Building a better role-playing game story. This is a weekly column from freelancer Rowan Kaiser, which focuses on "Western" role-playing games: their stories, their histories, their mechanics, their insanity, and their inanity. Getting story right in role-playing games is crucial. Even if narrative is not your primary motivator, it's a key element to the RPG genre. But not all role-playing games have discovered the right formula. Its been my experience that there's no set checklist to ensure a successful story, but I've found that there are key components that can appeal to players with a narrative focus. I'd love to say "follow these pieces of advice and make a great RPG story! " but stories are never quite that simple. Still, I do think that these are good general guidelines for why some RPG stories are forgettable, while others are shine through.
Balance the Antagonists: Getting a villain wrong is one of the most common mistakes of most video games, especially role-playing games. Developing Meaningful Player Character Arcs in Branching Narrative. A little background: During my years at BioWare, I found that despite the enormous amount of talent housed in the writing department, there were certain subjects for which we lacked a common language of craft -- a clear and broadly applicable way to discuss what worked, what didn't, and why. This article is an effort to remedy that problem for one particular subject. Due credit goes to my former BioWare colleagues Cameron Harris (now of ArenaNet), who provided feedback on my notes for a previous iteration of this article; and Daniel Erickson (now of Bluepoint Games), who reviewed a near-final version and suggested I take it to Gamasutra. Thanks to Greg Rucka as well, whose blog posts on character arcs in Mass Effect helped inspire elements of this discussion.
Let's start with the basics. Stories -- traditional stories, archetypal stories -- are about protagonists who go through difficult circumstances and who change or resist change because of those circumstances.
Rayman Origins designer Chris McEntee's rational approach to game design. In Gamasutra's latest feature, Rayman Origins designer Chris McEntee explains Ubisoft's "rational design" approach, and why he believes it's a key to success in the game design field. Conceived by several Ubisoft veterans, the rational game design method was implemented in the publisher's sidescrolling game Rayman Origins, which was praised by critics and gamers alike as one of last year's best platformers.
McEntee explains, "Rational design is all about eliminating unnecessary information, making things inherently readable, understandable and apparent, introducing mechanics in an orderly and easily digestible fashion, and preserving the learning and difficulty curves of a game, known as macro flow. "In principle, it is best to provide a player with significantly interesting and deep mechanics that are well explored and exploited through clever rationalized level design, rather than injecting the game full of one-shot gameplay mechanics to feign depth. " Boss Battle Design and Structure.
Boss Battle Design and Structure By Mike Stout [In his latest design feature, Activision and former Insomniac designer Mike Stout breaks down the boss battle into eight different beats, and runs two notable ones -- The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time's Ganon and Portal's GladOS -- through a thorough analysis to illuminate their designs.] The boss battle is one of the oldest and most beloved traditions in video games. Everyone has fond memories of their favorites, and opinion pieces proclaiming the "Top 10 Boss Fights of All Time" are always hotly contested and the source of a lot of debate. According to Wikipedia, the first boss battle ever featured in a game was the Gold Dragon in the 1975 RPG dnd, and the practice has been going strong ever since.
Coming up as a designer in this industry, some of my most difficult (but also most interesting) challenges have been boss battle designs. Each time I was assigned one I felt a mixture of excitement and dread. Hard-Learned Lessons And it was bad. Joost Rietveld's Blog - Partnering vs. self-publishing: how independent should you really be? Partnering vs. self-publishing: how independent should you really be? The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community. The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.
“We do not write a marketing plan, marketing doesn’t work.” – Indie developer in recent email conversation Independent game studios have the tendency to revert from publishing partners when it comes to commercializing their games on digital distribution channels. Adding value through certification and complementarities “We have 300+ email addresses from press contacts that we can contact. Great games are being released every day, whether it’s on iOS, Android, or Facebook. Perceptions of quality with prospect consumers or gatekeepers are positively influenced by the reputation of the developer/publisher. Routes to market based on reputation and complementarities Reputation alone won’t do the trick though. Final thoughts. RAD Game Tools. The Independent Games Festival is Fine - You are the Problem.
Yesterday, the Rotting Cartridge ran a piece explaining why they believe the judging process for the Independent Games Festival is broken, based on their experiences with a game they submitted to the festival, Kale in Dinoland. During the course of that article, they reprinted a piece of private correspondence from the IGF’s organizers and saw the lack of attention their magnum opus (a monochromatic Game Boy-style platformer) received as evidence that the festival is a corrupt and contemptible institution. Jenn Frank was not amused. My friend was right when he warned me not to get so agitated. “It’s scene drama,” he told me. I have been privy to scene drama, not only in videogames, but among otherwise-wonderful poetry communities, among fiction writing majors, theater schmoes, whoever. I really hate to suggest it, but maybe the problem was your game The Independent Games Festival (IGF) has been drawing drama since it started 14 years ago.
I have not-played my lion’s share of games. So. Features - Learning From The Masters: Level Design In The Legend Of Zelda. When going back to replay classic games I played as a kid to mine them for knowledge, I always fear that any games from the NES era or earlier are too old to learn much from. I tend to assume that many elements of modern design will be missing: no training, bad difficulty ramping, haphazard level design, and so forth. Before writing this article, I was under the impression that many "good design principles" I've come to know and love were invented during the SNES era and iterated on from there. The NES was the Wild West of game development, I thought, lawless and free.
So when I went back on Link's 25th anniversary to play the first Zelda game and maybe write an article about it, I was a bit gun-shy. As it turns out, I was totally wrong! In an interview, creator Shigeru Miyamoto once said that with The Legend of Zelda, he wanted to evoke the feelings associated with exploration in the player: "When I was a child," Miyamoto said, "I went hiking and found a lake. Level Flow. Breakdown. Zelda: Wind waker Tech and Texture Analysis *picture heavy* So After this little thread: i felt like the opinion was more yay than nay. it seamed people are (just like me) highly interested in "how" wind waker was made. so here are my findings: there are 4420 unique textures that i encountered in my (what i believe to be a) 100% play-through: i could not bring myself to upload the textures to my webspace and take that level of responsibility but saw "someone" has them available right here: other stuff i found noteworthy: now while posting this i realize for the first time that the "second/ugly" kind of alpha material probably saves massively on overdraw. hope you enjoy.
Level Design and Procedural Generation in Shattered Planet | Kitfox Games. Overview Tanya here! This is a more detailed look at the procedural generation in Shattered Planet than we’ve ever shared before! It’s targeted towards game designers and any who are interested in learning more about game design. I’ll talk a bit about our data structure, I’ll show a bit of the tools I use as a designer, and show how the complexity grew quite naturally over time from a simple premise. Keep in mind that I am not a procedural generation expert – I didn’t write a single line of the procedural generation code in Shattered Planet.
All high-fives and awe-struck eye-shinings should be directed towards Mike, Jongwoo, and Greg. However, as the designer on the project, it was my job to define the intended player experience, and work with the programmers to translate that into workable rules for the game’s engine to follow. If you’re interested in the actual code, let us know in the comments or on our Facebook page and we’ll see what we can do! The Goal Room Structure Critical Path.
Typography. Profiles : Yahtzee Croshaw : Posts. The four lenses of game making. [In this opinion piece originally posted on the What Games Are blog, and reprinted in full with his permission, UK-based game designer Tadhg Kelly breaks down the four lenses of game making, a "common set of assumptions and predispositions" he often sees in developers.] For years it's been apparent that interpreting games and their makers through the opposed lenses of gameplay or story is inadequate. Such a one-dimensional spectrum breeds false oppositions (fun-or-art?) While either ignoring many games that don't fit or reinterpreting them so they fit badly. The spectrum is too reductive and, while it is easy to summarize, it leaves out too much context.
Rather than talking about games in terms of two lenses, I use four (potentially five, but I'll come back to that). Each represents a common set of assumptions and predispositions that I often see in makers, and there are correlations between them which makes for an interesting (though perhaps deceptively symmetric) diagram. They are: Game Dynamics and Loops [Game Design. Describing Game Dynamics It’s easy to understand what a game action is: I push a button, I shoot my gun.
I click a plot of land, I plant a strawberry. I pull the right trigger, my car accelerates. A loop is also fairly straightforward. I take an action, the game or another player reacts, and the process repeats in a loop until I win or lose. Game dynamics are the next level of complexity, and describing them is much harder. What designers often do is describe a game dynamic in terms of other games. Some designers try to avoid describing a game dynamic altogether and instead spec a game purely in terms of actions and reactions.
What Is A Game Dynamic? Here’s my attempt at describing a game dynamic: A game dynamic is a pattern of loops that turns them into a large sequence of play. Game dynamics are larger than individual loops, but smaller than segments (commonly called levels or chapters) in terms of time and size. Primary And Secondary Dynamics Tension and Dynamics Rhythm and Tone Conclusion. Numina [Games and Fantasy. We often infer more from a game experience than is actually on the screen. We have the capacity to use the game as an imaginative springboard, inferring personality traits, characters, behaviours and a sense of a larger game world beyond even what the developer intended. We make cognitive leaps, little observations and associations that contain the quality of empathy, and so it feels like there is more there than meets the eye.
Videogames are capable of inspiring this sense, just as great novels and movies can, and this is why they are an art. I call these moments numina. Numina are the gateway to achieving magical engineering, and so they are an essential part of what games are. Numina are what lead us to believe. Peripheral Perception The players thought that they could see subtle effects in how the footballers acted, momentary actions and other patterns that were not actually in the game.
Entanglement Entanglement is a state in which the player cares about the game world.