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It was fun to read through your blog post - as all these considerations and thoughts are running through my head for months now. I try to achieve exactly the same: I want my game to consist of different stories which are triggered by player's actions and by certain rules (current location, planned todos, certain player stats and NPC stats, already played stories and so on). The overall goal is to make it feel  organic and non-linear - in my fantasy one can run through the game several times and can experience complete different stories.

I find it quite difficult to develop a system that consistently stores all the necessary data. I always switch between NPC-related classes (some kind of memory) and some kind of overall protocol. At the moment I decided to stay with a NPC related memory (so that I always know what the NPC can remember of the players choices - some kind of individual memory of a NPC about the players character) and a protocol for some general data. There is also still some kind of story-related memory where I protocol which story was played and which choices the player made / what the outcome was of the story but this makes it more complicated to collect information only relevant for one NPC...

I just write you as it might be interesting to talk about that? I create this system in Renpy / Python but apart from the concrete programming technique I think the overall problems and solutions might be very similar.

Hi. Thanks for commenting! My game is different type of story and point of view. If you are curious, I posted this on my blog:

http://www.beautifulfantasy.art/2025/05/the-views-on-romance-behind-my-game.html...

But yes, I am structuring it in what I call chapters, that are not lineal. Depending on what you do and how the different factors go, other chapters may happen. 

I already created the classes for that, but I am going to implement first simple quests and stories triggered by location and relationship. 

On your game, you may do something similar. As I see yours is dependent of many npcs, maybe having them as a class is good if they can do things when the main character is not there. Or if they react very much to what he does, or the same npc appears in different moments. 

For now I am basing it on events and the relationship of the characters and it's milestones. There are some chapters that will depend on that and others on random procedural things so they vary. Also I will add some npc but probably your classes need more detail that mine. 

I am using c#. Unity is used for UI only. The rest are my custom classes. 

I don't want to share the precise implementation I am using, but I like to discuss with other devs on an abstract sense. I think we may inspire each other although our type of game is different. You can email me if you want.