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Randomly generated CYOA?

6 years ago

Imagine a story where death and rebirth is baked into it, like a Dark Souls-ish feel. A game which is unforgiving; it punishes cowardly choices and rewards the bold. What if there was a game that promised constant death around the corner, yet if you knew where to look there was lore and story depth all around you. 

 

What if there was a game where every time you played, your choices were shuffled so that every playthrough was unique. Trial and error, learning from your mistakes is at its core.

 

Call me crazy, but I think a game like this could be something special.

Randomly generated CYOA?

6 years ago
Beyond the fact that coding this would be beyond a Dark Souls level nightmare, I doubt this would work in a text CYoA format. The problem with text is that it requires the reader to be paying attention to your work, and all the details. In Dark Souls, the communication is via sound and visuals, both are lost in this format, so you miss out on the chance to do layering (which is arguably the Souls series' greatest success).

A lot of DS's design is around serendipity (amusingly enough), finding things you didn't expect to find. You can die, but notice an interesting place in the distance. While fighting monsters nearby, you may see an interesting tower in the distance, and you want to go there and see what it's all about. Try doing that with text - "As you roll around the towering shield knight and sneak in an attack while waiting for your stamina to regenerate, you spy a tower in the distance, and as your eye briefly wanders there *Wham you're knocked out by the knight as you were distracted for a moment and died*" just doesn't make compelling content. You'd have to pull off some serious innovation to make this concept work, and I say that not to dissuade you, but to point out the things you'll have to be mindful of if you choose to work on this.

Furthermore, learning from your mistakes/deaths is a very common time travel trope (Groundhog Day, Steins;Gate, Majora's Mask, arguably the Butterfly Effect), the game would have to have a lot of pre-baked content into it, which you'd be comfortable with the player not seeing on any given run-through. Effectively, it'd be like writing three games for the price of one (at the very least), and managing all the edge cases and endings and building consistency across it all would require a fair deal of mastery of the medium.

Randomly generated CYOA?

6 years ago

Thank you for the awesome feedback! As far as being dark souls related... More-so in the way that it is bleak, narrated like there is no hope and yet you somehow make it further and further as you learn what not to do. And the further you get, the more you realize that's just how the game works and you accept it and start playing it for what it is: an adventure.

The combat would need to be rather like "You emerge out of the tunnel, and you are greeted by the most beautiful view overlooking a sea with the sun glimmering across the water. You spot a tower not too far ahead, along a dirt path. You begin walking towards it when suddenly a goblin jumps out of a nearby bush!"

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****This is where the game becomes interesting. There are 5 possible choices for this scenario, but you are only presented with 2 at a time.****

Possible choices include: Attack him, Try to run past him, Talk to him, Retreat, Lay down and play dead (of course a ridiculous option to make people feel dumb for trying and getting killed).

This time it only shows "1. Attack it, 2. Talk to it"

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Then for each choice there is a set outcome, no dice rolls or RNGs, so at least the choice results are consistent. The game continues to branch off like this and so on.

 

As far as this entire concept being difficult to code........... That's the thing, I already have coded it. I'm an app developer and I created the complete working framework for this game as a project, I just don't have a story to put with it yet. I can display pictures, play sounds, etc at any moment or for any choice made. I plan on completing the story and publishing the app to the Google Play Store as soon as it's done. 

I just wanted to do something different, all the other CYOA apps are linear and I imagined a game that always kept the player guessing and required them to actually pay attention because they can't just memorize what happens when they click button #1, then #2, and so on. 

Randomly generated CYOA?

6 years ago

"I already have coded it. I'm an app developer and I created the complete working framework for this game as a project" You had my curiosity, now you have my attention. What are you coding this in, Unity (with/out Playmaker)/Ink/ChoiceScript/GameMaker?

Now, again you've tried to point out how to do the combat and tower part, but you're still missing the issue at hand here. Affordances. A large number of games become respected from their ability to allow players to do things that are not obvious (i.e. hidden affordances). For example, in stealth hybrid games like Deus Ex:Human Revolution - to finish the level without killing a single person or even directly fighting the bosses in the remastered version is an outcome of the designers building those affordances intentionally. The problem in CYoAs is you're forced to tell the player their options, and often be disingenuous in how you conceal these 'hidden' paths/affordances. Say you want to show a negotiation with hostages, but if the player has been travelling around, he can use specific information to change the opinion of the other party, based on a page he may have read. Now when you're showing him his options, one becomes *Use specific information. This becomes a clear affordance, available even if the player did not really read the article in question but just clicked through the link, and now he has a 'better' solution at low cost to him. Managing this stuff is hard. When you're looking at a scene, each visual element sells itself, it hints at its existence, because you as the player can observe and interact with them at your will and agency, and find clever combinations without a prompt. That's just not the case in Text Only content, where you have to call out everything. You have to explicitly mention the tower exists, not let the player's curiousity about it guide them to it.

I'll given another example, Planescape Torment. While there are fixed chapter goals, and fixed text paths (technically), your ability to choose when you reach those paths affects the story. You can choose what content to interact with based on your decisions of where to wander, and what to do there. There are no signs: You have arrived in the underground, you can 1)Search for loot in random crates 2)Talk to the locals (followed by list of locals) 3)Attack the locals 4)etc... The problem here is that by enumerating the affordances clearly, there's hardly any exploration or serendipity. If you're told upfront that killing locals is an option (affordance), then just clicking through to it has nowhere near the impact value of the player pressing A, mousing over an NPC, realizing the attack cursor works, and they can kill an NPC, and then seeing the outcome of that action. Signposting that choice devalues it.

If you want to make a world work with signposted decisions, you'll have to pull and EndMaster, or something along the lines of Trails in the Sky, where you just code in SO MUCH DAMN CONTENT that your eyes bleed proofreading it all. (For reference, google the Curse of Kiseki). Effectively, you have to have so much content that even when it's all signposted, there's enough to explore (and enough different content each time), that the player feels like they're gaining something from the experience and not just 'clicking through'

We laugh at linearity because media has been doing it for millennia, but the other option - non-linearity, such as the fluidity you can have in a D&D setting or an interactive story by a wandering storyteller benefit from the ability of the GM/storyteller to make up the story based on general guidelines. The old classics like the Odyssey and Illiad were not remembered and recounted to the word in the time of the ancients, the teller would memorize various beats (AchillesxHector, the Trojan horse, the sacrifices, when the city fell), and make up the rest of the intermediate content on the fly. The problem with written CYoAs (or modern interactive media), is that you do not have the luxury of generating those paths on the fly. Everything has to be hardcoded, or the system to generate that hardcoding has to be hardcoded itself, which by logic is atleast one or two orders of magnitude a harder task.

So, what I mean to say is that you need to be very clear on what experience you're trying to build, how you're building interactivity in it, and what's a reasonable tradeoff in player agency vs cost to build (time, money, mental health). For more resources, I recommend you go through this thread Useful resources for designing a Storygame. I see enthusiasm and ideas in your core concept, but it'll be hell to realize, you'll have to make very smart choices.

Randomly generated CYOA?

6 years ago

All of the code for the scripting is in Android Studio with the rest of the code for the app design. This whole thing really started as me just making a simple app and slowly adding and shaping it into something that now is actually pretty fully-featured. Kinda like how dark souls was probably designed in order of #1: Combat, #2: gameplay mechanics, #3: story, this game was built so far based on what I thought I could do. My wife is my main (only) tester and at first she thought it was lame but has recently started spending a lot of time looking through everything when I make improvements.

I built the mechanics from the ground up. Basically when you click a button, the app takes which scene you are currently in and which choice you made, passes it along to a huge list of all the possible scenes with their possible choices. Then it figures out which new scene to move to based on the choice you made. Once it figures out the new scene to move to, it looks at the 5 possible choices. Since 2 of them are chosen randomly, it makes sure that both choices are not the same (1. Attack him, or 2. Attack him) and that at least one of the choices will allow the player to continue.

For every set of 5 choices, 2 or 3 of them may lead to the player's death. I don't want the player to ever be 10 scenes deep and be presented with 2 random choices that both kill him, because that's enough to make someone uninstall the game. There is however a way to obscure which choice led to death. I may mark "Jump into the pool" as a choice that kills the player so that it won't be paired up with "Roll around in the fire". But when you jump in the pool you don't die, you have 5 options like swim north, swim east, swim west, swim south, or dive down... No matter which one you choose, the piranhas eat you. But maybe if you dive down, you can see writing at the bottom of the pool that gives insight into the world or tips for a different puzzle before being turned into fish food? Who knows.

The game auto-saves. If you close the app and reload it, you'll be on the main menu now with an option to start a new game, or continue if there is saved data. On continue it will reload you in your current scene with the same 2 choices so there is no going back and no way to cheese it into re-rolling choices. 

From the main menu, there is a stats page which can currently tell you how many total choices you've made across all playthroughs, how many times you've died... and most (in my opinion) awesomely, "Game completion: X%" which knows whether each choice for each scene has been selected before or not. Something to work towards, lets people know roughly how much there is left for them to find in the game. 

So with this structure all in place and working, I just need to really put together a whole story. I will be definitely looking through this site for inspiration!

Randomly generated CYOA?

6 years ago

And to add to this, obviously all the branches could get very out of control, very quickly. If each scene has 5 choices, which each lead to a new scene with 5 new choices... It doesn't take long to have 35 million branches. That's why many choices may branch out briefly and then tie back together.

Example: "You narrowly escape the hellhounds chasing you in the hallway as you run the a door and lock it behind you. You turn around and examine the room you're in. The only way out seems to be through a door on the other side of the room. As you stand there looking around, a pile of bones on the floor begins to gather together and slowly form into a creature. After a moment, a headless skeleton stands before you. It reaches down and picks up a nearby bone and starts swinging it around as it walks towards you"

There may be several different choices that either kill you, different ways to kill the skeleton and explore the room, or avoid the skeleton and run around it but don't get to explore the room. No matter how you get past the skeleton, they both lead out the other door the same way. But it gets wrapped back up. There aren't suddenly 25 loose ends that each need their own unique path. And writing a scene like this room reeeeally doesn't take too much planning and I could probably get something out in 30-45 minutes. It's a lot of work, but I don't think it's like 3 years of writing where I need to sell my house and one of my kids to support the dream of getting this thing finished lol

Randomly generated CYOA?

6 years ago
It's called Combinatorial Explosion. It's a massacre on the untested. One way to reduce it is to offer fake choices (say the color of tea you'd like to drink) which don't change the story in any way, or atleast in ways that do not affect the remaining story. Those are fun, until the player realizes they're being conned, though a subtle enough implementation of the fact will prevent them from ever knowing the fact (done nigh flawlessly in Shadowrun Returns: Dragonfall, where you don't realize that the decision to double cross your employer won't affect you in the remaining game outside of your mental narrative). Check up the videos in the articles list I've mentioned earlier, they'd be really helpful to ya. Furthermore, I highly recommend you play 80 Days from Inkle, it's a masterpiece of modern narrative heavy game design.

Randomly generated CYOA?

6 years ago

Fake choices seem to be a great way to flesh out the choices and add some depth to the story without causing too many new branches. I can imagine many choices which may cause the player to have a quick thought and move on, or catch a glimpse of some foreshadowing. I have seen 80 days when I was looking to see what was already out there, I haven't gotten a chance to try it but it's at the top of my list! Thanks again for the explanations and ideas!

Randomly generated CYOA?

6 years ago

Interesting, have you checked out Ink, Inform 7, and Twine, out of curiousity? Also read up on Quality Based Narrative (which is roughly what the industry calls the game remembering your actions) from Failbetter.

N.O. NO, NEVER give a situation where the only outcome for the player's survival is a random roll (swimming in a random direction is a random roll for all purposes). The skill in crafting stories is in how you clue the player in to the consequences of their actions, and then let them experience those consequences.

For great stories to check out, I recommend Eternal, Ground Zeroes, Dead Man Walking, Necromancer followed by Death Song, and the Price of Freedom : Innocence Lost as good starting games. That'll take you around 25 hours if you're thorough and analyzing the design (I believe Eternal alone is 15 hours of that, the things longer than the LotR trilogy, you'll see why). I'm amused you're working combat before story, which means you'll have to find a good setting that suits the combat. Funny thing is I'm working backwards myself - building the story then I'll find a 'combat' system that fits it for my next game.

Randomly generated CYOA?

6 years ago

This would be hell to script.