Mapping out the Gameplay
Over the last few weeks I've been replaying some of my favorite narrative games and checking out a few new ones. Most games have a little intro that plays to give you some essence of the setting and where you are in the story.
Some will start the game in the middle of a scene, with lots of back and forth short - 1 sentence - dialog quotes. The action of having to click next over and over theoretically should give the player something to do while reading through the story at a semi-real world pace.
However.
When that short back and forth goes on for too long without any scene/character/emotive changes it turns the act of reading the story into a slog. I never want to let my game get to that point. Something should happen that requires thoughtful interaction roughly every ten minutes.
In the case of my game it is making a choice about what caller to choose to bring on to the radio show. (You will play as the show host and producer.) Other games have some sort of mini game or tactical puzzle or battle during this to break up the dialogue.
So what kind of options am I going to give the player? At first I wanted player responses to the callers to affect the path the story takes. But that would require too much time replaying the game to see all the options. What if you wanted to change things up in the middle of the show? Having the players choose the next caller gives them more power over what happens besides how to respond to the caller.
This weekend I'm going to get into the choice/narrative outline tree a little bit more. Hopefully things start to make sense as I get the demo playable.