“Opt-out” options are inherently uninteresting. Either you’ll have to override the player’s choice, (which breaks Rule 1 by removing the consequences of the decision) or you’ll have to give the story a boring ending. If you’re telling a story about a big adventure, don’t put in an option to stay at home and not go out on the adventure. That was lame.”ĮDIT: One particularly common way to make an option worse than all the others is to have an “opt-out” option, where you can choose not to participate in the story. Make the player say, “Wow, that was neat!” and not, “Oops. For example, in Choice of the Dragon, it’s possible for your dragon to die, sometimes rather gruesomely, but we tried to ensure that your death would always be pretty cool. Instead, make an effort to ensure that every option is appealing in some way even “wrong” choices should be fun. Hiding the consequences just turns one mistake into another, by removing the player’s basis for making the decision. When you break this rule, resist the temptation to “fix” it by giving the player less information.
Similarly, if one option is much worse than the others, fix it or remove it. If you’ve got one really great option, try to improve the others to match it. It’s like that Dilbert cartoon where Dilbert creates a computer with just one big button: “We push the button for you before it leaves the factory.” If one of the options is significantly better than the others, the player selecting that option loses a sense of agency-the feeling of making a decision. Rule 3: No option should be obviously better or worse than all the others
The goal of a multiple-choice game should be to make the player care about what happens random decisions force players to disengage from their options and select an option unemotionally. Without more information, I’m forced to decide at random. How am I supposed to decide whether to explore the ledge or explore the canyon? Both of these options are exploratory neither of them has any clear advantages or disadvantages.
#Rule 1 to avoid bad storywriting series#
One of the classic “choose a path” series of books broke this rule all the time. For example, choosing a gender in Choice of the Dragon doesn’t really change the story at all, but it can completely change the way you think about the game, especially when it comes time to find a mate! Rule 2: The player needs some basis to make a decisionĮven if you’ve guaranteed that every option has consequences, if players have no idea what the consequences of their decisions will be, it becomes impossible to make a meaningful choice. Some options may have no effect on the game, but have a big effect on the player’s imagination. For example, sometimes player decisions don’t branch the story right away, but they have an effect on the main character’s attributes (the “stats” on the stat screen) or on other variables in the world.
That would be pretty cool, but unfortunately it’s impossible to write a game like that you’ll never finish.įortunately, as a multiple-choice game designer, you have alternatives to branching the story completely. It’s also possible to take this rule too far, requiring that every option needs to branch into a completely different story. If you catch yourself doing this, consider just deleting those false decisions and skipping ahead to the good part! It’s easy to write a collection of choices where nothing really happens the player moves from place to place pointlessly. This rule is pretty uncontroversial, but in practice it’s hard to follow consistently. If my decision has no effect on anything, why am I even making a decision? Rule 1: Every option should have real consequences Here are five rules you can follow to make decisions you write more fun and engaging. The hardest thing about writing a multiple-choice game in ChoiceScript is creating interesting choices for your players.
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