And if you don't make branches, you will get people complaining about the linearity, "forced" scenes, kinetic novel, bla bla. You can't please everyone anyways, especially the entitled kids on this site. As long as you yourself have a deliberate reason for choosing a particular game design element, that's good enough.
Recommending Story-first games
- Thread starter jufot
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- Aug 3, 2021
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I suspect that you have too narrow search scope so that basically the only game that fits is Luna fall from grace. Have you played Ataegina? It has MC stats and it has good/neutral/evil routes that differ a good amount.
- Apr 24, 2020
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Imaging managing Heavy Five's branches?
I'm definitely starting with the more story option.
I get you. Initially, I envisioned my Steampunk game as allowing any combination of gender identity and sexual orientation. I then realized that I'd be putting a lot of work trying to tell the same story a dozen times. As it is, I'm having a hard time seeing anyone but my initial female protagonist. She feels so much more fun to write about. That has to count for a lot for a developer, right?
- Apr 24, 2020
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Yeah. I've been spending some of my brain resources trying to introduce choices into my stories to avoid the dreaded "Kinetic Novel" label. It's not easy when one has a prime timeline in mind to come up with variations. I do have one rather trolly branch in Dirty Snowball. If you decide not to divert to the comet, you have a very routine trip to Saturn and nothing interesting happens, game over "Do you want to try again?".
I did come up with a couple of real branches, branches that will have an effect on the final outcome of the disaster. Two for the male MC, one for the female MC. Writing for male and female is enough of a challenge, because certain conflicts will only occur with one or the other.
In my Steampunk games, certain events must occur to advance her career. Do I give the illusion of choice in that regard? The MC does not flip a switch, but later, a mysterious hand flips it anyway.
In my Parisian story, there are very few decision points that would allow the story to progress. I guess one big one will be whether you listen to her "amber" reports before things get to "red."
- Mar 24, 2023
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Well, that's clearly not true because there are also The Survival of Sarah Rose and Mistress vs Slave. I only used Lffg as a example because its completed Renpy game. MvS also probably completed but its RPGM.
- Nov 24, 2018
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Yeah, my experience with Toro 7 is that covering multiple genders and orientations is exhausting. Most images need to be rendered twice. All sexual content needs to be created 3 or 4 times. People certainly like having choices of characters and LIs, but it's definitely not as much fun to do.
I'm a fan of writing the story you want to write. If you're really only having fun writing about the female protagonist, it's a good indication that the story should be about her and not her other doppelgangers. However, beware that I'm speaking as a person who takes zero revenue from my games, so my advice is ... suspect ... if you plan to make a living at this.
Tlaero
- Nov 24, 2018
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I'm reminded of the original Knights of the Old Republic game. It was a AAA mainstream video game with a large staff. And, on first playthrough, it seemed like you were making massive changes to the universe based on your choices. But when you played again and made the opposite choices, the universe ended up in the same place.
Tlaero
Concepts such as choices, player agency, and routes are not free. Probably the vast majority of people, including me, appreciates a story that gives you some amount of control over the narrative, but many people just don't understand the ramifications of choices on the development side.
It will always come with some trade offs. The most obvious being increased costs (time and/or money), but there is another factor that most players won't even imagine. Choices place constraints on the actual story and creative freedom, even in the best case scenario.
Think of a story, any story, in linear form. Now imagine adding some choices that could lead to some branching that converges back into a common node. But what does this mean? That common node needs to account for both variations. It needs to make sense on both routes. That in and of itself is a constraint on the narrative. Either both routes need to be tailored to be compatible with the common node and overarching narrative, or the common nodes need to be tailored to fit both.
I'm not saying this is a huge hurdle or some impossible task, but the fact is that giving agency to the player means taking away some agency of the dev in the story they could otherwise tell. And devs often botch the execution, leading to a less compelling overall narrative than what could have been if they just wrote a tightly controlled narrative in linear form. It takes a whole lot of planning to write a choice-heavy story properly.
We see this in effect very frequently without people actually even realizing what's happening. Let's take a look at a specific example. Rebirth. Spoilers up ahead.
What is happening with Laurie's character? She could be alive or dead in the story, which means she literally cannot be a plot-centric or important character anymore unless the plot takes a truly divergent branching path. If they want to keep a common node narrative, Laurie's impact has to be minimized. She might as well not be there in the story, because the story needs to account for the route where she literally isn't there. She doesn't matter in the big picture, and scenes involving her are simply skipped if she is dead.
Now imagine if Laurie's fate was linear. Her death could be a huge event that affects everyone in the story and drives the plot forward. Or her getting turned can be a major event that similarly drives the story forward and directly lead to a lot of character development for the cast.
I mean, her death variable was in the works since the beginning of the game, so the dev clearly planned this. And this botching of the character was the result of that planning. It's not so easy to write stories that includes major variations, ya?
That's just one specific example, but this opportunity cost is always there. Some devs do a better job of giving you an output that is greater than that opportunity cost through careful planning and execution of the narrative. Others are not so competent in that regard.
Even after writing all that out, I'm not saying that I prefer kinetic novels. I do appreciate some juicy choices, but it does get annoying when people just shit on a game because some devs thought through this whole issue and decided that they want to write a tightly structured story that is mostly linear.
It will always come with some trade offs. The most obvious being increased costs (time and/or money), but there is another factor that most players won't even imagine. Choices place constraints on the actual story and creative freedom, even in the best case scenario.
Think of a story, any story, in linear form. Now imagine adding some choices that could lead to some branching that converges back into a common node. But what does this mean? That common node needs to account for both variations. It needs to make sense on both routes. That in and of itself is a constraint on the narrative. Either both routes need to be tailored to be compatible with the common node and overarching narrative, or the common nodes need to be tailored to fit both.
I'm not saying this is a huge hurdle or some impossible task, but the fact is that giving agency to the player means taking away some agency of the dev in the story they could otherwise tell. And devs often botch the execution, leading to a less compelling overall narrative than what could have been if they just wrote a tightly controlled narrative in linear form. It takes a whole lot of planning to write a choice-heavy story properly.
We see this in effect very frequently without people actually even realizing what's happening. Let's take a look at a specific example. Rebirth. Spoilers up ahead.
What is happening with Laurie's character? She could be alive or dead in the story, which means she literally cannot be a plot-centric or important character anymore unless the plot takes a truly divergent branching path. If they want to keep a common node narrative, Laurie's impact has to be minimized. She might as well not be there in the story, because the story needs to account for the route where she literally isn't there. She doesn't matter in the big picture, and scenes involving her are simply skipped if she is dead.
Now imagine if Laurie's fate was linear. Her death could be a huge event that affects everyone in the story and drives the plot forward. Or her getting turned can be a major event that similarly drives the story forward and directly lead to a lot of character development for the cast.
I mean, her death variable was in the works since the beginning of the game, so the dev clearly planned this. And this botching of the character was the result of that planning. It's not so easy to write stories that includes major variations, ya?
That's just one specific example, but this opportunity cost is always there. Some devs do a better job of giving you an output that is greater than that opportunity cost through careful planning and execution of the narrative. Others are not so competent in that regard.
Even after writing all that out, I'm not saying that I prefer kinetic novels. I do appreciate some juicy choices, but it does get annoying when people just shit on a game because some devs thought through this whole issue and decided that they want to write a tightly structured story that is mostly linear.
- Apr 24, 2020
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That reminds me of the original Wing Commander game. As your individual missions went, so did the war....
- Nov 24, 2018
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Yes. "Story" and "Player Choice" are enemies. As developers, our holy grail is finding a way to do both without hurting both of them. Over my 10-15 games (depending on your definition of "game") I've tried something different each time. I'm still searching.
Tlaero
- Nov 24, 2018
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Wing Commander is an excellent example. They paid for full motion video with actual actors. It would have been insane to not use every last second of that video on the player's game.
Then there's Quantum Break (which, by the way, is the best time travel story of all time in any media). They paid for non-green screen, full motion video with good actors. Hours of it. And the branches you chose impacted which videos you saw. It's downright staggering that pretty much no player saw all of that video. That they managed to do that while making a fantastic story is mind blowing.
Tlaero
- Oct 14, 2021
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I'm pretty sure I'll be tarred and feathered after my next update is released. In my case combining player choice with story/character cohesiveness has resulted in sex scenes that don't get handed to the player on a silver platter. Big no-no for a porn game.
- Aug 3, 2021
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In one universe Mission Vao is killed by Zaalbar. In another she isn't. Not the same at all.
- Apr 24, 2020
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Please excuse me sharing a picture from my project. It still needs some fine-tuning on the posing, but I like the way the glass adds to the scene.
Sydney and Gabriela at the window before the first exhibition scene begins.
Sydney and Gabriela at the window before the first exhibition scene begins.
- May 8, 2022
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Very good points, alas Laurie is butchered now.
Games with choices thrive when you have two very different paths in my opinion. and I don't mean ignoring a LI or a fetish.
Morality paths work best and one game that choices matter is defending lydia collier
Choices that branch the story for real and bring different characters and side plots.
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I think player choice will always be an illusion, especially in the case of VNs. It will always be about hiding the fact that the render count and written lines are limited. This only became more difficult, when fully rendering out scenes became the standard, instead of the waifu cutouts wiggling above the text box in front of a blurry background. Intricate action scenes like in the last Mad World update are pretty cool, but there's a point, where a VN stops being the right medium for the job.
Games became less complex with higher fidelity, not only in terms of gfx, but also in terms of story. Skyrim for example gets more complex, if you ignore the story and go off roleplaying on your own. Daggerfall is still the most complex TES game to date, because of how bare-bones it is, with everything other than the lore being procedurally generated.
I think we're only just now catching up to oldschool RPGs and it's costing the big AAA studios a lot of money and manpower. Cyberpunk 2077 got a lot of flak at its release, but it's also one of the biggest advancements in gaming imo, because it managed to pull off interactive cutscenes. There's a video somewhere out there, where the devs talk about what goes into these scenes in terms of cinematography, staging and keeping track of all the things that could go wrong depending on player actions and it's fucking insane. It's also incredibly immersive. But only as long as you don't run out of handcrafted story. Whenever you finish a storyline you get whiplash by how depressingly dead this section of the game suddenly feels, because it's such a stark contrast.
2077 highlights this struggle that seems to be inherent to RPGs: More handcrafted story gets you a higher degree of immersion, but handcrafted gameplay is the opposite of emergent gameplay. In practice this means that your choices in 2077 will lead you on different paths, but the outcomes will be very similar or at least limited to the few story beats the devs came up with. Choices have less or no impact on the game world and are more about characterizing the player character. You can't change the story (well, 2077 has a few very different endings I guess), but you can participate in the story in whatever way you like.
VNs can't possibly have emergent gameplay, because there can't ever be more than the renders inside of the images folder. A game with static renders will always be static, even with the biggest team and biggest budget in the world. So it's all about the immersion of a handcrafted story. That doesn't mean that there should be no player choices at all. But the outcomes will be limited to the few story beats the devs came up with. The players don't fundamentally change the story, but they can participate in it in different ways.
Tl;dr: The sandbox tag is fucking bullshit in most cases, but especially for VNs. Clicking on icons instead of text and grinding for monopoly bucks isn't at all comparable to building sand castles.
- Jan 16, 2022
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The main appeal for sandbox to me is being able to choose what story lines i want to interact with and in which order. A linear story can be good when the pacing is right, but more often than not in VNs it becomes skip anything that doesn't interest you. Whereas in a sandbox, you can come back to the content when you feel like it, or not. The game "Come home" is very close to the perfect example of what i want from a sandbox game.
That's not what a sandbox game is, though. Sandbox games are pure game mechanics, procedurally generated content most of the time and (ideally) emergent gameplay. Kinda how sand is very malleable and you can use it to build whatever you want or even dig down into it instead of stacking it up.
The GTA series are sandbox games. Simulators are sandbox games. A modded out the ass Skyrim is a sandbox game.
I recently discovered an early access game called Shadows of Doubt. It's a detective game with procedurally generated murders (it's pretty fun!). VNs can't work like that, because the murderer always has to be in the images folder already.
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- Jan 16, 2022
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Here's the tag's definition, from the tags rules thread
- Sandbox [For Free-Roam type of games.]
It's silly, honestly. If the sandbox tag is for free-roam type games (instead of what everybody else thinks of as a sandbox), why not use a free-roam tag? And wtf even is free-roam?
- Free-Roam [For Sandbox type of games.]
Is the new Come Home UI still Free-Roam, even though you click on characters now instead of places?
In terms of gameplay there's no difference between clicking on icons or a list of text. The only use for the sandbox tag is as a buzzword for the fact that having to click on a landlady's bedroom door is making people cry for some reason. That's all it is: A buzztag.