Find a partner and take turns sharing your homework. Have something to take notes with.
After you play, write these things down and discuss with the designer:
The process which you just engaged in is what game designers use to get feedback and test their designs. It is referred to as playtesting.
When designing games, the goal is to test things early and often so that you can test your assumptions as designers and make corrections as needed.
Without making a plan, just finishing a game’s narrative is sometimes the most challenging part. When you begin adding interactivity, or give a player choices, you will find yourself suddenly having a lot of story elements to craft.
As with other kinds of writing, and outline is an effective tool for creating the underlying structure of your game’s writing.
Note: We’ll be focusing on Interactive Fiction games as examples at this point of the semester, but the processes we explore will be applicable to a broad set of narrative games.
A plot in a story is the series of events which unfold from start to finish ( a beginning, middle, and end). It expresses not only what happens but also how one event leads to another.
The man woke up in the morning and experienced a number of unfortunate events which led him to arrive in the hospital instead of class as planned.
When even simplest of choices are added, the structure of a plot starts to resemble a classic definition of a game:
An easily achievable goal complicated by interesting obstacles.
Creating an outline of significant moments in your game and how a player moves from one to another is an important early step that can help you actually finish your game.
It’s important not to become too obsessed with the details of each moment at this point. Just provide enough information about the moment and then figure out how it connects to the next one(s).
In the example above, note that there is very little detail given about any particular moment. The outline is just creating the structure for the plot which will be expanded when the actually writing is done.
You can quickly develop a simple plot on paper, or spread out on post-its or index cards, but you might consider software like Milanote or Draw.io or PureRef.com for something a little more flexible and persistent. Don’t overthink it. Pick something that seems to meet your needs and see how it goes.
I’d recommend the not sitting down directly in Inky to begin outlining. Work out the details outside of Inky and then transcribing it to avoid worrying about Ink’s markup while coming up with your idea.
Two important things about this:
The through-line of your game is the direct path through it from beginning to the end which contains the significant turning points of the plot. Choices in games are exciting! But they can complicate your ability to focus on the story you want to tell.
Once you have the through-line in place, you can consider what you like and dislike about the structure and complicate the game little by little.
This approach is also nice because you start out with something that actually works and just becomes more interesting with iteration.
When outlining your plot, have an ending. One of the biggest traps is to figure it out later. You might not. And it will be more challenging for you to figure out where to go if you don’t have an idea where you are going!
You might even start writing near the ending, or backwards from the ending until you have a sense of the sequence of events leading to it.
Keep in mind with branching narratives (like with the first project) you will have multiple endings to contend with. How do you get to each one?
Something else to consider:
What kind of experience are you designing?
Beats are emotional moments in game’s story. Every scene will have at least one emotional beat, which are typically related to a character’s ability to achieve internal or external goals.
For example:
An external character goal (concrete in nature) might include:
An internal character goal (emotional in nature) might include:
As emotional moments, beats can either be up beats (giving hope that a character will achieve their goals) or down beats (making us fear they will not achieve their goals).
There are many types of beats. Here are some derived from Robin Law’s Hamlet’s Hit Points (link)
Of these, Birdland is the only one which will require a significant investment of time to play. Please play for this one for at least one hour.
Take notes. What did you like? Dislike? Something that caused a reaction in you? Something you didn’t understand? Favorite moments?
Come to class next week with a an open-ended discussion question related to each of the games you played.
Create the plot summary and outline for a short Interactive Fiction game with the following simple premise:
You must make a choice which leads to two very different outcomes.
You are not required to fully develop this in Ink. You are only required to produce the plot and outline for homework.
If you do the outlining in Milanote or some other software:
If you use paper, post-its, or note cards for outlining:
Over the next two weeks, please set aside time to read the first half of Chapter 4 of Wonderbook (pages 133-157): “Introduction,” “Plot,” “Structure,” “Creating Scenes,” and “Pacing: Beats and Progressions”.