Storytelling on PGD

[WILL]

Hey guys!

It's been rather quiet on PGD lately, I guess it's that time of year where work seems to either pile up or our attention spans get shorter. Who knows?! :P

Anyhow, I was watching the ABC/BBC mini-series 'Arabian Nights' based off of 'The Book of One Thousand and One Nights' ('http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_of_One_Thousand_and_One_Nights') recently, and it sort of made me think about storytelling in games. Something that I think we could do more of here at PGD.

Realistically what we do when we are creating a game with a plot is also creating a story. Something that we can let someone else 'live' in for a while. So to do that we can focus on anything we want really, but the more we delve into the storytelling aspect the more we need to bring to the table so to speak.

Things like anticipation, excitement, humour, rivalry take on more than a cookie cutter significance and your story becomes all the more interesting and involving. This is the art of storytelling and it's a great thing to learn.


Anyhow, I just wanted to see if there was any interest in this area of game development and if people had any ideas of incorporating more stories into their games and how they could do that.

Fell free to express your ideas or thoughts on this here. :)

[jasonf]

The trouble with Story Telling is that you have to have a good story to tell, that's quite a trick in itself.

Someone once said that everyone's got one good book in them.

I thought I'd got a good story for a game a while ago, it was epic. I started to work on a game framework which would allow me to produce a game based on it then after everything, I came to realise that it would take me an age to produce all of the assets required for the story.. and the story wasn't very well fleshed out afterall.. so I gave up. I might try again at some point as I quite liked parts of it. It had a lot of potential, Time travel, Worm holes, impending doom, a war, the fate of 2 planets, plots, morality, shadey characters, a rebellion, an oppressive regime, a puppet master and a plot twist at the end.. oh yes, and multiple endings based on your decisions.

The best story driven games I've played so far are Deus Ex and Outcast (which I'm currently replaying)

Both games had a strong narrative, player choices which had some impact on the game's outcome. They had good pace and lots of events and interraction for the player to immerse themselves into the story enough to make it a personal experience.

In both games I felt emotion, in Dues Ex, it was anger, fear, betrayal, revenge.

in Outcast it was a mixture of different emotions, from serenity to rage, especially one time where I killed one of the main bad guys in a few seconds when I ran at him in a blind rage for something he'd done... I'm sure it should have taken longer..

another emotion was a guilty feeling as the Talon race had built their entire religion around the events from a scientific experiment gone wrong..

perhaps I took them a little too seriously :oops:

A good story can add so much more to a game.
But a bad story can destroy a technically good game.
But both require a lot of effort.


Try creating a story in something like the Neverwinter Nights toolkit (using the plot wizards), you'll see how much effort goes into something even very simple, even using existing art assets.

[cairnswm]

From my point of view a story is not important to making a Shareware/Freeware game. Replayability is more important.

A small game cannot truly include a story, there isn;t enough scope in the game for it unless you use it as sort of cut scenes between levels showing how the story line progresses. Peggle has done this and in my opinion it really doesn;t work at all.

Rather spend the time adding a few extra animations to the game, I believe it would increase your chance of sales more than a detailed story.

[jdarling]

I think that story lines can do more for a game then most people realize. For example, in your Village game a story line that gave the player some idea of where they were headed and why could help to provide interesting play. Having a note pop up every now and then from a "Towns Person" stating that they are starving and would like food, instead of the notice about the king wanting his share (that never changes) having multiple versions come up with different hastes assigned to them, or having notices from the battle field come up. These drive the story instead of it just being a point and click.

One of the biggest complaints about "modern" games is the lack of story line and how it drives. I've seen post after post on different boards talking about how players wish that the game development companies had spent the time to build in a story line. In MMORPGS we see it over and over that the players build out their own stories and even lore. Why not have this happen in a low end shareware/freeware game?

Doom was cool because it brought a new play style and look, Zork is known because the story was outrageous and fun. Besides, its cheaper to produce a story then it is to produce graphics :).

[JSoftware]

Actually, when I think back, I was only highly entertained while I played games with a solid storyline compared to an average mindless fps.

Games like C&C, red alert2, tiberian sun; Deus Ex kept me playing because of the storyline only. I had an illusion of choice and power which was quite remarkable in only those kind of games.

[Hilton Varian]

I think the best way to put more story in a Game is with more expreson in the charictors eyes and In the way a charictor presents it self to othe charictors. In cut sceans and to the person who playes the party or charictors and viar lighting effects and music including atmosphear music. and sound Effects and textures done with a good 3d design program like 3d studio max, Mayer and adobie after effects in post and preprduction. A good Game engin it all helps and low polygon modiling.

Hilton

[WILL]

I think Hilton is on the right track as well. Storytelling isn't just about making the player sit a read text. Or even reading it for him. There are so many little things that you can do to 'tell' your story or reveal your plot in your game.

Best example of indirect storytelling I can think of is Another World (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Another_World_%28video_game%29) (Out Of This World in North America) by Eric Chachi.

Everything was all animation and scenery and small, but effective cutscenes.

Another aspect is the back-story. Sometimes it really pays to have your characters own stories fleshed out just for your own sake. It can really help to keep all your characters consistent and believable when you do have them say something or react in some way.

Another is your main character. Lets say you have a simple plot for your game. You want to add a bit of background plot to make the whole adventure of playing the game worth something in the end. Ok so what type of journey or quest does he go on? How does he change as a person along the way? Is there a moral to the story used? Does he or she learn something that helps them in the end somewhere in the game? And so on...

Story can do a lot for your games and make them more relevant to the player sitting in front of the screen. Has anyone here ever wanted to make a game that has any of this attached to it?

[jasonf]

Another world was like watching a cartoon when played well, there was no dialogue as such, it had an intro, various interesting sections, events which happened to the main character and an end, which was unexpected ( for me anyway )
My only gripe with Another World was that it was so very very unforgiving.. the key presses had to be spot on or it was squishy death, or drowny death... or spikey death.. I've played the game a million times, beaten it once.. and I still get killed by those slug things on the 1st level.

Doom on the other hand was fun on a very personal level, mowing through hordes of bad guys with a chain gun has a very satisfying feeling.. but I never felt like I was in the story... there wasn't really a story apart from something the id guys came up with a few hours before they shipped.

I've not played Halflife2, but I've heard that it's got a pretty decent expression system (as well as really good physics) does it add to the narrative though?

Fear had a good story, always kept me guessing. Scary too... sometimes too scary. (for me)

I don't mind reading a lot of text (completed Dungeon Siege and Neverwinter nights), as long as it's not boring. Deus Ex had a lot of background information hidden within texts, emails.. etc, the most important stuff was spoken, but a lot of the immersion was text.

Max Payne 2 had a good solid movie storyline, I enjoyed it immensely and played it to the end. Re-playability?... not so sure, but it was like playing a movie.. yeah, sure it was on rails.. (so heavily scripted) but it was supposed to be.

Halo on the other hand, Big game, fairly big story... boring (in my opinion there was far too much re-use of location meshes, made it too repetitive)

All of the games above would be nigh on impossible for a hobby game coder to write apart from say Another World .


I played C&C and didn't care for the story, I just wanted to blow up some tanks :D

[JSoftware]

Oh that reminds me of the first Max Payne. It definately had some of it all. Revenge, side plots, nice graphics, emotional environments, innovation of the fps genre. It was a wee bit long but the end was worth it.

[WILL]

I think the best storytelling FPS, besides Deus Ex, I've played was Return To Castle Wolfenstein. That game had a great storytelling method.

[cragwolf]

I sympathise with cairnswm's point of view, but on the other hand, I can also see how a good story can significantly add to the enjoyment of the game. The trouble is that most stories suck, as the human imagination is quite a limited instrument. This is why I tend to prefer simulations, which are based on true stories, i.e. reality or history. One of the reasons I like WWII games so much, particularly ones which take the simulation aspect seriously, is because WWII is one of the greatest stories in human history. Less focus on narrative, more focus on facts, is part of my recipe for a good game.

[godbeast]

For about 7 years, I've been searching for inspirations in books, history, real life events (I sometimes cut some nice articles from newspapers), science etc. I collected more than 200 pages of such stuff in my notebooks. I chose a Polish national drama for the core story (very brutal yet romantic).

So I tried to write something good out of those, but it never came up the way it should look. Then I realized that I'm starting from the wrong point. It's just that when you decide to write something huge and you really want to put your heart in it, the first thing you do imo is the "world" concept. You have to play god, create from the begining to the end, with is borning and annoying. When you finish with that, choose some points in "the world" history and start writing "your story". Concept plan first, then some more details, character creation (or adoption) etc.

I knows that's it ain't America, but doing that way, I have more than 70 pages of pure scenario (main story), with is only around 30% of full project.

When I read it, I start to get the feeling with way I'd like to see and hear it on my screen, and how would I implement the gameplay.

[WILL]

So would you guys be interested in a game story writing competition?

[jasonf]

Would this be in the form of an Interactive fiction game or a paper?

A story adventure game like Sam & Max hit the road?
An epic adventure about the people of a village persecuted by a terrible demon who's taken up shop under their beloved church?...

I'd be interested, but what would be the prize?... the best story is made into a PGD collaberation game.. afterall, we have enough coders, artists, musicians, scripters.. to make a combined project.. but do we have the management and the will to do it?

[WILL]

It would obviously be a short story competition. :P And it would probably run for about a couple of months or so to give people time to write something interesting.

Of course this is just shooting out ideas... I wouldn't have the time to run such a competition.

Yeah, I had thought about a team making it into a game. :) In fact better if a commercial development team would be interested in taking a winning story and turning it into a game. But that depends on what kind of exposure it gets.

[godbeast]

So would you guys be interested in a game story writing competition?

Yeah, but after summer session :evil: