Interactive story

Envy123

Hi guys, I'm making my first indie game and since I have no budget at all, I decided to start off simple and use my writing skills to make an interactive book as a first game.

However, the current templates seem to support only a linear narrative. How can I make it into a multi-branching story with multiple endings, depending on your choices? Any help would be appreciated

Daniel543M

Well I imagine you'll have many, many, many different scenes where each scene expands on the current storyline and provides a number of choices for the user to make.

I'm not entirely sure what you mean regarding the difference between a linear narrative or a multi-branching story...

Have you heard of the book series called "Goosebumps"? If you have, is this what you want your game to be like?

Let's say you start your interactive book by saying that a character has just been an a crash and give the user the option to choose if the crash was, say, a plane or a train crash. Click one button to choose the plane story and the other to choose the train.

The plane choice will obviously change the scene to the 1st plane story scene, and the train to the 1st train scene.

Is this more or less what you are thinking? I'm not sure what the dilemma here is

I actually too wanted to create a game similar to this and the first storyline choice was similar to the example I gave. I found that although I enjoyed the creation of the stories, it was a lot of work. Just think about how many scenes you will have to make even if each choice has merely 2 options to select from as opposed to 3 or 4. Even if you do enjoy writing, it's a very tedious task to create this many scenes.

I hope I was on the right track to what you were asking about..

Good luck
Daniel

Hopscotch

@Envy123 , @Daniel543M , ideally you would only use one scene and control the flow with tables.

One table with an StoryPartID column and a column with the associated text.

Table two would contain the relationships between the StoryParts.
A row for each alternative.
So a column for the StoryPartID that it controls, Text for the alternative and the next StoryPartID that it links to.

e.g.

Table1

ID  Text
--  -------------------------
1   Paul arrives at a t-junction
2   Turning right, he sees the road is dark and scarry
3   Turning left, he sees a fairground in the distance
4   ...

Table2

ID  OptionsText                TargetID
--  ------------------------------- 
1   Turn right                 2
1   Turn left                  3
2   Run back                   4
2   Continue carefully         5
3   Check pockets for change   6
3   Turn back to get money     7  
4   ...

The scene should then display the current text, plus buttons for each of the options. When a button is pressed, the scene updates with the new text and options.

Of course, Table1 can also have a column for a possible picture or animation to be displayed on that scene, or ambient sound to be played.
Hope it all makes sense.

Envy123

Thank you - it helps a lot

chirikosan

I myself am working towards a game like this mixed with some things taken from the Princess Maker franchise, I haven't been testing with tables and attributes and all of that stuff will be working yet because I have been busy drawing the artwork. I am trying to make things a bit easier in case I screw up by making my game's different sections in separate gamesalad test files (in part because it's going to have a lot of images and if I screw up with a rule that doesn't work right I don't want to mess with the hassle of fixing a HUGE file).

Will your game be using a numeric point system for different attributes depending on the actions which will affect the ending using a month calendar format or will it be more simple with button clicking like those mystery RPG like books I read as a kid where depending on your actions on each scene you get a specific ending either good or bad.

If it's the latter you are probably going to be uber busy like me doing lots and lots of artwork. Believe me, it can get tedious after a while.