Narrative story

[merlekitty]

I wonder if it's plausible to have a narrative story in a video game without having a main character - or more accurately, the main character is you. In most games, there is a defined main character and an antagonist that drives the main character's progression through the story

Comments

[boxie]

Something I was thinking about to increase the success of your game is how do you introduce it the masses. Watching games come and go lately, it seems you need to introduce the world first so you have a waiting audience

[merlekitty]

Well, the odd thing about this one is that I'm building it to cater to me. I noticed when I started coding, I lose steam because usually I'm trying to hard to build something I think other people would want. Recent conversation with my friends through skype while we play games lead me to start forming a basis of what they like to play. Through that, I was able to see what I wanted in a game, with a lot of "Wouldn't it be cool if..." moments.

So then I figured, hey, why do I keep asking that, why don't I just make that? :)

So right now, I'm working on old-school LAN type game framework. I don't expect more than a group of say 8 people... think of a night of D&D back in the day. Just a group of friends, joining an unknown world, banding together to play a game... but this time, there'll be a digital "DM" that sculpts the world to the players :)

[boxie]

Ah, ok, so that is a bit smaller scale than I thought from our previous conversation. I was just worried that you had something really big in mind... the kind of thing that would take teams of programmers thousands of man hours to push out.

[merlekitty]

Nah, I thought about it and even in the MMORPG "world", how frequently do you really interact with other people? You see thousands of them running around, occasionally you talk to them about random stuff, you buy stuff in auction from them... but you really only "play" with a smaller core group.

So I figured one could replicate that experience replacing the thousands running around with NPCs and your "core group" being you and your friends. As long as the world is dynamic and moldable to each person to seem like they're in a "real world" situation, to the player it should be no different.

[boxie]

That's actually changed a bit since blizzard introduced the looking for group system. It randomly builds a 5man group to run dungeons. You remember how pvp used to work? Queue up and in 10 - 15 minutes you were running with a random group from your server

[merlekitty]

You can do Skype on the iPod? That's cool :) You can chat with us when we play games then! :)

[boxie]

It's one of those ipod touch things.. so all the apps, but no phone or 3G. Only works with a wifi connection, but hey, its still pretty cool.