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Brothers
Brothers is a narrative game where you are Jay, and you take care of
your little brother Rex. Help Jay make decisions that will keep his
little brother out of trouble and happy.
The scoring system I envision will take Jay’s decisions and use that
as a model for Rex’s own temperament in making decisions. You “win” by
molding your little brother into a good person and keeping him out of
harm. So far its an interactive story more than a game, let me know
how you think I can add a challenge and make the narrative into a
game.
Brothers was written by Edgardo Molina for Prof. Perlin’s Fall 2009 graduate games course. This is a sketch of a game btw. Any comments would be greatly appreciated. Play and find out what it’s all about.
AVERAGE RATING
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(2 votes)
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I like the premise for this game. The game is really about Rex growing up well adjusted, but it would be awkward if the player directly controlled Rex, since the player presumably has a more matured sense of responsibility. By controlling the older brother you let the player identify with Jay, and lead by example. Very cool idea.
As we discussed in class, I think the challenge to you (and to everyone with branching narratives) is finding choices with non-trivial branches. I take a crack at this problem in my game, Help, by having two “resources” and each choice can affect one or both of the resources. By making Rex grow up either good or bad, the player will just choose good (or bad, I suppose), but the choice is obvious. If instead you had more than one axis of his personality – like altruism and responsibility – then the choices could nudge Rex in one direction or another, but then you can have more subtle choices – like should Jay help a driver stranded (altruism) or should he get to school on time (responsibility).
November 14, 2009 @ 11:28 pm
I like how well thought out these situations are. The stories are interesting, even the effect of the choices are interesting. The choices themselves are not interesting. I can always tell which choice I need to get a positive effect. This seems to be the hard part about making a narrative game like this. Even an element of randomness like you said could help, but I think you will need more than that. At least some valid reason for me to choose the “bad” choice or maybe muddy things enough so that I can’t tell which is bad.
Most games in this genre use the second person. You have the player as a third person semi-omniscient controller. I feel detached from Jay. And it seems strange that I am making decisions for him, instead of for myself as a character in the game.
November 16, 2009 @ 2:28 pm
Nice well thought out situations in the game. In the first situation though, it is not obvious from the get go how this would affect Rex. Dave and Jay go to get candy before school but that means Jay is late to pick up Rex after school – I guess you can make a point for that but its not clear from the question itself.
Instead, one suggestion is to have the questions and instead of haveing yes or no answers have 2-3 choices which spell out what would happen in each situation. So for the first question the choices could be: (1) Get candy and go late for school and … or (2) Don’t get candy and pick up Rex …
Neither answer has to be right or wrong..maybe Jay getting candy and giving it to Rex would make Rex happy. So for individual questions there are no right answers but what choices you make for all questions combined could lead to a favorable or unfavorable output in the end.
November 17, 2009 @ 10:50 pm
really good game idea. one can make the argument for not having the choices spelled out for you. like it could be a learning game to show kids that every action has consequences (unintended consequences included), so that each choice you make, you learn something.
i had a suggestion not unlike kai’s suggestion (although hers is alot more insightful). my suggestion to make choices less obvious is to have two meters of success. one meter is for integrity; the other for money. or something like that, something that mirrors the real world where choices are not so black and white. for example, do you blow off homework (or worse, quit school) to work and earn money so that rex can have a better quality life? that’s an extreme example, but like i said: kai’s suggestion is better.
November 18, 2009 @ 11:36 am
I agree with others that you need to figure out how to make the choices more interesting and less obvious. In particular, I thought it would be interesting if having skipped schiolo to play with his friends at the playground, Jay was able to stop Rex’s friend from getting hurt. Then at least I could wonder as a player if sometimes the “wrong choice” can turn out “right” or at least not “totally wrong”. I think it would help the flow of the story if you write shorter passages.
November 18, 2009 @ 4:05 pm