Posts
By Julian
Hello folks
and welcome to the weekly update for Story Realms. As it has been going, “update” is a bit of a
misnomer for these posts. We should
probably start calling them design diaries or something like that. Our game is still deep in the process of
development and we are working hard to get things ready to show, but at the
moment we don’t have much in the way of news to offer. What we can offer is some insight into the
game itself and our thoughts behind why we made it the way we made it.
Story Realms
has a few design specifications that we decided were core to the
experience. These are “laws” of the game
that we do our best never to break. One
of the most important decisions we made for this game is that we wanted a
gaming group to be able to go on a full adventure in about an hour.
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| Grand adventure in just one hour? Can it be done? |
For all
these reasons and more, it became important for us to design Story Realms so
that each adventure you would go on would take about an hour. An hour is something you can squeeze in and
still do something else that night. An
hour is a reasonable commitment to ask your reluctant family members to make to
try something they’re not sure they’ll like.
However, a short game wasn’t good enough on its own. We didn’t want to shorten the gameplay by
chopping up a story into a bunch of tiny pieces or by making the adventures
small in scale. We wanted Story Realms
to deliver a COMPLETE adventure EVERY time you sit down play. An opening scene to set up a story, some journeying
or mystery solving, and a big climactic scene to bring the adventure to a
close. Cutting a grand adventure down to
shorter than a movie while keeping the fun and action intact was not an easy
task. It took a lot of testing and
retesting ideas, but always we returned to the principle that getting this
thing down to about an hour was incredibly important.
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| Do you really want to solve this one turn at a time? |
For me, when
thinking about this idea, I thought about the movie Labyrinth (a particular
favorite movie amongst the Growing Up Gamers crew). Early on in the movie Labyrinth the hero,
Sarah, sees the entire maze off in the distance and it looks like miles and
miles of passages and corridors. By the
end of the movie, the audience very much feels that Sarah has journeyed through
that maze of corridors, overcome many challenges, and solved the Labyrinth. However, the movie doesn’t really show her
doing it. At least, it doesn’t show
every step of the way. Instead, it has a
few shots and quick cuts of her considering which direction to go and then
jumps to the scene where she encounters the next interesting character or
worthwhile problem the Labyrinth presents.
Thinking about this and other stories we loved made us realize that a
lot of adventure games have an incredible amount of filler.
In Dungeons
and Dragons, this Labyrinth adventure would be handled entirely
differently. There would be a map of the
entire Labyrinth and generally, the players would wander down each corridor
picking left, right or straight and spend hours mostly seeing a lot of nothing
while encountering the occasional minor trap or monster meant to fill the
space. This is the common temptation because when the
player is the character in the story it feels like there should never be a cut
in the scene. After all, if the players
were really there wouldn’t they actually have to navigate each corridor? If you describe them entering the Labyrinth
and then jump to a scene halfway through the maze, aren’t you cheating them of
the storytelling agency they are supposed to have? The answer is, no. You’re just making them wander a lot of
corridors. No other storytelling medium
does this. Television and movies do not
ask the audience to watch the hero walk across the countryside. Even books which are a much longer format for
telling stories don’t fill their pages with countless details of what equipment
the heroes purchased or prepared before heading out on every single quest or
what the scenery looked like when the hero road his horse to the next town. Most storytelling mediums break the story
down into scenes and, just like the movie Labyrinth, they fill those scenes
only with the exciting moments that really push the story forward. For Story Realms, we thought, why try to
reinvent the wheel? Let’s make the wheel
turn for us. We decided to break it each
adventure down scene by scene and set a limit.
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| The action rises over three scenes |
An adventure
in Story Realms is played across three scenes.
Usually, there is a scene to set up the adventure, a scene to show the
heroes journey towards the goal, and a final scene to show the big, climactic
finish. To accomplish this, we had to
cut out a lot of waste. No unimportant
side quests, random encounters, or filler rooms to make a place feel big by
using up time. This has the benefit of
always keeping the game on the most interesting parts of the story and never burning
up play time with repetitive mundane tasks like searching corridor number 37 to
find another small room with nothing in it.
At one point we were worried that slimming an adventure down to three
scenes would make it feel like the quest was “on rails”. Would the players feel as though we had taken
away their choices? After playtesting
numerous times, it became obvious that this would not be a problem. While we removed the illusion of choice to go
in any direction you wanted, we replaced it with much more freedom for the
players about how a scene plays out. I
say the illusion of choice because while a D&D adventure will let the
players choose to go off in any random direction, it doesn’t really accommodate
that choice well. The Dungeon Master has
an adventure in mind and if the players try to chuck that adventure to the wind
and set off on entirely their own task, the adventure tends to go right off the
rails with them and quickly crashes to a halt.
The fun choices are not about whether you go on the grand quest, but HOW
you go about accomplishing it.
This is
where Story Realms shines. The rules are
designed to be flexible and allow for just about any creative choice a player
can think of to try out to solve the challenges presented in each scene. One scene in our opening adventure involves
the straightforward task of getting to the bottom of a waterfall (well there’s
a bit more going on in that scene, but the basic task is descending the cliff
where the waterfall flows). We have had
players climb down with ropes, build flying machines, glide down on wings and
freeze the waterfall and use magic to fashion it into a zigzagging ice
slide. None of these were predetermined
options written into the adventure. They
were all just different ways players thought of to get down a cliff. This is what we are aiming to keep the focus
of the game on in Story Realms. Allowing
each player to use their heroes powers and skill as creatively as they can to
solve the big challenges and play out the meaningful and exciting parts of each
adventure they go on. That is how we let
the players experience epic quest after epic quest in about an hour each. The heroes are always running away from “the
cleaners”, escaping the bowels of the oubliette, fighting the goblin hordes in the
goblin city, and confronting the wicked goblin king in the room of Escher-like
staircases. They are never simply
wandering corridor after corridor of the endless Labyrinth.
Of course,
the scene structure isn’t the only thing that helps keep the play time
down. Our challenge/combat system is an
important factor in that as well. But
that’s a story for another time.
