The subject title should be:



Storytelling OR Game Development.



I know that the product will not support RPG directly. However, if LUA is used as the scripting language then that is one more giant step towards RPG. Also, as long as there is a good variable system that will add to FPSC scripting when needed.



I am still very much more into RPG. Here has been a thought regarding creating an RPG game. It is basically my philosophy that will start game creation.



Of all the titles for a person developing a game, the one I like best is Storyteller. At the most basic level, that's what I'm doing. Every story has heroes, villains and danger. The storyteller is the one who weaves it all together to entertain the player. For me, it's a story rather than a fight or even an adventure. It's not a competition between me, as the game creator, and the player. I'm not out to beat him or to "win." I hope that my games are greatly influenced by the tone and pacing of books and movies. Whereas many role-playing games center around combat, good books and movies have complex plot lines, engaging mysteries and rich characters. I would like to create investigation and social scenes that are as important as the combat. I have heard or read that some of the best levels contain no fighting at all. The end goal is to create a sense that the player is in his/her favorite film. It can be difficult to balance the player's contributions to the story. If you don't leave the players enough room to add their own flavor, they may wonder why you didn't just hand them a script or all the cheats for the game. On the other hand, if the storyteller doesn't make anything happen, then the player is left to figure out the whole thing on his/her own, often wandering aimlessly or even leaving the whole story to rot. I would hate to be known as having a rotten tomato game. For me, the key is to remember that role-playing is basically a team sport. Everyone takes part, regardless if the player is human or an NPC. It is up to us scripting good AI for the NPC to follow and for the human player to interact with the NPCs and everything else that is going on in the game.



“The world of reality has its limits the world of imagination is boundless.” ~ Jean Jacques Rousseau.



That's my philosophical wisdom for today. If you want to create purely a FPS, then I am sure you will have all the necessary tools to use without doing any scripting. That's what FPSC-R is designed for, I believe.

I don't know what is going on with this thread. I tried editing my original post and instead it posted a second post of the exact same thing. So, I deleted the duplicate.



I should have used C4!!

I am not sure if this thread will help anybody. But my relooking at all this is very helpful for me to get into the mindset of a game developer/storyteller. This is about:



Sounding boards, assistants & Costorytellers



Ah, the loneliness of command. Indie Development as well as storytelling is a bit like being the captain of a ship. Very lonely at the top. You may not have anyone to share the burden of decisions with; should I kill off a trusted ally and friend in the second chapter or wait until the climax of the game?"



Since you're an Indie developer, who do you bounce ideas off of in those moments of those question. If you're lucky enough to have someone who's into role-playing and game development, then maybe you have someone to talk to about it. If you can, find a sounding board for your ideas, someone who is interested in stories and games.





Sometimes I think some idea is so cool and it's not until I run the scene that I realize it didn't work out as well as I thought. A sounding board gives you the chance to talk about your ideas, to get them out of your head and in front of you where you can see them from a different perspective. Even if all they do is listen, it works better than talking to yourself. Just having to explain your idea to someone else can show you places where it doesn't make sense. And if they have suggestions, even better!



One of the most important things you can get from a sounding board is the player perspective. I've played in a lot of games, but when I run a campaign (being the major player), my mind is in a different place. I'm thinking about story and theme and system, not about the finer points of my players' tastes. Without a little help and guidance, I find myself doing the very things that I hate when I'm playing … and then wonder why nobody liked it.



Sometimes it's helpful to have assistants. A sounding board just listens, maybe makes suggestions, but an assistant is in there, helping you run the game. I like to use music in my games, FPSC-R has a built-in computer-based map tool to create maps and track character tokens. It also good to have notes and have them at your fingertips. I'm a control freak, so I like to do it all myself, but If you find yourself neglecting music or maps or anything else because you're too busy – or worse, making mistakes in the game because you're dicking around with a prop or computer – then maybe you can give someone else that job so you can focus. Maybe you can use a co-storyteller. Unfortunately I have never found one bu I might be able to still give some tips with having a co-storyteller.



My next post will be about the co-storyteller. See you then.

Working with a Co-storyteller



A Co-storyteller is an upgraded, luxury model assistant and sounding board in one. A Co-storyteller is a like a copilot. They help you develop your plot, outline the story, run the game and might even play it, too, in the testing part. If you have a weakness in your games – like weaving mysteries, running social elements, creating NPCs, running combats – then think about taking on someone who's good at them.If you can find someone that can fill in the gamp. I have not as yet been able to do that.



Here's my thoughts on having a co-storyteller. Sharing creative control of a game can be tough. Egos vie for control and you have to figure out how to work together. Establish early on who is Storyteller and who is the Costoryteller. A ship can only have one captain – when you run into different ideas, you eventually have to go one way or the other. Both people, then, will have buy into that idea and you can't be bitter that it didn't go your way.



Be open to opinions and criticism. Don't bring someone else in to listen or help if you're just going to ignore their contributions. You don't have to follow every suggestion, but the more open your mind, the more you'll get out of a Co-storyteller. Prop each other up in your weaknesses and combine your strengths.



Here's the bottom line: you both want to create a good game. It's not personal; it's about the project, not your partner. Drop the egos. Maybe you don't get to use your idea that time. Call it an experiment and see how the other way goes. Maybe it'll end up cooler than you think, maybe it'll suck and you really should have gone with your idea. But either way, you learned something.



How do you split the work? I talked to someone who has worked with Co-storytellers. They would chat in person but you may not be able to do that. However, you still can tossing ideas back and forth via email. Real-time conversations are nice because you can brainstorm, but email provides a written trail so you don't forget the details. Email also gives you time to think out your ideas so you can get them straight before pitching them to another person. Nothing sucks more than tossing out a completely inarticulate thought that is entirely misunderstood or misinterpreted. You can send game notes back and forth so each Storyteller can work on the part they're good at, or one person can handle the outline and notes and meld the ideas into one plan. I can't say what is going to work for you, but you'll either find a balance or find that you don't work well with a partner. If you don't work well with a partner, or if your partner doesn't compliment your style, don't complicate things by bringing one in.



Collecting your thoughts Keeping the plot moving forward is a full time job. When you spend all your time figuring out how to react to player requests and coding their scenes and side plots, your story can be fall by the wayside. But if you only concentrate on pushing your story forward, you may limit your players in their own plans. Some storytellers are comfortable winging it. They juggle the plot and the players and anything else spawned by the chaos of role-playing. It's a skill that helps give players more freedom and can make the game more dynamic. But you don't have to be an expert at it. Players aren't going to up and quit on you if they do something crazy and the response is not what they expected. The best thing to always do is test, test, test with different possibilities that the player might have and figure out how to respond to what they might do. In this way you may not paint yourself into a corner with just a couple of poor assumptions. Taking time collecting your thoughts to figure out all of the possible scenarios the player might throw at you. However, too much stress in trying to make sure you have covered everything can lead to burnout, so, don't let yourself be pressured. If you feel confused and frustrated, take a break and come back to it later.

Planning



To plan or not to plan, that's not really quite the question. It's an individual thing and what works for some storytellers but will be a disaster for others. Some are great at playing it by ear, writing the story as they go. Maybe they have an over-arching plot in mind, maybe they don't. Some are at their best when they prepare detailed notes and plans and backup plans.



It's up to you to figure out how you work best, but don't start a game you can't finish. Whether you need time to plan or the energy to wing it, do it and dedicate yourself to the doing. An uncommitted or sloppily made game isn't fun for anyone. Storytelling preparation falls into one of three categories: seat of the pants, planning a level at a time, and planning way ahead for the whole game.



If you can make a game as you go and being able to come up with a direction and how to react to what the the player might do a any point in the story, then you rock. That's not easy; but if you're good at it, it could be an awesome game. Developing a game that way can be quite flexible and nimble. You can go wherever think the player can take you or go wherever a sudden thought takes you.



Those who take it a level at a time are pretty close, but when you start that level's game, you may have a plan; but, you may not know what the next level will actually hold, because you're waiting to see how this level goes. It's a little more structure than totally improvising, but you can still go in any direction because you haven't planned the next week or the week after yet. So, it could be a good thing; but, you have to watch about the possibility of revisine perhaps the previous week.



Here's what can bite you in the behind, though: You have a plot, say preventing [insert catastrophic evil here] from destroying [insert something nice here]. If you follow a tangential (slightly or indirectly related to the . . .) story – whether it was generated by the what you think the player might do or a sudden idea you may have – might move the game away from your plot too far. Then you have to figure out how to get back in that direction. You have to split your focus between advancing your story and reacting to whatever might happen in the game.



The real danger and the one that damages a game more – because those tangents and the road back to the plot can be a lot of fun – is that you risk going too are in thinking what the player may think and do while they are playing the game. Let's say you are reading a bedtime story to a child. The child keeps asking questions about what Goldilocks was doing in the woods and what flavor the porridge was and where the bears had gone all day and why they left their porridge on the table … You can answer all those questions and you can make as much of a story out of them as you like, but if you do, then you're not telling the child the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears anymore. You perhaps have gone way too far from the plot and you might lose sight of it and then confuse the player with what the journey (mission) really is.



One storyteller told me that he felt he could never predict what the player would do or how the player would meet challenges in his game, so he didn't even try to plan most levels ahead of time. He just followed his plot or story. Because there was no planning or thought behind building the game, he just used the same bad guys over and over. The fights were pretty much the same with no surprises and not even much variety. My thought is that probably will not be a very fun game to play.



The player can easily be frustrated because they would have no idea where to go. He/she had to guess at what would lead them towards the plot. The levels of the game that had been planned more strongly were the best of the campaign, but others suffered. If you have decided to be a Storyteller, then tell the story. The players collaborate and weave their characters into it, not the other way around. Make things happen to the players. They don't know the plot and they can't guide the story. NPCs should come to them for help, villains should menace them, danger should court them. Bad stuff needs to go down and the player's part is to react to it. You take what you think their reactions might be and make it a part of the game, but you need to be active, not passive.



If you spend a lot of time planning, you have other issues to deal with. I know of someone who works best when he has the time to develop his story into a detailed outline. It's not unusual for him to spend more than a hundred hours on a game before he even begins working on the computer.



He usually ends up with NPC lists, maps, a high-level outline, a low-level outline, chapter by chapter notes, a second draft of those with the rolls and rules and stats and sensory details. The obvious downfall is the huge investment of time even before he puts the first segment or entity down in the map. A hundred hours? If you've got school, a job, kids, or even one of those social lives I've heard about, then you may only be able to spend a few hours a week creating a game. At that rate, it can take a year to plan in such detail. So plan ahead. What other problems can detailed planning cause? Well, if you get too attached to your plan or too rigid in adhering to it, then you could lose flexibility. Just because winging it may lure you into being passive doesn't mean it will, and just because you plan your game in detail doesn't mean you'll automatically become a dictator. Either planning ahead or playing it by ear can be great ways to develop a game and have fun, just be aware of the traps inherent to both and make sure you don't fall into them.

Sandbox vs. rail games



Sandbox and rail games are a lot like all that stuff about winging it or planning ahead. This is about how your players will interact with the plot.



Sandbox and rail games are the usual terms to describe developing and writing the story to video games. A sandbox game is a wide-open setting where the players can go wherever they want and do pretty much whatever they want. A rail-type game has a much more linear story that the players are led through from one event to the next.



You would think that Storytellers who wing it always run sandbox style games and those who plan always run rail games, but that's not necessarily true. If you have it all planned out but let the characters leave the story for long stretches, introducing their own elements and stories, then that's sandbox, even if you have a detailed plan for the game. And if you run your game completely off the cuff, but push the characters along without giving them room for their own stuff, then it might be a rail game. You're not stuck with one kind of game because you create your game a certain way. A given game doesn't even have to be all sandbox or all rail. It might begin as a sandbox, only to narrow in focus when the players dig into the main plot, or begin as a rail and open up when the players leave the first scene and step into the larger world.



So, to the pros and cons! Sandboxes are big and you can find NPCs and adventures anywhere that you go. It makes the game feel big and very alive. Players have a lot of room to pursue their own ideas and stories. It's only a problem when the players go everywhere in the sandbox except where you've buried your plot in the sand. If you let yourself be passive, then your plot can get neglected.



If you keep active, you can make this or that corner of the sandbox interesting to the player and lure them to your plot, or throw danger at them and drive them where you want them to go.



It can be difficult to keep your story moving. I talked to a Storyteller who was created a large sandbox world (Oblivion IV). Anywhere you went were NPCs to talk to, things to do, secrets to find. And she put her plot all over the place, so it was like a treasure hunt collecting the pieces. At first she found that it wasn't much of a guided treasure hunt and she found that the player would get to the end of the game without half of the pieces. The people who tested it said it was fun and they enjoyed the game, but it didn't make a whole lot of sense. It would have been a lot more fun to find out as they played the game. So she revised her AI for the story.



Oblivion IV is the best role-playing sand-box style game I've come across and have been fortunate to talk to some of the people who created it.



Another problem can arrive when you're not good at filling the sandbox. If the characters run into the same people and the same situations over and over, no matter where they go, then the world stops feeling big. It feels like so many cardboard cutouts. Or maybe it just feels empty and fake. Bottom line – when it comes to sandboxes is you have to be good at them. You need to be able to create NPCs and play them. You have to be able to roll with the things your players will want to do and go if you give them a whole world (galaxy, universe, etc.) to play in, and you'd better be able to keep them interested in the plot one way or another.



Rail-based games might sound undesirable at first, but sometimes they're more fun, and some Storytellers are just better at running a more linear game than a sandbox. When your game is on a rail, the plot unfolds consistently and logically and while the player may be brought up short by a challenge they cannot yet overcome or a puzzle they cannot solve, the way forward is unambiguously clear. A rail-style game is also very easy to plan for, since you always know what's going to come next.



Rail-style games work well with educational type games. Also, there are times you may want the player to go in a certain direction in the world and not veer off the necessary path. FPSC At times made this necessary because of collision problems. If there is a collision problem somewhere, the make the player avoid that area using invisible walls.



Next, I'll talk about how difficult should we make a role-playing game.

I'm mostly waiting on this before I really jump the gun and start working on a game in Reloaded. As my intent is to create games in the genre of sandbox FPS-RPG.



I'm really hoping the night and day cycles come with a read/write variable so we can have random encounters based on the time of day.

Those are some very good points you make, Flatlander! The problem (or challenge) about a sandbox game is that you should leave the players all the freedom. Do they want to follow the main plot or do they just like to find their own adventure in the world you created for them? I don't know if you ever DM-ed a pen and paper RPG (like D&D). The same problems always appear there. How do you get the players into your story but don't make them feel like you already made all the decisions for them so they are only lead from one location to the next with no real say in what is going on.

The scope of a game like Skyrim is probably beyond anyone's possibilities here. But if you keep the game world small yet big enough that there are things to explore for those who want to and also a red thread to follow the main story, you have found a good balance I think.

As for the main plot ... it's like with music there. Every possible song has already been made and any new one will relate or be compared to another one already existing. So the main story might not have to be so unique like many might think. But the twists and turns during the player's journey are important. And so are things like NPCs or even more factions that play a part in that story. Maybe the player will even be able to turn the tide to the favour of one faction or another, depending on the actions chosen. And maybe there might even be different endings depending on the player's actions.

Very important as well (at lest in my opinion) ... leave the game world in the player's hands even if the main plot has been finished. If the world you created provides some more adventure than "just" the main story, the players might like to explore and play even beyond that point.

Creating a truly open world is something that all developers want to achieve. As of yet it has not been accomplished. There are games out there that have so many story lines that it appears to be open but in the end they are all scripted events, some are based off of the players input while the majority pigeon hole the player on to a path that has it's own set of specific scripted actions.



To accomplish a true open world you would first need to create a system that can think for itself without the need for coded events based on reaction from the player or player input. This would be a very dangerous system and not likely released as a video game for the masses.



however,



It is completely possible to follow in the foot steps of the giants and create so many scripted events that the world appears to be open and completely controlled by the player. There are some set backs that you will confronted with while trying to achieve your goals.



1. Story line blurring - So any distractions that the main story is lost completely to

the player and is damn near impossible to re-align for completion.

2. Managing side stories so that they make sense and are relevant and appropriate to

the game world.

3. Writing each and every story line, side quest not so random events within the

game. Having a template will help but writing sufficient relevant scenarios mind

prove more work than what it's worth.

4. Providing ongoing support for the title to ensure that the world runs as intended

will require more resources than a single person or small team can provide not only

monetarily but in man-power.



Not sure if this is relevant to the discussion but it seems to fit.