Comments on: locked doors and broken dishes http://www.wordsaretoys.com/2012/06/26/locked-doors-and-broken-dishes/ and so on... Fri, 24 Apr 2015 02:43:40 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=4.3.1 By: chris http://www.wordsaretoys.com/2012/06/26/locked-doors-and-broken-dishes/#comment-37 Thu, 28 Jun 2012 01:01:47 +0000 http://www.wordsaretoys.com/?p=219#comment-37 Deus Ex is an old favorite of mine too, but holy crap, that script! Glad I’m keeping mine to around 15 minutes of play. (For now.)

]]> By: Darien http://www.wordsaretoys.com/2012/06/26/locked-doors-and-broken-dishes/#comment-36 Wed, 27 Jun 2012 15:47:22 +0000 http://www.wordsaretoys.com/?p=219#comment-36 Cool, I’ll have to go back and give ‘Dear Ester’ a try. First I’ve heard of it, but it sounds pretty neat.

Yea, gaming scripts can be insane. One of my all time favorite games “Deus Ex” (I believe) broke a record at the time for in-game voice-acted dialogue. http://www.sheldonpacotti.com/script/

]]> By: chris http://www.wordsaretoys.com/2012/06/26/locked-doors-and-broken-dishes/#comment-35 Tue, 26 Jun 2012 18:33:21 +0000 http://www.wordsaretoys.com/?p=219#comment-35 Hi Darien,

I didn’t play the original Fallout but I get the concept. It sounds like it would work great for keeping quests in isolation, and I’d definitely consider that for larger projects. A time-based mission does make sense as well. I’m thinking small-scale at the moment. What prompted the post was me writing two pages of narrative and realizing I’d need about two additional pages to explain why the player couldn’t leave the area until they’d collected this item and talked to that person. More of a rant than anything but it got me thinking about the assumptions I was making about how a narrative game “has” to work.

Don’t know if you’ve ever played “Dear Ester” but my thoughts keep taking me there. It’s a lot of walking around with little interactive “payoff”, but it has unusual impact for a non-linear experience.

I like your decay idea. It could be adapted to a variety of themes. It might also be interesting to make the decay a result of the player’s actions.

Chris

]]> By: Darien http://www.wordsaretoys.com/2012/06/26/locked-doors-and-broken-dishes/#comment-34 Tue, 26 Jun 2012 17:52:17 +0000 http://www.wordsaretoys.com/?p=219#comment-34 Another option you may want to consider if the Fallout Option. The original PC game (if you’ve played it) contained different locations which acted as nearly isolated worlds with its own missons. These missions overlapped to a certain extent, but generally any of these worlds could be accessed at any point in the game. As with most RPG games, sometimes the game makes it extremely hard to reach ‘late game’ areas simply by making the enemies ridiculousness tough. Also within Fallout, there was an over arching time based mission (collecting a water chip), which altered environments. Having a vague overarching time based mission is not necessarily unrealistic… in fact it is similar to real time. Most people want to graduate college by 21, get married by 30, have kids by 35, retire by 65.

One interesting idea is one of decay. Maybe the world of your game is slowly being destroyed, in the beginning any environment is accessible, but slowly, your opportunities as a gamer to visit other areas decrease until the game finally ends. In this way it might be able to avoid most ‘storyline conflicts’ which might be created had the world remained ‘completely open.’

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