Narrative. design...SO exciting to add story to Min'atoa
Playtesting of Min'atoa showed there was not enough gameplay for a really immersive player experience. There's some function and assets, but what does the player DO? There are two things it needs, puzzles and story. I played (I mean researched) some narrative games: Gone Home, Her Story, What Remains of Edith Finch, What Never Was, and some with puzzles or challenges: A Scholar's Tale, The Wild Eternal, East Shade, Chook n Sosig...I have many more on the list to "research", but all gave me ideas: how much story and how much puzzle were in 'real'games .
I chose to focus on the narrative because it was the hardest to finalise, despite having built the story into something quite rich over the last 2 years.
Note to self: Fools rush in where angels fear to tread. I have a habit of optimistically leaping into I things I know nothing about, assuming it will be easy. In fact, I've only written non-fiction (policy and science). well...I wrote three short stories (and people who should know told me they were good) but that's a long way from being an author. I had written thousands of words for Min'atoa but no idea how to start on the game story. Tutor Matt Payne suggested laying out the story beats as sticky notes in chronological order, and then mixing up the order. I set out the sticky notes and tagged them for red for spoilers, orange for misdirections / partial spoilers, and green for open stuff like background information that would be good to get at any time.
So I had a mess of sticky notes. Now what!
To make the 'paper prototype' for playtesting by last Friday, I sorted 'story bits' into locations in the game, typed them out, and cut the bits and stuck them with sellotape onto an A4 coloured page for each location (1. in the portal, 2. on the balcony, 3. in the lift...).
Playtesters read the snippets on each page, then turn to the next page to discover the story. Players loved it! I got a swollen head and ambitiously showed it to actual game narrative designers and authors, who were unbelievably generous with their time and input. I got great pointers , compliments and ...some crushingly honest yet helpful feedback. The most daunting bit was comparing my work to theirs: I could see how talented they were. I have a long way to go!Turns out, narrative is a complex arcane skill that writers hone over years. Who'd have thought? I concluded about myself:
“You know nothing, Jon Snow”. Ygritte from GoT (George RR Martin Esq).
I researched writing software - Twine and Prairie, Ren'Py, Inkle and Fungus...none of it seemed right. a published author friend told me he uses his head, and maybe Novel Software. I reasoned that Shakespeare used a flipping quill and parchment, so sternly told myself to get on with it . Our greyboxing deadline is 5 July), so I went straight into Unity and made quick 3d assets (cubes with 2d textures of text snippets on them ) to make notes, books, posters and pictures. I made a rough assets and placed them in the right locations.
Tonight I am excited to say that I made the player raycast interact with the 3d readable objects to bring up the 2d UI objects like this:
So now I just have to repeat that for the other 2d and 3d readable notes.
Next task, create books with pages that the player can flip.
I think this is all doable so I am on track to have a real, playtest-able greybox Unity game by 5 July. Yay!
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