An Insight Into Game Development:

Branching Narratives

Nowadays, many games use so called branching narratives. A branching narrative is, simply put, when the story is non-linear and the player gets to “choose” the way the story goes. In some games, the way branching narratives emerge is very subtle, while in games like Emotions: A Day In A Life, it’s pretty obvious: the story gets impacted every time you pick an emotion in an interaction with the other characters.

Making branching narratives can be a daunting task, especially for larger games. Even in a short game like Emotions: A Day In A Life, creating branching narratives is tricky. There has to be enough options to make the game replayable, but there can’t be too many so that the development of the game gets too long or it gets too complicated to implement all the different story aspects. Therefore, it’s necessary to weigh workload and replayability against each other.

In Emotions: A Day In A Life, a branching narrative emerges through picking an emotion in an interaction with a non-playable character. Because of this, every conversation can end in six different ways, one way for each emotion you can choose. It would have been possible to make every conversationending lead to a completely new path of the game and a unique ending of the game itself, i.e. the game would be completely different from any other playthrough from the point where you pick an emotion. However, with the game having 6 emotions to choose from in every conversation and with 4 characters to converse with, that would create hundreds of endings with this type of branching narrative. With a development plan of 3 months, and for a game with a length of 5-10 minutes, this was not a viable option.

Instead, the branching narrative in Emotions: A Day In A Life works as follows:

1. The player interacts with the first character by picking an emotion to respond to what that character said. The dialogue plays out according to the chosen emotion.
2. When the player meets the second character, the conversation starts differently – sometimes covering a completely different subject – depending on which emotion the player picked in the conversation with the first character. If the player was angry with the first character, they start the conversation with the second character angry, and so on.
3. The player then picks an emotion to respond to what the second character says. That emotion is then the starting emotion used in the conversation with the third character, and so on.

All in all, this means each character except character 1 have 36 different ways their conversations can play out. Combinations of these narrative paths lead to one of the almost 50 different endings. The logic behind the endings are connected to the specific emotions you picked in the interactions with the characters, e.g. if you were angry with character 1, they might not appear in the ending.

This was a lot of text and information, so cheers to you if you read through it all. Hopefully it made sense and made you understand how the branching narratives in Emotions: A Day In A Life work.