Characters have traits, but they don’t grow and change, with perhaps a few exceptions. Characters don’t really have wants, they have villains that they want to defeat, and “defeat the bad guy” is pretty boring as a motivation, especially when that’s really the only narrative that they have going. What Wildermyth does instead is fake this sort of thing. What I Wish Wildermyth Did DifferentlyĪnd here is one of the things that I wish Wildermyth did: story circles, or character development. The best thing about this, from a writing perspective, and especially from a “procedural” writing perspective, is that the formula means that we have concrete keys to refer to. Rather, they’re a structure that humans understand really well, which means that you can easily build things on top of them, and get power from subverting. One important thing to note is that story circles are much worse if you think about them as rigid. Return - Then return to their familiar situation,.Go - They enter an unfamiliar situation,.You - A character is in a zone of comfort,.I don’t want to entirely ignore this method of integrating different narrative structures, but it’s somewhat to the left of this particular post.) Dan Harmon’s Story Circle The more you do this, the less power you get from the “events in a bucket” approach. (Note: you can include a previous event as a precondition, which is how you can use a system like this to integrate in narrative events that end up looking like a graph, one of the traditional storytelling methods in games. Unfortunately, there are some problems with this approach, but they’re ones that I feel like I have a handle on how to address. This is great for writers, since they can black box things and not have to worry about when or how the preconditions are met, nor about anything else that might get in the way of just immediately writing a story. In this way, it’s similar to how Naughty Dog handles the non-scripted dialogue in The Last of Us, or how Left 4 Dead handles character barks, or how Heaven’s Vault handles its whole plot, where the content is disconnected from all other content, put into a bucket, and then checked at runtime against preconditions. It’s interesting, though I wish it went more in-depth on why they made some of the decisions they made. In Wildermyth, there are characters with Aspects and Hooks to them, and when it comes time to figure out what events are going to happen, it looks at the stable of available events, sees whether it has the right characters with those Hooks or Aspects, then casts them in those roles, saying dialogue that is written such that the writer knows nothing about those characters except that they meet some of the preconditions. (Note: this is one of those blog posts that I write in an hour to get an idea out of my head, I apologize if it’s less baked than it should be.) How Wildermyth Handles Narrative Some of this interest has been because I’ve been playing Wildermyth of late, and little things have been, if not bugging me, then getting my imagination going. 1.I’ve lately been watching a bunch of GDC (and other game conference) talks, specifically about how to do narrative when you have to worry about the player doing something stupid and unexpected. We've been working on this for a while and are super excited to finally show it off!Īlso some good bugfixes, including a memory leak fix that should improve performance for long sessions, and improvements to lighting when point light limit is low. This story is unlocked by an existing event and follows the consequences of releasing Vulta from their gem-prison. The Sunswallower's Wake is a three chapter campaign for legacy heroes, focused on Vulta, an ancient enemy of the Yondering Lands. Share on Twitter Share on Facebook The Yondering Lands have more stories to tell.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |