Hiya, I have already asked about this in a programming room, so if you have already read this .. sorry. Basically I am not a writer in any sence of the word, but have been thinking a lot recently about the role of the story in adventure games. Perhaps I should be spending more time on the storyline?! I am thinking mainly about influencial games such as Myst and tomb raider which while having great gameplay, groundbreaking design etc, are also renowned for amazing stories. those in the programming room obviously feel that the game is more important, while the assumption would be that those in this room would feel that the story is more important, so my question is basically which comes first? for newbie game developers and small companies its probably not that important as they will be playing to the genre rather than the story, but does anyone in here have strong views either way? or know how some of these big games (myst, tomb etc) are developed, the game developed around a good story? or a story written to fit a concept? sillyfishyboy.

If you are just starting, focus on gameplay first. It is much easier to achieve replayability through gameplay, and replayability is the lifespan of your game.

After you are comfortable that people will play it, then you go on to move into the artistic stuffs. The gameplay is the backbone of a game, but the story is the soul. Most of the times you can get away with just making the body.

Intuitively, to go from a story to game is probably easier than to go the other way. If you are starting with a story first, all you need to do is to convert the challenges in the story into a gameplay. If you are going the other way around, you would identify the types of gameplay challenges, and then write a story that will provide different settings and meanings for those challenges.

If you just pick any movie and try to do S2G (Story to Game), you will find that the most common problem is the dimension of the challenges. In other words, there are too many different kinds of challenges, that you might have to write separate code for each challenge, and the skills required for each of them do not necessarily overlap. This is costy. But it can be fixed by changing the story so that more situations can reuse the same gameplay.

If you try G2S, the most common problem is having a repetitive story, because the story has to fit inside what the gameplay can do. But this can be fixed by implementing additional gameplay for situations that you think will benefit the overall experience. This trick is tricky because your overall gameplay is predominately repetitive, so your player might get used to it and reject any different game modules. If you want to play safe, you would, instead of introducing new modules, expand the functionality of the existing module.

If you want to do innovative gameplay, you should design that first, but if you want to do a standard adventure game the story is what will make it stand out and give you ideas for interesting visual content and puzzles, so you should do that first. If you aren't a writer, don't try to do the writing yourself, team up with someone who is a writer. I have written some game development articles about starting a game design project including designing the gameplay and story, please have a look at My Developer Journal, you want the entries that are August 24 and 35, 2004.

In an adventure game, I am more likely to put up with poor gameplay than a poor storyline. In other words, I consider the story to be more important than the interactivity in interactive stories.

In other genres - such as action games - the opposite is true (for me).