GDC talk Adventures in Text by Ingold

I’m only partway through but it’s already an excellent talk IMO, particularly this quote at 5:20:

gdcvault.com/play/1021774/Advent … ovating-in

Good talk - thanks for sharing!

I think his main point is that the game designer must remember to cheat the player! It doesn’t matter if the player choice actually matters, what do matter is that he get the feeling they does.

If your game consist of lots of text, you want to be able type this in a simple way, so you can concentrate on authoring instead of coding.

Meaningful choices don’t have to be epic, life-changing stuff. They can just be “make a comment about his tie / say nothing” which in reality functions as a “Continue” icon, but one that give the player an illusion of choice.

36:40 – a perfect system for character-stats! it goes something like this: Each character-stat is a vector, consisting of two numbers that only goes up, starting at 1.

49:00 – improving the game by making the colorful descriptions optional and seperating it from the raw game mechanics. Interesting, since this goes against everything I believe in!

It’s pretty intuitive as systems go. I liked it a lot.