One of the most important things need to create is impact, but what is impact?
What is impact?
Impact is the measure of players believing their choices matter. To tell a good story we need to balance
the act of maintaining a cohesive narrative, avoid exponential scaling and delivering impact.
Types of impact
Cascades
Cascading impacts are what most people are referring to when reference a big decision. These decisions promise
to permanently alter the game/world in a major way.
Pros:
- Easy to setup simple (just by limiting the choices)
- They’re attention grabbing
- They are memorable and discussion worthy
- A proper execution is impressive
Cons:
- Impacts that deviate too far from each other present exponential scaling problems
- Players have been burned before (saying that choices matter and then they don’t)
- Very emotionally charged decisions
- Hard to balance making them feel important and be able to finish the game
- Easy to over-promise and under-deliver
- Require a lot of work and are subject to the highest levels of scrutiny
Tips & Tricks:
- Write them to be modular (converge at some point)
- Think about the purpose of major decisions. How do they make the story feel different.
- Don’t make people feel like they’re losing content. If someone dies, make content about that death.
- Combine with other types to make them more effective
Callbacks
They reference something that happened earlier in the story specific to a player choice but without
interrupting the flow of the narrative.
Pros:
- Easy to track and scale linearly over time
- Not as common as cascades so players don’t expect them
- Easy to under-promise and over-deliver
- They feel personalized and make the players feel good
Cons:
- They’re not enough on their own
- You need a lot of them for the players to notice
- They can require a lot of flags to cover all your bases
- Require an encyclopedic knowledge of your own story
- You can break your brain if you rely too much on them
Tips & Tricks:
- Use callbacks to make dialogue less awkward and flow better
- Flag everything. You never know when you’re gonna need it.
- Set up naming conventions to variables are easier to track (e.g.
episode_scene_character_flag)
- Keep them in a spreadsheet so it’s easier to sort and inspect
Heuristics
Is a technique that relies on simplification to quickly arrive at a “good enough” solution/answer.
We can use this simplification to measure player relationships with other characters or keep track
of the personality the player is infusing to the main character.
Most dialogue choices must impact them in a small way and major decisions must impact them in a big
way. One axis (2 variables) is not enough to handle bootlicker players. We can use variations of
O.C.E.A.N to define
the personality traits that matter according to the theme and tone of the game.
Pros:
- People use heuristics in real life. Using them correctly makes the character feel more fluid and lifelike
- You don’t need to memorize or remember thousands of details
- You can use them to add flavor and nuance to both cascades and callbacks
- They can be constructed as sliding scales (defined ranges), so you have a wider range of potential
character reactions
- Modular by nature
Cons:
- Difficult to set up. They scale almost exponentially on the number of dialogue choices
- They need cascades and callbacks to reach full effectiveness
- They are as good as your writers
- Can create a lot of extra complexity to your narrative
- If you oversimplify things, your narrative can feel to game-y
Tips & Tricks:
- Once set up, they are the most flexible tool in your arsenal. Use them to:
- Contextually change music to reflect character relationships
- Change sprites to alter the meaning of a dialogue
- Offer up different perspectives or information on events
- Use them in conjunction with flagged decisions
- A character lost a friend. How much are the willing to open up about it?
- How does your relationship change their perspective?
- Use them to change options available in big decisions (cascades)
Takeaways
- It’s easy to focus too much on only one type of impact but the more techniques you use, the more it will
feel like your player’s choices matter
- Constantly ask yourself why this narrative benefits from interactivity and use those answers to guide
your design process
- Always think about scale. What’s the most efficient way you can add impact without breaking your back?
References
- https://youtu.be/KU3FlTpxSyk