Exploration of Branching Narratives and Player Choice
Introduction
In order to learn more about my specialist area of game writing, I decided to focus an entire project on non linear storytelling and the importance of player choice. The reason why I chose to study this area was because I've always been invested in games as a storytelling medium and want to write narratives which fully immerse and involve the player.
Research
During my project, I conducted multiple research tasks in order to learn more about my specialist subject and practice some of the skills and methods used in game writing. These tasks included transcriptions, prototyping and play testing.
I also looked into specific areas which I thought would be useful when creating my prototype, such as how the story and choices are presented to the player, how to create meaningful choices, and the difference between narrative and game play choices. This research helped inform how I would make my prototype, such as having choices which directly influence the game play experience in order to give each choice more weight over the entire game rather than just the story.
Transcriptions
I did two transcription tasks, one of them was a recreation of Fighting Fantasy in GameMaker, where I wrote an open narrative where the player could see how the story would play out. When writing this narrative, I had to consider how each part would connect to each other, and how straight forward the story was for the player to follow when going between different branches of the narrative. I also had to think about what choices the player would have to make and how that affected the story.
For my second transcription, I tried to adapt the narrative structure of Kotaro Uchikoshi’s games to work as a choose your own adventure book, where the story had multiple routes which the player must go through first in order to reach the true ending. By trying to recreate a digital process using only traditional tools, I had to consider how I would stop the player from reaching the true ending until they had seen all the other endings first, my solution was to make the page number the product of XYZ, which the values of would be revealed to the player by the other endings.
My Hypothesis
After researching into my specialist area, I created a hypothesis to test what I had learnt from my research and determine the direction of my prototype. Since most of my research focused on non-linear storytelling, I decided to test if 'narrative choices are more meaningful and rewarding to the player than game play choices'.
Prototype Creation
When making my prototype, my aim was to combine storytelling with game play in order to test which was more rewarding to the player. Because of this, I decided to feature dedicated game play segments aside from the player making choices on a screen filled with text. This way I could test attitudes towards game play and story at the same time, rather than making multiple prototypes to test different things.
Because I wanted to include both story and game play, I decided to build upon an existing prototype I had. This way I could focus on creating the story content and branching paths, rather than spending time deciding on how the game should play.
When writing the story, I once again used a flowchart to plan out the structure and where the game play sections would take place. I would also use this flowchart to keep track of each story and game play section when adding/ creating them in GameMaker.
To help test the importance of story, I wrote different routes with varying levels of context given to the player, one route would have almost no story whatsoever (Route A), whereas another route would have a strong emphasis on it (Route B), and finally a middle route with a moderate narrative (Route C).
I set up each room in GameMaker beforehand and created the basic functions I would need for room progression and resetting the game. The basic mechanics for enemy objects and the player already existed from my earlier prototype, so I only had to create more enemy objects and adjust their behaviour depending on the room.
I used Photoshop to create the text backgrounds for the game, as it would be more time efficient than creating multiple objects and setting up fonts in GameMaker.
When all of the backgrounds were done, I added them into the prototype in separate dialogue rooms which explain the next choice to the player, along with the corresponding navigation objects to allow the player to continue.
Once I had the story all set up, I focused on creating the game play and choice sections of the game. I had made most of the rooms I needed beforehand, so I just needed to program all of the objects I needed and then put them into the correct room.
For the choice sections, I made sure the navigation objects sent the player to the correct room and had the correct sprite to indicate how the player should interact with them (door, enemy sprite). I also set up any hazards I needed for each room such as moving walls or a time limit.
Testing and Feedback
After my prototype was complete, I had other people play test it to get feedback on my hypothesis. The majority of testers felt that the game play was more rewarding to them than the story, and some felt that the choices they were given were quite random and the outcomes weren’t clear when making each choice.
From this feedback, it's clear that my hypothesis was proven wrong, as even though people did notice the story to my prototype, it didn’t seem to resonate with them in the same way the game play did. The game play of my prototype was quite challenging and arcade-like, so it can exist on its own without any story content to go with it, however, if I made a prototype with a different genre, such as an adventure game or RPG, it's likely that the results would have been more favourable to my hypothesis, since these genres are much more reliant on story.
