16: WGE MAG
A Never Ending Story? H
as articy:draft come up with a solution to help developers solve the problem of story- writing within coding?
The Situation Interactive storytelling is the key word when it comes to blockbusters like Heavy Rain or Mass Effect. No one can deny the great potential of non-linear stories that put players in the center of events, mediating the unique feeling of importance and actual influence. But people tend to forget the typical problems that occur every day during the design phase of such a project. The player sees only a section of dialogue and the consequence of his or her action, but the writer has to keep an overview over all possible dialogues and decisions - in addition the writer has to make sure that every ‘path’ works within the story. Writing a good linear story is already a challenge in itself, but when you add the ‘dynamic variable player’ to your plot, that’s when the battle against the branching chaos really begins.
The first and most obvious problem is the actual display of the non-linear structure. Which event is supposed to follow on which decision, which dialogue line is the reply to which question? In addition, it doesn’t even matter if we’re talking about the structure of an epic RPG or a small, casual point and click adventure, already a few player options are enough to make game writing in a classic word processing tool a nightmare – especially since interactive dialogues are a real challenge of their own. The reason why this happens is because this dialogue type has a very high density of relevant decisions that affects the ongoing story. Already a relative short dialogue with only two options as answers can quickly branch out into a dozen new storylines. Even if the conversation ends at the same point, the difficulty to transmit the feeling of freedom of action for players and at the same time to simulate a natural conversation flow still remains.
On the search for alternatives (with a better overview) some writers use the classic Post-It notes or wikis with hyperlinks. But if you don’t have access to a very big office wall for your Post-Its you’ll very quickly reach the limits of this alternative. Even a wiki can be very difficult to handle when it comes to managing more than only the general context, like detailed dialogues for instance.
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