue takes place in a city, not a world. You move from neighborhood to neighborhood, not from country to country. As was brought to light by AP. in the Character Growth thread, smaller setting is the first step to better divergence. Panzer Dragoon Saga was also on a small scale, there were two small post-apocolyptic towns and one wandering caravan. There are so many advantages to a smaller setting. There are so many disadvantages to a massive setting. Once again, if it''s essential to your game, by all means go continant hopping, but I''m content to stay small and flesh out my NPCs and locations. PERSISTANT TIME PASSAGE This was a really neat trick in shenmue. Time passes at something like 1/5 real time. NPCs go about their daily lives, from work to home to bed to work, etc. This is a wonderful balancing mechanism. You train with this old man in the Park to learn Martial Arts, but you can only train so much because the old man has to go eat his lunch eventually. Experience? Hah. Levels? Not even. Just time passage. More in a bit... gotta go eat... ====== "The unexamined life is not worth living." -Socrates "Question everything. Especially Landfish." -Matt

OUTRIGHT REFUSAL
At all times in Shen Mue, you are surrounded by people. But when you try to ask most of them questions, they just refuse to talk to you. Sometimes they just keep walking, sometimes they reply with a confused look "Do I know you?" This awesome and quite funtional.

EVENT TREE
I''m still trying to figure out how this game''s event tree works. The small scale works very well here because you can bottleneck the player and count on her moving through a specific place to get to other places. Get yourslef a clever level design, and BANG interactivity and continuity.

Now, this game really isn''t divergent. You can''t really make choices that affect the plot, although you can take much of the game out of order if you wish.

QUICK TIME EVENTS
No, it has nothing to do with Quicktime(tm). Instead these things are kind of like the old Dragons lair game... hit this button in time and something good happens. Hit the wrong button or take too much time and sorry but...

Now, if this were the whole game, i''d be pissed. But it adds some spice to the FMVs. It allows the action of the game to carry over into cinematic sequences. If you screw up one buttonpress, you the action takes a turn for the worse, but you can always recover with the next buttonpress. The only problem I saw is that in ShenMue, if you lose a QTE, it starts you back at the beginning of the scene and you get to do it over again. I would rather have to live with the shame of having been pummeled by those street punks...

quote:Original post by Landfish
SMALL SETTING

There are so many advantages to a smaller setting. There are so many disadvantages to a massive setting. Once again, if it''s essential to your game, by all means go continant hopping, but I''m content to stay small and flesh out my NPCs and locations.

Yeah, this definitely something I was planning on doing. It can allow the player to really get to know the NPCs in the area. This combined w/ the persistant time passage can have really realistic effects.

Like, the player could meet a certain NPC in the local tavern, then a few days later the player wants to see that NPC to ask some questions or what have you. Then the player may have to hang out in the tavern at about the same time as the player met him before or perhaps check at the tavern periodically.

The point is that there would be so many NPCs and the player could really get attatched to them.

quote:
PERSISTANT TIME PASSAGE
This was a really neat trick in shenmue. Time passes at something like 1/5 real time. NPCs go about their daily lives, from work to home to bed to work, etc. This is a wonderful balancing mechanism. You train with this old man in the Park to learn Martial Arts, but you can only train so much because the old man has to go eat his lunch eventually. Experience? Hah. Levels? Not even. Just time passage.

This is another really great one that should be an absolute necessity for most heavily story-based games. This is basically what dwarfsoft, ingenu, and I were talking about a while back.




"All you touch and all you see is all your life will ever be --Pink Floyd
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur.
Need help? Well, go FAQ yourself.

Click here to see my current project.

quote:Original post by Landfish

OUTRIGHT REFUSAL
At all times in Shen Mue, you are surrounded by people. But when you try to ask most of them questions, they just refuse to talk to you. Sometimes they just keep walking, sometimes they reply with a confused look "Do I know you?" This awesome and quite funtional.

This I was planning on using in my current project also. Well, at least it's similar. I was thinking if there is a decent reputation system, the player would practically create his own quest by trying to attain a piece of info or whatnot and needing to get that NPC to trust/like the player. There could be many ways to do it too which would create new experience as a side-effect.

Like the player could invite the NPC to the local tavern & buy the NPC a beer (I was thinking alcohol could make NPCs more eager to release info, but also make them easier to piss off too). The player could do a favor for them or join an affiliation that NPC belongs to assuming that NPC does belong to one.

Some of these concepts were infulenced by my reading about Morrowind though, so I can't take full credit




"All you touch and all you see is all your life will ever be --Pink Floyd
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur.
Need help? Well, go FAQ yourself.

Click here to see my current project.


Edited by - Nazrix on November 21, 2000 7:30:05 PM

quote:
if you''re here in the writing forum you must be smart.

Oh ya.

[qoute]
SMALL SETTING...

Definetely a good idea. I think it''s much better to have a small world that you can get very involve in then a large one that you never get connected to. There is a potential problem here in the player may feel confined. Substitute geographical size for NPC depth and I think it might work.

In FF8 I found that the designers decided the NPCs could never be very interesting, so they instead made impressive graphics and a massive world. I would much prefer an NPC that you can''t predict (without just being random).

I''ll add more later. have to go eat...

"When i was a child I caught a fleeting glimpse, out of
the corner of my mind. I turned to look, but it was
gone, I cannot put my finger on it now. The child has
grown, the dream has gone." -Pink Floyd

Once again LF comes up with his OWN ideas and POSTS them on this board for all to see... And once again they are GREAT!

Small setting, this is very well and good (to which I agree) but what if you wished to include a world? Would you then have specific localised areas to which the player could travel to and therefore specify a small area of detail for a large game world? This brings to mind Feist with Crydee which was described very well, and the swamp (and later the Shinzawi estate) were the only things on the other world to really be described well. (the academy was not really in need of a description. It was devoid of much more than walls, ceilings and floors).

Is this then a breach of your guidelines or is it an expansion of them? I would prefer to think of this as a few detailed areas which you would see, and the rest is just ''scenery'' (background). This is what I intend to use in my game (as it really seems pointless to have miles of uninhabited countryside that the player must walk across for hours eh? )

About the timing attribute, yeah... I kind of remember talking about that. It was in the AI forum in the ''NPC AI...'' (one of them) thread. Basically, everybody has things that need to be done and things that need to be done at certain times. This comes back to needs based scheduling (There is a thread of that name in the AI forum too about the same thing ). You can choose to do ANYTHING at all that you want, but if it doesn''t mesh with the other persons plans then tough - you will have to wait .

Also, to do with timing.. It seems similar also to the adrenaline factor that was being discussed in the Flowing Figthing thread.

About events though, all you really need to do is set EVENT, with a list of PREREQUISITE EVENTS that decide if an event is able to occur. Then, you add in the conditions under which the event occurs. From these, you can have almost complete NON-LINEARITY that can have an unlimited number of events and unlimited combinations of events that can be worked into the story. If you weren''t there for one event, then you could have a completely different experience (and story for that matter)

About the button hitting taking a turn for the worse, I would just like to rephrase your term. I would prefer to look at it as a twist in the story, possibly a more interesting set of actions or events is about to occur... Maybe it is more fun if the wrong thing was done.

I will see what I can do about incorporating this rant into the doc. It seems that a lot that needed to be said about Story design and game design as well as writing was said here. (I see this as more of a design thread than a writing thread).

-Chris Bennett of Dwarfsoft - Site:"The Philosophers'' Stone of Programming Alchemy" - IOL
The future of RPGs - Thanks to all the goblins over in our little Game Design Corner niche
          

quote:Original post by dwarfsoft

About events though, all you really need to do is set EVENT, with a list of PREREQUISITE EVENTS that decide if an event is able to occur. Then, you add in the conditions under which the event occurs. From these, you can have almost complete NON-LINEARITY that can have an unlimited number of events and unlimited combinations of events that can be worked into the story. If you weren't there for one event, then you could have a completely different experience (and story for that matter)

I don't mean to take this off topic too much, but could you explain more about your thinking on this? Are you thinking that if the prerequisites are not met then it's possible some events may not occur at all one time a person plays the game, but will occur if the player replays the game. Or are you thinking this could make events just happen in a drastically different order? Or are you thinking of something totally different? I'm just curious, 'cause I was thinking about doing something like this too.




"All you touch and all you see is all your life will ever be --Pink Floyd
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur.
Need help? Well, go FAQ yourself.

Click here to see my current project.


Edited by - Nazrix on November 22, 2000 9:55:29 AM

Doh. Last AP was me...