He he he… (I say that because in my game, you spend some time collecting three different-coloured frobs and manipulating them to be able to escape one of the areas. All because of a misunderstanding I had about what a FROB was!)
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On a tangent, what about feelies in communicating gameworld history/lore ?
isn’t applicable to my WIP for story reasons, but can be applied for other story narration where the PC is supposed to have at least basic history. Taking Drew’s examples, a feelie can be a “brief history of the Invasion of 668” or even a “Report of The Admiralty on the battles of 680 GUE”.
Personally, I consider the best Ultima I-VIII booklets among the best feelies, surpassing even the vaunted Infocom ones (one is even actually titled “History and lore of Britannia” (the world where Ultima series unfolds…) )
Writing a .pdf feelie about the game world shouldn’t be difficult, esp. if one follow jbg’s suggestion of annotating the details of the game world.
Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.
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I don’t think these threads can ever have too much advice. After all, this is something a LOT of writers here have dealt with, and so they’ve come through the wars and know better how to win or at least not lose at it. I’d be a fool not to consider what everyone has to say.
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This is another good trick if it serves your game and helps with backstory - a “prologue” interactable sequence where the player inhabits a different character who knows the backstory.
Think of how horror movies might show a pre-credits scene of a group of minor characters at the end of their story encountering the monster or the killer to set up the stakes and make clear “yes, this is a horror movie, this is a taste of what you’re up against and here’s kind of how it works, please worry about this foe through the calm first hour of the story…”
Your pre-credits character might even die or meet some fate after inner-monologuing about what brought them there - maybe after an attempt to vanquish the foe in a manner the real PC will use, but failing. The key is figure out ways to make your exposition interactive instead of just a text dump.
It can even be as subtle as the player starts as a deckhand on the ship and hearing gossip all around them including the name of the ship. Then the deckhand might snoop through a piece of luggage (which actually belongs to the PC) “Whoever this suitcase belongs to is obviously here to negotiate a peace talk based on this paperwork!” Then when you flash forward an NPC can just mention the name of the boat the PC arrived on and they have the suitcase they’ve already explored as a different character so backstory has already been observed and it follows that as the PC you don’t need to “discover” what the initial goal is.
As I said don’t stress if the character doesn’t understand all of your world building right off the bat. It may take 75% of the story before they do. Part of the appeal of IF is the player deciding how much to engage. You can plant optional lore dumps in letters and books and recordings that the player might optionally peruse. Some people will seek out every bit of lore you tuck away, others just want to get to the action. Don’t stress in either case. If players discover they miss something, that warrants replay and it’s good for people to realize you did set everything up and they may have skimmed over it.
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Late to the party (as usual).
One note I would add to the above is the power of what’s left unsaid. It’s surprising how many blanks in the backstory can be filled-in or deduced by the reader. Think of Hemingway’s iceberg, or the short story (wrongly) attributed to him: “For sale / baby shoes / never worn.”
Without knowing all the details, and which are truly important for the player to know, what’s probably the most vital of the above is “one faction is poised to win now.” That’s a detail I imagine presses hardest on the immediate events and characters in the game.
Also, if a war has been raging for centuries, I would doubt any one person’s claim to know how the war started. Three war historians, four opinions. There’s even debate over the origins of the Six-Day War. Six days!
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This of using a prologue as a backgrounder is an interesting, very excellent if handled well, idea, but has its pitfalls.
I still remember as a major lesson the first great PR fiasco of Square-Enix, the prologue of FF XII, whose indeed follows a minor, doomed-to-die character; the fiasco lies that back then, not few major western videogame magazine has badly lowered their standards of recensors and recensing (an enduring issue in mass-media) and not few “recensors” obviously don’t play FF XII beyond said prologue, and in their “recensions” wrote that the minor NPC was the main PC, booting the (IMVHO undeserved) bad rep of FF XII.
This anecdote is for underscoring that this narrative device is excellent, if handed and delivered well.
my on-the-spot improvement of this prologue idea, albeit in my case, frayed with potential “Mary Sue” suspicions, at least in the eyes of players whose known the author, is that the prologue’s character is an historian, researcher or student, whose first read some general reference, then start reading the book about the story…
Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.
ps. for Jim: if one want to find the origin of the arab-israeli conflict, one must look back to at least the Book of Joshua, if not even the Book of Exodus. In other words, is the oldest ongoing conflict, started around 1600 BC (I’m convinced that the impact of the Santorini eruption on Egypt was the catalyst of the most-debated migration in history, no wonder that another migration under unique condition restarted the dormant conflict…
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As a little working example, albeit still to be polished (just coded):
feel ears
you feel your right ear, moving a finger along its periphery. Indeed are long and pointy, and the curve of the long and slender lobe seems channeling the sound toward the auditory hole. What surprises you is that moving the finger along the lobe toward the auditory hole you instictively turn your head right; you test the same with the left ear, and your head move left. You think hard about this, realising that the long and protruding outward ears works also as a sort of telemeter, and your fingering was registered as “a sound fast approaching from right”, and your body reacted accordingly by instinct.
an elfin body, with elfin instinct.
whose I hope that is a good example of communication about world/lore…
Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.
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Yeah, what I should have said is ‘Here is my first and last contribution to the topic.’ Because the person who’d already read enough was me 
Some topics can become ineffectual by going on, but this is not one. The one that makes me laugh is the noble attempt to identify ‘The first thing you really need to know about Inform is…’ followed by hundreds of pages of complex suggestions and sidetracks, including mine.
-Wade
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Oh, I thought this was their first PR fiasco, lol:
(In jest, FFX fans, in loving jest.)
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well, AFAICT the fake laughing was actually intentional: Tidus was teaching Yuna how to fake laughing (or was Y teaching to T ? I can’t remember now…)
The VA know their work, and understand fully the scene they are voicing, so they intentionally give out a recognisable fake laughing, because this IS the sense of the scene learning to fake laughing, the first attempts of fake laughing of the characters was not precisely perfect; dunno if this was genuinely not fully understand by players or actually was an early case of “square-bashing” trolling, but the sort of meme of “bad voiced scene” borne out from this…
Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.
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Oh no, I know it certainly isn’t the fairest criticism, but it was certainly a PR fiasco, deserved or not.
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I remember when my sister got to this part of the game, and we were both like “…What was that??” 
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A recent game that did this well (imo) by @PatientRock
As a short SeedComp game, it wastes NO time trying to do a prologue, backstory, or exposition that’s not directly in the game world. The incredibly biased views of the protagonist showcase the rigidity and expectations of the society via her very thoughts, and all other worldbuilding is delivered through dialogue, items and tchotchkes, and windows into the not-so-empty vacuum of space.
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Let me tell you a story.
I once played a game for the TRS-80 Color Computer (affectionately known as CoCo). This was a type-in from The Rainbow if memory serves me correctly. The game was published with a very long back story that went for about four to six printed pages. However, when you played the game, it made no reference to the back story. You could play the whole game without having read that back story. This is a good example of what NOT to do.
Try to reveal the history gradually like J R R Tolkien in Lord of the Rings, George R R Martin in Game of Thrones or J K Rowling in Harry Potter.
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Write a prologue, but keep it short. This should be a teaser, just enough to get you interested. I liken this to the back cover blurb on a novel.
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Reveal the history gradually as the game unfolds. This can be through maps, documents and other artifacts found in the game. Remember that history is written by the victors.
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A more interesting version of the history is the oral history gained by talking to characters and asking them about things. Remember that different characters will have a different perspective and memories of events fade over time.
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Try to avoid anything that is completely irrelevant to the story. A little colour is okay, but don’t go overboard. In parser-based IF, the player just wants the facts. In choice-based IF, the player wants flowery prose. Write to suit the audience.
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I totally disagree with this. I’m a parser writer and a parser player, and I don’t just want the facts. I think either format can be well-suited to brevity or to story-heaviness. Parser games used to be story-light, but I love that the dogma surrounding what parser or choice games can be has loosened. That said, I’m writing my first story-light parser game. It’s quite Francisian.
Other than that sticking point, I think your list of advice is a good one.
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Let me elaborate on what I meant by point 4, as I was purposely being brief.
If you write long flowery room descriptions in parser IF, then you more than likely have lots of scenery in those descriptions. A parser player is always looking for clues. If you don’t provide descriptions for all that scenery, you get criticised for the game being under-implemented. If you do provide descriptions for all that scenery, you get criticised for having too many red herrings. Do you see the dilemma? Therefore, it is better to provide concise room descriptions where you can drill down to get the extra detail rather than present it all up front. This avoids the wall of text that is prevalent in a lot of modern games and re-showing that wall of text every time you enter a room.
This does not negate having a rich story. There are many ways to present that story, but I would personally avoid really long cut scenes, except in those situations where you have to explain a change in time or place or the player’s circumstances. Of course, you’re free to disagree.
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I see you as one of the standard bearers for the venerable tradition of IF that is very heavily focussed on gameplay. Your stories are always well-sketched, but they are not the point. The point is the exploration and puzzle-solving. I adore this type of game and I always love your games because they are fun. Which, I think, is your goal. I don’t disagree with you at all that there are dilemmas in text-heavy room descriptions, and that big cutscenes are not always good. I think that solving puzzles and having fun is not always the point of parser games anymore, and that the format can be used in other ways effectively. In short, I don’t think you’re wrong-- I just think it’s an incomplete picture of the power and breadth of the modern parser game scene.
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I would agree about the issue with combinatorial explosion and red herrings. With that said, how the player character thinks and feels about the various things they see and interact with doesn’t have to expand the scope of those objects.
If seeing a tricycle causes to player character to briefly reminisce about the time their drunken angry mother threw the player character’s bicycle into a 4-lane highway, that doesn’t add new things to implement while adding color.
With that said, many of these sorts of things might benefit from being seen once and then collapsing into more brief descriptions upon further examination.
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I think that many fine games have the shape of a funnel or a sluice, but I wouldn’t say that theory and example are the same thing.
While I recommended some first-time reporting rules, that was based on Amanda’s desired outcome, not because that is the only way to do something well. It’s hard to give advice if you don’t know what someone wants to do.
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Something I’ve been experimenting with—first inspired by trying to do speed-IF for ECTOCOMP—is having things of gameplay importance get their own paragraphs in room descriptions, rather than being part of the first paragraph itself. I want to see if I can give my players a sort of implicit assurance that “these are the things you need to examine for the puzzles, anything else is flavor and story”, letting me indulge in scenery writing as much as I want without overwhelming them with red herrings.
So far I’ve had to break this rule for doors, but it’s worked well for everything else. I’m curious what testers will think of it.
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