Authoring tools for coherent characters and narration?

cvaneseltine · March 13, 2014, 1:48pm

krainert:

What I’m interested in (rephrasing with the benefit of an improved overview) is stories, possibly linear in nature, during which the player, possibly only occasionally, navigates the world and interacts with items (text adventure style; like Hoosegow) as part of the progression of the plot. For example, imagine a detective story in which the player must move around and between crime scenes and interact with items and clues while the interaction with NPCs remains mostly linear/static, and the main plot is similarly linear. In this case (the way I envision it), the player would be presented with linear text until the point at which he must solve a crime puzzle. He does this by interacting, and the resulting output is written in a progressive way so that the text output comes to form a naturally advancing story (which would be achieved by having several possible textual outputs for each action depending on the current state and whether the action has been performed before).

On a non-text level, this sounds rather like LA Noire. LA Noire is graphical, but you advance from place to place, inspect crime scenes, interview witnesses, and eventually announce a verdict about who committed any given crime.

(There are also occasional running/gunning/driving sequences, but I believe they can all be skipped if that’s not your thing.)

krainert · March 13, 2014, 7:17pm

Thanks! Yes, these examples are what I’m interested in. However, I think you are right in that I don’t have enough time to sufficiently investigate the existing titles. Probably I’ll have to make this a personal project and postpone it until I can dive into current systems and examples further.
Again, thank you very much!

matt_weiner · March 13, 2014, 8:43pm

You might want to look into C.E.J. Pacian’s Rogue of the Multiverse as well – it’s a reasonably short parser game (should be playable in under two hours) that I think fulfills some of your criteria.

I have a rant in progress in another window about how Centipede demonstrates the difficulties with having the game move on by itself while you’re trying to solve a puzzle, but maybe later. (TL;DR: In Centipede no one even knows there is a puzzle.)