Hi. I’m making a game, and I’ve realized that my idea for presenting the puzzles really just felt arbitrary.
The game is set on a sinking ship, and my idea was “oh you decide what to do based on conversations you have with people over the radio” but… That just seems stupid.
The main reason I wanted to do this in the first place was because I was under the distinct impression that more choices = better game. But, after stepping away from it for a bit… Wow, that’s stupid.
Now I want to write it mostly linear, with some branches going off but not going too far. Some ending branches opening up near the end of the game. Mostly I’m just realizing that the more I worry about what makes a good game, the less effort I put into making the game. So I’m gonna try to just make it and fix it in post. Probably what I should have been doing from the start…
I feel like a “mostly linear” game is the only way I can really tell this story. Forgive me for getting personal, but i feel like i’m just subconsciously looking for any fault, no matter how much of a stretch, to justify quitting, and “that’s not how other games are” is such a bomb for my anxiety.
It can be an almost impossible burden to make your first games great. There’s so much that goes into writing a game that just completing it is a wonder in itself.
What’s worked for a lot of people is to release a game, get critical feedback from the community, and then make a better game next time.
It’s like going to the gym. If you go in thinking “if I don’t bench 200 I’m a failure”, you might have a bad time. But if you think, “I’m going to bench more than last time”, you’ll probably succeed a lot more in the long run. So with the game you can think of it both as exercise for your writing and as a chance to see what your audience likes.
As for choice bs linearity, either one can be fun. Two common ways to handle that are “branch and bottleneck” (have a lot of choices but then they all come back ton the same result later on, then do it again) and delayed effects (so you can choose to pick up a pebble or not early on and twenty choices later a rock collector appears and you can sell them the pebble).
Communicating with radio on a sinking ship sounds fun!
I don’t know. I mean, I can imagine talking to several people with different ideas about the best course of action, and you have to decide what you want to do. Maybe someone wants you to navigate to safety, someone else says get in the escape boat now, someone else says, ‘First nip downstairs and get that diamond that’s on display, then the escape boat’.
Even if you don’t like these ideas, I feel like there’s a lot of ways the general idea could work. I’d concentrate on trying to find one you like, then proceed from there. Puzzle ideas tend to flow naturally from story ideas, not the other way around. Unless you’re hellbent on executing a puzzle you’ve already invented and have to fit a story to it. But keep it simple if you haven’t done a game yet. You want to get something you like enough, and that’s doable enough, that you can complete it.
A generalisation I have about Good games is that their overall effect/design is not arbitrary. So getting an idea you like and developing puzzles that are consequences of that idea is at least starting on the turf of Good.
I think, by lessons hardly learned, that the major issue in the narrative-heavy stories is the command of the language. You have available an expert on “Navalese” and Naval matters, and reading your posts, seems that you have a solid command of english, so please go wild, send the ßtest to your local Naval expert implement his feedback, rinse and repeat, and you’re on !
This is something I bought into for a while, too. But after making games for a while and seeing audience feedback, what people really seem to respond to is feeling like they have control over their experience. And there’s lots of ways to indulge that feeling without including puzzles for the sake of puzzles, or making a giant branching choice-based monster. Long story short, you can fake it!
If the main character encounters an obstacle, having the player involved in getting past it feels good! (Even if you can’t fail or even change the outcome). Having small choices about how they approach a problem can also feel good (even if the impact of different choices doesn’t matter after about five minutes). Find little ways to involve the player and engage their brain in the moment. You can still tell the one linear or lightly branching story you want to tell while also making it feel super interactive, and that’s something I personally really like both as a player and as an author.
Re: faking it, if examples would be helpful, I liked The Thirty-Nine Steps from IFComp 2022. It’s based on a book and largely follows the plot of it, you can’t fail, and IIRC there’s about one thing in it that would qualify as a puzzle, but I thought it did a good job flavoring things differently in response to choices.
While IF always involves some choices (to be interactive fiction), those choices can manifest in a lot of different ways! There’s your classic Choose Your Own Adventure style, where every choice branches the story and those branches never recombine. There’s the Choice of Games style, where choices affect your stats and maybe branch in the short-term, but the branches recombine before the next scene. There’s the parser-game style, where your choices don’t make any real impact on the overall story (Zork always has basically the same story no matter what you do) but the act of making those choices—solving the puzzles, etc—is fun.
And then there’s dynamic fiction, which is where there are no real choices at all, and you’re just choosing how you experience the story. The simplest version of this is just “click to continue” links. And people like that too!
(And then of course there’s just publishing a short story or novelette or novel, with no interactivity at all. This forum isn’t really about that, but people here tend to enjoy those too—it’s no surprise that IF players tend to like reading other types of fiction as well!)
EDIT: Oops, that was supposed to reply to the OP, not to Encorm. Sorry about that!
I’m interested in “linear” games with a lot of lateral content. My released game and two future games all have a fair amount of side stuff. A work can be linear and not linear all at once. Or neither. Some terms limit the experiences of players and audiences alike; they’re a kind of interpretive box.
Not to say they aren’t helpful in conversation, but they can become restrictive.
But less philosophically: My advice is to put together something unfinished but playable and show it to people. It’s good to test early; that affords a chance to get the foundations right. Questions of narrative structure and puzzle placement can be hard to answer on one’s own.
First off, I think you have to identify what exactly inspired you to begin creating this game. If you can’t say it in a single sentence, then your thoughts are too muddied and you should revisit what sparked your inspiration.
It sounds like you wanted to tell a story. Having lots of choices is more of a gameplay mechanic so I’m not sure how much of your inspiration is actual story vs. gameplay.
Once you identify and acknowledge the idea that inspired your game, support that to the end. If it’s story, write a linear plot that’s satisfying, then create branches if that enhances the experience. If you find yourself waffling a bit with that course of action, maybe you are more interested in the gameplay side of things and creating a framework and mechanics (puzzles and rules) for your simulated environment is the priority, and that story is second.
So I guess you have to ask yourself, what was my inspiration? …and answer it as clearly and concisely as possible. Focus on that aspect and don’t allow other things to distract you.
I truly believe that creative endeavours are expressions of one’s self. You have something to share with others. Make that messageloud and clear.
Old 1900s era naval technology vibes, mixed with shipwrecks and claustrophobia.
Part of what makes me excited about this game is the imagery of being in a dark, cold place. Machinery that you can’t control. Honorable mention to Subnautica, especially the wreck of the Aurora. As well as being able to mix together fantasy and naval history- So many opportunities for fun words, unique things, and interesting interactions. E.G. Crowe being too afraid of firearms to pick one up, but being totally fine with using a full-size Saber.
The vibe I sort of picture is quiet, weirdly calm, and anxious. You are beholden to the forces of nature to not be crushed by pressure. Your only hope of escape is someone else coming by with the equipment to salvage the hulk.
Another inspiration- Exploring half life 2 maps. Everything is… Wrecked. Nobody’s here. In this game, not so much in HL2, nothing is trying to kill you. It’s you versus your environment.
I found the less I worried about writing “the game people want” and worked on writing the game I wanted to make, the better the games were received.
You can mostly ignore the people who decry “linearity” as a fault. Nowadays it’s a preference.
A kinetic novel is a visual novel that is linear with no choices and presents like a story with multimedia elements.
Dynamic fiction is the IF equivalent of a kinetic novel with no branching. Usually done in a choice-narrative system. There may be some instances where there are multiple choices which you read in the order you want or are optional, and some interactive elements, like entering your name or varying some cycling text. Often text styling, pictures, music, and sound effects are featured.
I’ve played Subnautica and absolutely adore it. One of my top games of all time. I’m familiar with the Aurora.
What you’ve stated, though story related, focuses on setting more than plot. The story doesn’t sound as crucial as the environment does for your inspiration. Dark, claustrophobic, isolation, out in the ocean, eminent danger, stress, exploration, survival. I’d map out the locations within the vessel, a loose plot of how you escape (puzzles) and string it all together. It should play out in a very linear manner just to get it working and playable. Then you can direct your attention to spicing it up with branching paths, gating access to areas, optional content, characters communicating on the comms, flavourful environmental descriptions (gotta feel that stress), etc. However, those other aspects will become clearer once you have the working version.
Knowing how to start is half the battle. When my son was writing English essays, he never quite understood the purpose of a theme statement and how that guides the entire content of the essay. If you have a strong, clear theme statement (your inspiration) and fully invest in it, you can write great essays even if the subject matter isn’t your cup of tea because you’ll actually have something to say on the matter. Everything you write should have purpose and support your vision (theme statement) for the game.
there’s several dynamic fiction parsers also, I think aside from tailypo (which is mentioned in emily short’s link) there’s open that vein and after the accident.
You should get used to both these problems. They will be around for a while .
Solve problem number 1 first. You have a unifying theme for the thing you want to make. Stay with the “sinking ship” idea for as long as you can. It will serve to motivate you to write the first version of your game. The first version should be as short and simple as possible.
Then you need to find somebody to play it. It will help to be able to say, "This is as short and as simple as I could make it. It takes about 5 minutes".
Then you flip into phase 2. Conversation with people about the thing you made. That may fundamentally change the concept you have for the project you are building. But the benefit is that you will have established a feedback loop with some real-live human beings.
Keep the email addresses and phone numbers of those people. Because after you rewrite your game again, you will want them to try the next version. Hopefully they will have talked about you to some friends, and you will have more people next time to help you.
I don’t know, “compelled to make bad decisions based on communications from someone not in your position” is approximately the most naval thing imaginable.
There is a surprising wealth of primary source material here—actual dispatches and so on—that might be illuminating. One of my favorite examples isn’t actually naval: a slightly catty exchange between the Secretary of War and the commander in charge of the defenses at the mouth of Charleston Harbor in the leadup to the US Civil War (barest summary: Forts Sumter and Moultrie were fortifications in Charleston Harbor; Sumter on an artificial island in the middle of the harbor, Moultrie on the north shore of the harbor on a much larger natural island; in the winter of '60 hostilities seemed inevitable but did not break out until the following April):
And so on. This is transcribed from The War of the Rebellion: a compilation of the official records of the Union and Confederate armies, an official history compiled by the War Department after the war. It has just shy of 300 pages on Fort Sumter.
I take note that someone studied seriously Ft. Sumter (reading the WoR-OR is a mark of serious study); but the primary sources often need to be put in the context of these days; namely that Floyd, secWar of the Buchanan administration (back then, the inauguration day was in March) was perhaps second only to benjamin arnold as loyalty: he was rather sympathetic for the southern cause, taking not few questionable decision, not in the best interest of the United States.
Anderson’s answer, pointing correctly to the soundness of its decision of concentrating his meager forces (guess how and why he has more guns than men ?) in the most strong position, that the brand-new, near complete Fort Sumter (and the “third system” forts was something to behold, literal stone ship of line, with their double or triple tier of guns..) where his few men, as he pointed (actually, warned) can actual do a strong defense, avoided the bullet; the question being a probing for finding an excuse for replacing him to an officier more symphatetic to the southern cause…
implement his feedback, rinse and repeat, and you’re on !
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