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erutnevdAtxeT
The idea is that when you “End a new game”, you are
presented with the last screen of a text adventure. You’re told what
happened to you. You can disagree (”No, I didn’t”) or agree and
continue backwards through the narrative (”Yeah, but what’d I do
before that”). The goal is to reach the beginning screen of the text
adventure: “New game…” This game was written by Alec Jacobson for Prof. Perlin’s Fall 2009 graduate games course. This is a sketch of a game btw. Any comments would be greatly appreciated.
AVERAGE RATING
/rating_on.png "1 Star")
/rating_off.png "5 Stars")
(1 votes)
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Alec, this is great. It’s a really novel idea, and it’s a lot of fun to play around with it. I like the way you’ve extended the theme from the story line to the gameplay (the button labels) and the idea of ending a new game, etc.
This game really does play like Memento to me – I have an incredibly hard time following time jumps in plots, and this really made me think. Which is a little embarassing, given the cheesy story
But it all certainly made sense when I thought it out, so although the story is a bit random, it plays out well with the multiple causes.
I think my favorite moment in the game was finding whole new branches of the narrative – the joining Peta and becoming depressed and saving a panda loop was particularly philosophical
I replayed it several times before I felt pretty sure that I had hit most of the storylines, which made me think – I didn’t really enjoy just clicking through it (since it actually was just a 4 step story, and an odd one at that), but I got great pleasure out of seeing other possible causes for the current scene. So much so that I wish I could go back a scene, then forward again and make a different choice. In a longer story this would be particularly pronounced, but in the short game I just replayed and chose a different path.
So that leads me to think that perhaps the game goal isn’t so much “get to the beginning” since many paths lead to the beginning, but it could be to get to a specific ending. I don’t know how much farther you can branch this narrative out, but perhaps if you had another story that, say, ended with you getting into a limo, then the goal of this “chapter” would be to get to the beginning that had you exiting from a limo, and that way you could continue through another story equally twisty and full of character (but with a clean slate of a new ending, and its own branches), back to a beginning that was also an ending for a different chapter.
November 14, 2009 @ 11:47 pm
Nice concept where the player gets to figure out the path to the end. It situations look like pretty hard to create but you have done a good enough job in this initial version to keep the player interested.
The gameplay is quite good in itself but just to give a suggestion for a slightly differnt gameplay (or you can use it for advanced levels). You could have certain paths that are impossible to arrive at. So lets say a situation shows up to where a player would never have reached if the story was being told from the beginning and the player chooses “What did I do before this”, that would be an incorrect answer. There was nothing the player could’ve done before that to reach that state. Not sure this makes sense or how effective it would be but something to think about.
The last screen for the “new game” hurts the eye! I guess its good in a way since it immediately makes me want to click on “New Game” and start playing again
November 17, 2009 @ 11:16 pm
Thanks rachit and kai.
I’m going to try both of your ideas. I like Kai’s idea to be able to explore backwards and forwrds through all the branches. Maybe this could function as a story/causality explorer game. Although I don’t want the use to feel like she is running an algorithm. We’ll see how that goes. I am also intrigued by the idea of the dead end pasts. This is a clever play on the causality predicate.
The new game hurts my eyes, too…
November 18, 2009 @ 2:01 am
The music is so weird it makes the story hard to read — I kind of just want it all to end. But I really liked the story and enjoyed getting to the beginning. I want to know more about the narrator, and why he’s so prone to lying to me. Also, I’m not sure you really succeeded in making a game in which you get to do things you would actually do… I think the form of a branching narrative — even one told in reverse — is going to feel contrived. The silliness of the story though helps make me feel like my choices don’t really matter, and it’s just about exploring different endings. For that reason, I wanted some sort of feedback for when I get caught in a loop. Like maybe the narrator gets progressively sleepier and the screen starts getting dark, or something — as it stands, it just sort of feels weird to repeat myself.
Nice work, dude. And way to go on your use of Beige.
November 18, 2009 @ 4:29 pm