A long time ago, I started a series of posts to analyze and record the things I learned from a playtest of the prototype of my game. However, I never finished the third post, which was meant to analyze the story of the game, and more importantly how the story was told and how people perceived it. This is that post.
I want Micro Missions to be able to tell stories in a very abstract, symbolic way, without using too many words or specific details about the story. This both helps the "controlled chaos" feeling of the game and makes generating dynamic stories much more feasible. But can I make stories abstract yet still basically understandable? Judging by the playtest, the answer seems to be: Yes, if I'm careful, and reinforce the right points of the stories in the right ways.
The last question on the playtest survey asked the respondents to "Describe what the game is about(story-wise)." I left this question intentionally vague to see not only how much people understood about the story, but how much they cared about it and wanted to write about it. The answers ranged from 3-word sentences starting with "idk" and mentioning a few prominent features like stick figures or chases to long, comical narratives which extrapolated the simple story into a true RPG epic. Most people, though, seemed to be content with understanding the gist of the story - chasing, defeating, finding treasure. This is exactly the kind of spread that I had hoped for, so I'm pretty happy with it.
I'm also extremely happy that more than one person was inspired to write down extrapolated stories. This shows not only that people's minds are working to actively fill in the details I left out, but also that people are having fun with the story aspect of the game.
Throughout playtesting different versions of the game, the most common points of confusion about the story surrounded the role of the mini-games themselves: why am I currently doing this thing? what did I just accomplish. So, the most important thing in terms of the story is to make sure the mini-games are book-ended by context: for most mini-games, there needs to be a cutscene that describes what's about to happen before the game, and another cutscene at the end that describes the outcome. The more these cutscenes are connected to the mini-game, the better.
For example, after defeating the bandit, the player is presented with a cutscene of a letter which gives clues as to the location of the leader. This confused some people, probably because not everyone is used to the somewhat typical RPG sequence of "defeat bad guy" -> "gain information(by looting his body for clues/letters)." Instead of implying that the letter was found on the bandit, it would have probably been better to show the bandit "dead" (or knocked out) explicitly before showing the letter.
When looking through the survey answers, I was pleasantly surprised by the number of people who identified the guy you fight as a "bandit." Pretty soon I realized that this was not because I was so great at drawing stick-figure bandits, but rather because I identified him as a bandit in the letter cutscene. Before this discovery, my goal for storytelling in Micro Missions was to use as few words as possible, to make the game more abstract and symbolic. But now I realize that words are very powerful symbols themselves, and being able to cause the player to associated a graphical symbol with a word is extremely useful for forming connections to the player's previous experiences. So now my goal is to use words in conjunction with visual symbols, and instead I'm going to try to avoid full sentences longer than 2-3 words.
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