Plotline Remixer (Ideas for Games and Interactive/Dynamic Fiction) -By Space_Daemons / Ladam Includes grim plot descriptions. Grab a single or pair of 6 sided dice, online, coded or physical, and prepare to roll for two numbers to add up the intro and conclusion to these dark fantasy plot points before I discuss a topic associated with this small sheet game I made. -------------------------- Intro: -1. A band of enlightened goblins are sick and tired of being hunted. They kindly ask you to remove a boulder from a cave, wherein lies a mystical sundial which glows at a certain time of day and can cast spells of flame when properly utilized. -2. A group of rogue soldiers exiled from King Mauger's army need your help picking magic berries for rations. -3. A collection of monstrous wendigo turned fairies sit by a beach shore, mildly lamenting their cannibal reputation and contemplating their absurd new existence. One walks up to you and calmly asks if you could return their forest's talisman to its rightful place. -4. A band of legendary heroes with bounties on their heads suffer a loss of one of their members, as well as their morale after a fatal friendly fire incident. They humbly ask that you find the deceased member's locket, which grants a single wish to only the first person wishing on it. -5. A trio of squires who were prophesized to save their kingdom request that you kill their trainer, who was also the prophet, and obtain his sword. The sword grants wielders speech in any normal and magic tongue. -6. A small circle of adored artist pose models are appalled to learn that most of their fans are part of a ritualistic cult that is attempting to usher in the end of the world, causing one of them to make a scene by desecrating their own face in a passionate fit of rage. They later request that you retrieve an odd-facing compass that grants the holder precognition. -------------------------- Conclusion: -1. This allows them to fend off the self-proclaimed 'celestial guardian' beings who were revealed to have been scourging the lands. -2. The act helps them find and communicate with the merpeople by the shore, who would lead their travels to a better and safer land. -3. Doing This aids in their discovery of and entry into the chamber of the Council of Time, who allow them to reverse their harsh circumstances in exchange for a single eye from one of the group's members. -4. The benefit of this allows them to drive off the army of the oft angered King Mauger. -5. The act leads to convincing King Mauger to spare them rather than have them captured and beheaded. -6. This enables them to discover a cure to the werewolf curse of a known royal family in another kingdom, forming a stronger alliance between both groups. -------------------------- I haven't posted anything to main gallery in awhile. So you might have considered storytelling in video games, or nonlinear, procedural, and emergent storytelling at least once in your life. While predesigned stories are some of the most powerful lures to some experiences, gameplay is a separate element that can sometimes hold interest for longer due to its simpler abstraction of events being easier to rearrange and recombine. Now that we understand the easier methods, let's put a bit more effort into this experiment. But first, we shouldn't strive to make a game experience completely movie-like, for player eyes are different from movie audience eyes, as players are concentrating on different tasks and challenges than what moviegoers are. We can still afford the level of abstraction and repetition necessary to make events recombinable, for context changes and interactivity are what we're aiming for without creating an impossible workload or building an AI that needs an organic brain to run. Now that we're incorporating far more story into the gameplay, and also supposedly writing more of the story by playing with the game, we'll have to consider what makes both story and gameplay interesting and entertaining, as well as consider the infinite ways these two things can be combined. Both story and gameplay have puzzles, challenges, irony, elements of unpredictability, and different frequencies at which events are repeated for events that do repeat. Repeated events lose some value, but are somewhat or variably revitalized with context changes. Having certain kinds of choices means things can be missed entirely by players (which is a good thing and creates more depth to explore or hear about from other players). Pick your poison and what types of experiences you're willing to sacrifice to chance during your creative process, and know that you may find cases where you think even chance should be balanced out. If you've read this far, it means you might have considered putting a lot of story into a game, or a dynamic story into one. This is the part where you should either know or learn how to make non-violent character interactions interesting or entertaining to yourself and / or other people, and maybe even introduce multiple areas and settings. You'll also notice that I may have mentioned usage of language and text more than other assets / content / work, and that is simply because language and text are the two most powerful and easy ways to communicate a story, or communicate anything at all really. You can tell a story without any language at all, but there will be less to it. Combine art, assets, and language if you want to gain a bit more attention. Do note and remember that instead of just changing a single catalyst within a timeline to create branching paths, this is also about the ability to potentially create thousands of branching paths by changing the entire context around and details within some, many or all narrative / storytelling game components / assets / text blocks. Cleverly re-use content to save effort and time, as well as plan to make the content that can be reused and recombined. Make narrative generation effect and tease at effecting the gameplay so that there's more purpose to it being a game. Have systems that alert about or hint at your character's world's surroundings so players can make a rough estimate of things they could expect to come. Imagine an example where you're playing an action adventure game (with maybe exploration and RPG elements), that's also being played like a real-time-strategy game by AI simulating other players (or people if you build the UI), but you don't get the full info about their moves. Additionally, imagine all this, but you also get to be an underdog or major player in this real-time-strategy game at the same time by effecting events within your character's adventure. Maybe simplify a system keeping keeping track of NPCs outside player view, their behavior, their personality, their plans, or just make a system that roughly determines the player's next experience relative to their past actions. This might all sound overly ambitious at first, but you only need the most fitting elements from all included genres, with a determined percentage of each genre to include. You can simplify systems and add random chance and less expected variables to them to keep players on their toes. Extra features don't mean impossible difficulty, just possible balancing if those features have a large influence. Line up some of the most interesting experiences at the start before making players explore or progress to see more of them. Have rare events or side things and places that are hard to obtain / access / find if you want more reasons to keep players for longer. Plan to have some parts of scenes or dialogue ignore or sidestep some things that players have seen or done for writing and directing convenience. If your game is built for more than just speedrunners, then you can have way more choices in it. Some games to list that include some or much of the above are: Sid Meier's Civilization, The Sims, Some open world games, Dwarf Fortress, Rimworld, Oddworld: Abe's Oddysee, Minecraft, Undertale, Many Strategy or 4x Strategy games, Dark Souls, Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver, most video games, and of course some games that have guns that you can aim in them as well. Games are an ever evolving medium, and there will always be new or clever ideas you can put into them. Make sure you can always take credit for your intellectual work, and don't worry about it getting overshadowed. Your work will always be there and plant inspiration for others (and should possibly be able to make you money at some point). Study other games, study what's fun, study what gets to people's heart strings. Make whatever you want with your newfound knowledge.