The concept of a multiple choice game.

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6 comments, last by griddolini 6 years, 5 months ago

Hi there gamedev community!

I am currently developing a horror mobile game on android. I am stuck at the dilemma of multiple choices. What kind of approach should I take in terms of development and design? 

From user experience perspective would you rather have that third choice? Or would you rather play a game that has white or black consequences instead? 

 

On the other hand I have been initializing buttons for each action in the game but then it turned out to be resource wasteful, so what I thought about was to create a handler with an integer flag, whenever the player clicks on the button the flag is incremented or decremented so next time the button is pressed a different method would be chosen from the handler. 

I hope I'm being clear, if you have any questions please ask for further explanation.

 

TL;DR: I would really appreciate getting help in the methodology and design of developing a choice based game. 

 

Thank you for reading. :) 

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18 minutes ago, EagleGamer said:

From user experience perspective would you rather have that third choice? Or would you rather play a game that has white or black consequences instead? 

This is the wrong question. Don't ask us what we prefer. Decide what gameplay you want your game to have, and force it down our throats! Maybe sometimes it's 2 choices, and other times there are more than that. We just have to deal with whatever your game throws at us.

-- Tom Sloper -- sloperama.com

1 minute ago, Tom Sloper said:

This is the wrong question. Don't ask us what we prefer. Decide what gameplay you want your game to have, and force it down our throats! Maybe sometimes it's 2 choices, and other times there are more than that. We just have to deal with whatever your game throws at us.

An exceptional advice indeed, thanks a lot, I suppose I'll do just that. :D 

How about the psuedocode/methodology of a multiple choice game?

21 hours ago, EagleGamer said:

From user experience perspective would you rather have that third choice? Or would you rather play a game that has white or black consequences instead? 

Most users of this site play a game or two in their free time, but we're not your game's playerbase.

21 hours ago, EagleGamer said:

t then it turned out to be resource wasteful

Are you talking about your code ?

 

I recommend you focus on creating/finishing the game with 2 choices, while keeping open the option to later on expand the game a bit.

Have you considered the many games from Bioware that have a range of actions in each dialog wheel?

There are certain obvious choices (good/evil) and usually a neutral choice. There are occasionally other axis like humorous, cruel, heroic, and others.  Each decision shifts variables so a player that is mostly good can still make an evil choice without completely throwing the personality.  Different options are made available based on how well aligned the player fits within each axis.

Two choices are okay, for my taste as a gamer, if they are not strictly and obviously "black and white" and/or if there's certain occasional randomness (say, one option gives you an obvious result and the other option, compared to the first, might give you either a better or a worse result randomly).

I would say, from a high level programming perspective, the "easiest" way to allow a variety of choices would be basically a dictionary of all the choices in the game, with the player's response recorded. You'd want to write a log for yourself to reference what each choice / option was, and then at various other points in the game you could simply pull up the choice they made in the past to handle any decision logic.

So for example, part way through the game you meet a guy in a dark alley. You met him earlier in the game. If(playerChoices->WasMeanToGuy == true){
shankPlayerInRibs();
}
else{
sayHi();
}

The feasibility of this obviously depends on the length of the game/number of choices, and the depth you want those choices to have. 

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