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While we believe that a vignette-based structure with relatively little branching lets us build strong text-based games, it produces some inherent tensions.

On the one hand, we want choices to be meaningful, but on the other hand, we want to reuse later code.  The urge to reuse code can create pressure to have choices be purely cosmetic.  Sometimes we explicitly make choices not affect the rest of the game.  Those choices are about the player’s imagining of a scene or triggering thoughts about motivations, not about affecting results.  But taken to an extreme, this could destroy the meaningfulness of the choices.  In “Choice of the Dragon,” there’s a vignette where the player’s dragon seeks a mate.  In the original version of that vignette, it was impossible to actually succeed in getting a mate, because the vignette’s author wanted to avoid any downstream effects to having a mate.  We changed that because it seemed too frustrating for players and because it made the vignette less meaningful.  Now, your dragon can get a mate, although it remains challenging.

Likewise, the more we reuse code and avoid branching, the less replay value the games have.  Imagine a game that begins with a simple binary choice and then uses entirely different text and subsequent choices for each option.  The bad thing about that is that players who choose choice A don’t see any of the work that went into the results of choice B.  But the good side is that a player can play the game a second time, choose B instead of A, and find a whole new game.

The flipside is that some of our individual vignettes have a lot of branches, and some then set variables that affect later vignettes.  Taken to an extreme, branching within a vignette and then using a variable to condition later vignettes can cause the same problem of proliferating options that makes a simple branching structure undesirable.  It can even result in writing essentially dead text—text that nobody ever sees in play but that’s there to cover the outside chance of a series of strange choices.

Ultimately, we think we struck a pretty good balance in “Choice of the Dragon.”  In part, that’s because Dan always pushes for simpler models, with more cosmetic choices, whereas I always push for more complexity to make the choices more meaningful.  He tends to rein in my efforts to make the game ever more complicated, while I make sure that choices in the mating vignette actually affect outcomes.  But at the end of the day, it’s a balance that we wrestle with and discuss over and over again, and we’d love to hear your thoughts about it.

–Adam

One of the focuses of this blog is discussion of design decisions within the course of making our games.  I’d like to begin by talking about one of the core design philosophies embedded within the ChoiceScript framework.  ChoiceScript seeks to minimize wasted design effort by recording variables instead of branching.

Many of us had our first experiences with text-based games controlled by choices in a totally different format:  the various multiple-choice books of the 1980s–the “choose a path” style books.  In a typical multiple-choice book, each different choice takes you to a different new page, which then offers you a new set of choices, and so forth.  The plots of most of the books aren’t strictly speaking trees—some choices will lead you back to a common page, and there are some dead-ends that send you back to make a new choice. Still, a read-through might involve seeing one tenth of the total content in the book—reading ten pages out of a 100 page book. http://samizdat.cc/cyoa/ presents some interesting analysis of books from a particularly popular series from the 1980s.

The problem with this model is that it involves a ton of work that gets rarely seen.  If we write 20,000 words of text, we would prefer for most of our players to see more than 2,000 words of it.  In fact, the problem quickly becomes insoluble.  If each choice has two options, each completely distinct, then after 10 choices, we would be writing 1024 different pages.

Our solution is to try to minimize the amount of actual branching we do.  We write our games in individual chapters or vignettes.  In “Choice of the Dragon,” the progression between vignettes is almost entirely linear.  Within the vignettes, however, branching is a common tool.  In order to keep choices meaningful, however, we use a set of variables to record the consequences of your decisions—not the exact details, but the bits that matter to what happens next in the story.  We believe that this approach lets us strike a good balance between allowing for real choices and avoiding producing far more material than a typical player ever sees.

In a future post, I’ll talk some about some of the tensions and difficulties this can create.

–Adam

Choice of the Dragon is now available as an Android app! Please download and review it.

iPhone and other smartphone versions are coming soon. Sign up for other mobile versions here.

The first game from choiceofgames.com is now live!  In “Choice of the Dragon,” you play a powerful dragon that likes to kidnap princesses and sleep on a hoard of treasure.  Dominate the local kingdom, loot and pillage, and inspire terror in the hearts of your enemies!

Like all games on choiceofgames.com, “Choice of the Dragon” is free to play.  The web version is currently available.  iPhone and other smartphone versions will be available soon.

–Adam