So I'm still designing my game, but I figured that direction on my story is going to be as important as anything else. Here's the backstory of my current project:

The setting is a medieval fantasy world, presided over by generally absent gods. Humans run their own affairs in their cities, countries, and empires. For centuries, the world had been generally stable. But the past fifty years saw a broad war between the gods, using humans as soldiers, prizes, and pawns. The war itself was largely inscrutable to humankind, and its conclusion brought no clarity to them as to its purposes or results; only relief. But time moves inexorably forward.

Everything, the world, its people, and even the gods themselves, exists under the strictures of time. History often measures time in ages, with one transitioning into the next. And in this world, time manifests itself quite tangibly. Ages are not simply measured retrospectively. They are born.

In the center of the largest and most tumultuous sea on the planet, a single island sits, which is dominated by a massive mountain reaching towards the sky. Within a deep crater at the mountain's peak, eggs grow and develop over millenia. Eventually, one of these eggs becomes ready to break. This hatching marks the end of the current age, and the birth of the next.

No age can birth itself, however. Someone must come to the island and claim the nascent age. The nature of the person who does so sets the tenor of the world's next epoch. Because of the incredible power concentrated on the island, even the gods' powers falter as they approach it. Typically, a god approaches the island as a mortal when the next age is ripe, stripped of his or her divine exaltation by the irrefusable forces within. The god scales the mountain as a mortal and claims the next age, breaking its shell and allowing the next epich to wash over the earth.

As an egg swells, its need to hatch grows. As more and more time passes without being claimed, the egg sends out an irrefusable energy which prods the world's inhabitants towards greatness. Legends are born of the age's insatiable need to come into being, but their motivations cannot be so precisely directed. When an age wanes and greatness pours from the next, massive wars break out, empires rise or fall-- but the knowledge of the island and its contents is not imparted to the world's inhabitants. In this regard, the gods do much to maintain peace. By claiming the next age themselves, they prevent the pressure from the next era from imposing mighty deeds and events on the world.

But some mortals do have knowledge of the island. The majority of those who have this knowledge treat it only as another legend. However, there are some who treat this knowledge more seriously. Some of those gave rise to an insidious secret society, dedicated to claiming an age for themselves. They have plotted and labored for millenia without success, but finally they have executed a plan affording themselves a realistic chance at success. They know not only of the island, but have also discerned something of the nature of the gods.

Gods are subject to time in that they endure from one moment to the next, but they are themselves timeless. They do not age, they do not wane except through the interference of others. But the price that they pay for this eternal existence is that they cannot participate in time in the same manner that mortals do. To interact with mortals, the gods must temporarily expend some of their godliness. This is the only way that they can measure their time in minutes and hours rather than years and decades. The aforementioned secret society, through guile and cunning and exorbitant risk, goaded the gods into fighting amongst themselves-- but upon the earth as their battlefield.

This expended the majority of the gods' power to manifest as mortals do, on the earth and at the normal pace through time. That which remained to them they began to guard carefully, hardly daring to appear on the earth for more than a few minutes at a time, regardless of their designs. And none among them retained enough power to manifest themselves on the earth long enough to reach the island and usher the next age into being.

The next age cannot be denied. With every year it was not claimed, it pulsed out more and more energy, inciting mortals to grander designs, greater power, and more conflict. But very few know the reason behind this, and outside of the secret society the number is smaller still. The members of that society are laboring in secret to determine the exact location of the island, and contrive the means to reach it, so that they can claim the next age for themselves. Their ultimate aim is to dominate the next era of existence, ruling over every corner of the globe, and even displacing the gods themselves.

There are, however, those who will oppose them. Driven by the need of the nascent age, they pursue their own goals and resist those who try to prevent them as they see fit. Ineluctably, at least some of these will come into conflict with the society, whether they are seeking to claim the next era of the world for themselves or not. The outcome of this period of intense struggles will determine the shape of the next millenia.

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So that's the background. The game itself is an RPG, in the tradition of those from the 16 bit era. The player takes the role of the main character, and can pursue his or her own goals over the course of the game, seeking the next age for his/her own or working with others for their visions of the future.

Major characters will exist, which will shape events of the world around the player. Some will be noble, others villainous. But my questions are: how many of these characters should understand the true nature of events surrounding them, versus those focused on more worldly aims? What strategies might some characters pursue to establish their own greatness, build their own empires, or claim the future? What kinds of other goals might characters have, impelled by a force they can't even perceive but which nonetheless drives them to grand-scaled dreams?

Any comments, criticisms, ideas for what you'd like to see in such a setting, and so on are appreciated.

Trying to read this is really exhausting and doesn't leave me with much understanding.

I find myself questioning whether or not what I'm having to read actually matters or if it's throw-away information; I feel like I could scribble out the whole opening with the wars with the gods and understand the rest equally well.

I'm left with no mental image of the setting.

There's a paragraph out of nowhere about an egg on an island. Are there people looking for an egg or was this a metaphor? Think about your audience; you're trying to bring random forumers up to speed to solicit advice, so you should strongly favor clarity.

Regarding the questions.

I get the feeling that you made up a whole lot of setting and backstory and now want to make up an actual story so you can do something with it.

I do this too, it's fun, but rarely leads to actually producing a story. I find myself stuck or writing junk. I have this whole setting in my head with people colonizing the Saturn System, and I can tell you all about the machines they use and the contrived economic conditions that facilitate it, but I still can't squeeze a real story out of it.

It's a lot of effort writing something that isn't a story, and isn't conducive to writing a story.

On the other hand, the stories I'm progressing on were made with a somewhat different approach.

I have some thoughts about what you could do, and how to better approach this, but I'd like to get a better understanding. Can you please clarify your pitch?

I think I see a strong theme of progress?

[Edited by - JoeCooper on December 18, 2010 5:03:14 PM]

I did not perceive myself as having any difficulty understanding when I originally read it, however coming back now due to a new post having been made I did find myself having to scan through the entire story semi-carefully in order to retrieve the information that it is to be a single-player game. (If not then oops I didn't scan carefully enough.)

I have seen similar "the player will be the main character" claims made for multi player games in the past, which is why the uncertainty.

My take is that the story is done. Quote: "The player takes the role of the main character, and can pursue his or her own goals over the course of the game"

That tells me the story is over, from here on in the player is the author. It is up to the player what story to tell now.

In principle you could even turn the goals of the NPCs question around, leaving that too up to the player. For example instead of letting the player choose whether to go looking for a mage a cleric or a fighter, let the player choose whether to go looking for [ pick from same list you asked us to pick from of types of NPCs ].

The essence though is that the player gets to write the story using the "show don''t tell" technique of playing the character the story is about.

I have a somewhat similar "problem" in at least one of my Battle for Wesnoth campaigns: I do not know what will happen next, because the whole point of having a player play a decisionmaker is to offload that decision onto the player. Thus "what will the Egyptians do in year XXXX?" is hopefully not mine to decide, and I will only be forced to make that decision myself or turn it over to the artificial intelligence (that will do a lousy job of it, I happen to know) if no player ever chooses to be Egyptian between now and the eventual time when going forward with the project absolutely requires knowing what the Egyptians did that year. (And if there is no player playing them who needs to know the answer? Someone playing one of the other nations on the planet? Or merely a backstory exposition device known as a Battle for Wesnoth campaign?)

You already told us the mechanics that will be used to try to encourage the player to move the plot forward toward ending the game by cracking the egg, or starting the even more player-directed game of designing the next age him or her self by means of the powers granted by the egg. To wit, the intensity will be ramped up and up and up and up...

...Eventually presumably the high-intensity encounters / monsters / battles will either kill the player's character or the player will crack that egg or stash the game on a back shelf until some future day when a hankering for another extreme intensity encounter strikes.

[Edited by - markm on December 18, 2010 6:31:08 PM]

Quote: Original post by JoeCooper
Trying to read this is really exhausting and doesn't leave me with much understanding.

I find myself questioning whether or not what I'm having to read actually matters or if it's throw-away information; I feel like I could scribble out the whole opening with the wars with the gods and understand the rest equally well.

I'm left with no mental image of the setting.

There's a paragraph out of nowhere about an egg on an island. Are there people looking for an egg or was this a metaphor? Think about your audience; you're trying to bring random forumers up to speed to solicit advice, so you should strongly favor clarity.

Re-reading it, you're right. The egg bit could certainly be clarified, and the setting is not very vivid visually. For the record, the eggs are the ages, they hatch and then the age contained inside of it begins. It's not a metaphor, as far as characters in the game world are concerned.

However, this is backstory, not plot. The war between the gods was put in to explain both that 1. humans typically never are involved directly with the transition from one age to the next, and 2. that they almost certainly will be involved this time.

Quote:
Regarding the questions.

I get the feeling that you made up a whole lot of setting and backstory and now want to make up an actual story so you can do something with it.

I do this too, it's fun, but rarely leads to actually producing a story. I find myself stuck or writing junk. I have this whole setting in my head with people colonizing the Saturn System, and I can tell you all about the machines they use and the contrived economic conditions that facilitate it, but I still can't squeeze a real story out of it.

It's a lot of effort writing something that isn't a story, and isn't conducive to writing a story.

On the other hand, the stories I'm progressing on were made with a somewhat different approach.

I have some thoughts about what you could do, and how to better approach this, but I'd like to get a better understanding. Can you please clarify your pitch?

I think I see a strong theme of progress?

Happily. A big feature that I didn't include here (I wanted to be careful not to move into game design too much) is that I want an extremely flexible story. The goal is for it not to be on-the-rails linear, as in say, FF7. A new game+ feature will definitely be included, which will allow the player to experience other stories and other paths from the beginning to the end.

To that end, I am developing a large cast of characters, who may or not actually be central to the plot as the player moves through the game. They'll be influenced by events driven by the player either indirectly or directly. That's why I'm interested in goals that characters might have-- if a character fulfills a goal, that might affect their role in the overall story, which is the competition to control the next era.

Basically, there are tiers to a character's relevance to the story, and characters can be upgraded or downgraded as the game progresses. For example, from many characters with the potential to be arch-villains, only one will actually reach that position and after that a good portion of the story will revolve around them, whether or not the player chooses to support or oppose.

That's why I'm more focused on backstory and setting right now. It's more important to me to figure out what characters are like and what they might be working towards, and then place them geographically (or script events such that) they will be brought into conflict with other characters to determine who takes on a larger role in the plot, and who will not.

A good story is always going to be character driven. It is possible to write a story in any setting. But setting always provides context for characters and the situations they face. A good setting allows for more and more interesting interactions between characters, which is what I'm trying to sort out right now. For your Saturn story, there is absolutely a story in there, although perhaps none of the possibilities excite you enough right now to explore them. I have multiple "stories" to write into my game. What I don't have enough of are characters.

Maybe my question is premature right now. On review, I see that a "here's a vague setting, let's make up some characters" type question isn't going to be much for a forum reader to go on. Perhaps it would be better for a forum if I were to go through things story-at-a-time instead.

EDIT: This is a longish post, I'm sorry. Usually a re-write my posts a few times to whittle them down, but it's late.

Quote: 1. humans typically never are involved directly with the transition from one age to the next, and 2. that they almost certainly will be involved this time.

I think you're saying that usually the gods hatch the egg, but now it's humans. I'll assume that hence force.

Quote: I want an extremely flexible story ... not to be on-the-rails linear

There was a recent article on Gamasutra by that guy from Tale of Tales about how he wanted a game that you explore "like a painting" rather than as a linear movie.

There was a huge fuss in the comments from people who didn't get it, but you might consider thinking about this for any kind of story, especially a game where you don't want a linear, on-rails "story" but want to express a lot about the context - including your backstory.

I actually wrote some silly text blurbs for a crude crime game on the internet under this model; everything you write, every detail can characterize the world. I had summarized the approach as "everything is exposition".

In one story the character tries to sell drugs, is arrested for selling marijuana, tells the cop "it's not illegal here!" and is told he failed to fill out form QXR-46B as mandated by the Gardening Finance Reform Act. The character is arrested.

Morrowind is my favorite example. Even if you ignore the story and just wander around, everything characterizes everything so well. You get a clear idea of the spirit of the place by reading what people say, looking at the art and architecture...

Quote: goals that characters might have-- if a character fulfills a goal, that might affect their role in the overall story, which is the competition to control the next era.

What'd ring true is that most people are really just trying to get by in life, in whatever context they're in.

But if we're focused on folks seeking the egg...

The egg ushers in the new era.

We have to flesh out what this really means, and what people think it means.

I pitch that an era is a big, unpredictable shift.

It's not like everyone is driving cars, the egg hatches, and now we have spaceships.

It can't be like that because we started working on spaceships in the 1890s. They're just coming along a lot slower - but once they really proliferate, it won't be shocking or surreal.

The egg hatch needs to be much more jarring! The egg should hatch, and a guy on his horse realizes trains, cars and spaceships are possible.

Someone ought to go after the egg thinking "I know what the next era is like thanks to my research, and thanks to my planning, I'll be on top of things and I'll be king!"

And when it hatches, that person should get a swift kick in the rear. Metaphorically speaking.

There's a goal; being on top of things. Being ahead of the game.

Here's a second; bitterness.

Whatever's going on, zounds of people hate it.

It's easy to find some bitter twit moping about industrialization and grrr factories.

But there's no egg that sends people back. Only forward.

Someone needs to be going after that egg because they don't like the world in front of them.

Here's a third; a counter to goal #2.

Someone who is on top of things now, and opening the next era means he may or may not run things anymore.

Maybe he even thinks he knows what's next, like the first guy, and he doesn't like it; he thinks the next era will be bad for himself, or bad in general.

Another guy ought to have no idea, and people fear what they don't know.

#4: You might consider the religious angle.

I gather that gods are supposed to hatch this egg, aren't they?

But now they're not?

Why is that?

Think of a few answers - maybe the gods expect man to do it - and then envision whole groups of people, churches, sects, devoted to whatever answer they came up with.

Maybe the next egg isn't supposed to be hatched, and the gods have opted not to for that reason. There should be a group that thinks that.

So. To summarize.

I pitch:

1) Folks who think they know what's next and go after the egg or the egg-hunters based on their prediction.
2) Folks who try to interpret the god's behavior and extrapolate.
3) Folks who rightly see it as a mystery box and want the excitement, or fear it (and go after the egg-hunters to thwart them.)
4) Folks who see it not for what's next, but as an end of what's now, and go after it (or thwart the egg-hunters) based on what they think of the now.

You could come up with many groups out of these approaches, and from that, you can build characters by thinking about who might think in any of these ways, and infer about who they are, from how they react to this action; the hunting and hatching of the egg.

How someone sees the egg, and how they imagine its effects, their biases, says a lot about who they are. When you apply an idea to a blank person, you're halfway there.

You can think deeply about how kinds of philosophies and mindsets are really at work here, especially if you explore what the current era is about, and what ideas people might have about the next one.

Shibby?

I think it sounds cool. The problem I have with writing is that I am always coming up with tweaks and cannot settle on a final model for a plot.

Quote: Original post by delaford321
I think it sounds cool. The problem I have with writing is that I am always coming up with tweaks and cannot settle on a final model for a plot.

Do you need help writing? You can start a thread if you're having some trouble like that or want advice about it.

That's actually a pretty cool piece of original mythology, although it's challenging to imagine how one would implement a game flexible enough to let the player do such a variety of things.

Where is the "how" problem in implementing it?

Let's imagine storyboarding it in the form of a Battle for Wesnoth campaign. That way we end up with not just a plot nodes and paths graph or a storyboard but an actual "playable" plot and storyboard. That could itself be a nice little game even before going on to render it cinematographically with some more complex engine and combat mechanics and and and and did I mention and.

I don't see any "how" problem, merely a "how many hours per path and how many hours per node times how many paths and how many nodes" problem. In other words, mere drudgery of explicitly delineating each path in an executable form.

But a lot of that drudge work can be skipped using some automation.

For example there is already a campaign on the add-ons server that demonstrates ramping the "intensity" up and up and up "endlessly" unless the player chooses to end it. So we know that can be done and can look up how it was done.

There is another campaign in which instead of using the transition from scenario to scenario to choose opponents or miniquests or whatever the player moves around on a "worldmap" from "scenario location" to "scenario location". That can simplify making more freedom of choice of the order in which tSo I'm still designing my game, but I figured that direction on my story is going to be as important as anything else. Here's the backstory of my current project:

The setting is a medieval fantasy world, presided over by generally absent gods. Humans run their own affairs in their cities, countries, and empires. For centuries, the world had been generally stable. But the past fifty years saw a broad war between the gods, using humans as soldiers, prizes, and pawns. The war itself was largely inscrutable to humankind, and its conclusion brought no clarity to them as to its purposes or results; only relief. But time moves inexorably forward.

Everything, the world, its people, and even the gods themselves, exists under the strictures of time. History often measures time in ages, with one transitioning into the next. And in this world, time manifests itself quite tangibly. Ages are not simply measured retrospectively. They are born.

In the center of the largest and most tumultuous sea on the planet, a single island sits, which is dominated by a massive mountain reaching towards the sky. Within a deep crater at the mountain's peak, eggs grow and develop over millenia. Eventually, one of these eggs becomes ready to break. This hatching marks the end of the current age, and the birth of the next.o encounter which NPC or challenge or whatever.

So to me it seems like just a matter of putting in the hours.

Hence my question as to which part seems problematical to implement.

(It is, after all, a story, not a game-mechanic nor a combat-mechanic nor a requirement to be or not to be turn based or real time, not a specification of an inventory system or items constructable from components system nor even any "leveling" of the character requirement not even any mention of changing choice of weapon or armour to wear, none of all that cruft and bells and whistles and so on and so on and so on... Leaving implementation free to focus on actual story nice and clean and simple.)

The part about the player pursuing their own goals within the game is definitely gameplay. The player has to have something to do within the game which will feel to the player like a somewhat realistic and fun way to pursue any goal the player might imagine. On top of that the game should be able to figure out what goal the player wants to pursue and reward the player appropriately. Any kind of game which attempts to create a world within which a player can act freely yet not totally give up on doing interactive storytelling involving the player's actions heads off in the direction of absurd complexity. It's possible, yes, there are existing games which give the player a world they can play somewhat freely with. But it's an extremely big project to tackle, assuming we're talking about an indie team. Even if someone offered me a budget of thousands of dollars I'd hesitate to try to design any kind of interactive story world sim.