Silly billiard stories from a pool of possibilities

When we first imagined the concept for Call Shot Dead (spanning stories from the collisions of billiard's balls), we knew narration was going to be the greatest challenge, but we had no idea how to tackle it ! After all, how could we write interesting stories for the thousands of possibilities arising from the collision of 15 balls ? Doing everything by hand would be nearly impossible - the undertaking of many years, with only 4 people !

So we went on to search for others who had done (or tried to do) similar things before us. The way to make stories needed to be :

• Modular : as we have no control over the order in which the player will strike the balls
• Without lenghth-restriction : we cannot ensure any minimal or maximal number of collisions during the game
• Interesting : the story bits must be the reason people play our game. This implied having a semblance of chronology between story bits, lest the whole thing becomes a mere bundle of unrelated, random events

After having checked conferences, papers, books and the likes on the topic, we eventually settled on reshaping the algorithm used in Caves of Qud for the sultans' biographies since it matched all our criteria :

• the story bits can be placed in any order (their selection is completely random in their case)
• any number of them can be made to create the story (the number of 13 is chosen in the sultan's case, but it is completely arbitrary)
• they create an illusion of chronology between events

However, we have enough differences with Caves of Qud that we cannot simply copy paste their system : adaptation is necessary. First is the main character of the story. In CoQ, the sultan is randomly generated at each game, so the starting point of the story is a quick introduction to a new character, and all subsequent feeling of chronology derives from these few traits. But in Call Shot Dead, the victim whose fate hangs on the billiard table is an actual character we wrote with a definitive narrative intention. Which means we have way more information to initialise the world state, and to tell the player before the game starts.

A second difference is the absence of story arcs. In CoQ, they know the biography will last 13 gospels,  and all must begin with a birth, have a throne accession in the middle, and a death at the end. But Call Shot Dead can not enforce this type of arc, as we have no way of knowing which collision will be the last. Thus, we have to find a way to keep the story structured and interesting without any definitive life changing event.

Finally, our literary style are not the same. CoQ tries to tell old legends of forgotten mighty rulers in a magic land, so even if the story style is a bit clunky because of its algorithmic nature, it is coherent in its artistic vision. But our setting is in modern Ireland, and we prophetize the life of a common bloke, so this clunkiness is way more apparent.