The first thing I needed for the project, was a base website, something I could put all my work into. So, I needed to decide the layout for the website. This is where prototyping comes into use. I started designing layouts for the website on paper, sketching out the boxes and where each part would go. The game needed to have a few core elements, such as a video player, a text box, and a submit button. Not to mention a title at the top. I needed the basic options, the option to start again, the option to go back to the previous choice, a list of commands the player could use, such as "Pick up" and "Walk North, South, East and West". The player would also need to easily be able to access their inventory, so I decided to put this on the text log, where the descriptions and such would appear, as well as a list of their past commands.
I noticed I had a little more room on the page that needed to be filled up, so I started thinking of more things to add. I realised this game would need a logo, a little something people could see and think of my game. I also considered adding hints for each page, it could be used to help the player move along, though I'm not sure how I could implement this with the multiple choice aspect, as the player had to make their own decision, and not feel inclined to choose something other than what they normally would because of hints in a certain direction.
After creating a quick paper draft, I started work on actually trying to get this website made, I started using dreamweaver to get the code down, using HTML as my main code and attempting to link it to another CSS file. For now I just wanted to get the page working with all the elements laid out, I needed a template, where all I'd need to do was add text and the video specific to the page. For now, to test that I'd need to use fill-in videos.
I quickly discovered the live view of the webpage in dreamweaver wouldn't allow me to view the video placed on the page, so in order to test that I'd need to open it up in a browser. I started testing the most basic things first, changing the colour of the background, adding a title and text etc. Eventually I got to the stage where I wanted to try adding a text box, so I looked up a few tutorials, and tried adding one in, along with a submit button. The result can be seen below:
Here I'd managed to get a header down for the title, a small section of text called "paragraph test" where I plan on putting the various descriptions of what's going on, and a text box, along with "Enter Command"as an instruction and a submit button. I typed "work" into the box to show you could type into it and made the background green to show...well, that I could make the background green.
The video had already been coded in but as you can see above, it wasn't showing in the live view, so I had to open it in a browser, and the result was:
Well...
The player was a little too big. I couldn't fit the whole thing on my screen. I'd added controls for the video player in the code, and used a video from the archives pitch I'd edited. So, I needed to make the video player smaller. And the current way I was adding it wasn't giving any size options. It took a quick google search to find out how to shrink it down again, though I had to re-type the code.
I rejigged the video player code and changed around the text. The plot was developing in the background to this so I'd changed the location, and added a new name as a placeholder. TBVG or Text Based Video Game. Created from sheer imagination.
Much better. Once I'd found a much more appropriate size, I decided I needed to get these things into the centre of the page. This wouldn't be the size of the final video, but I needed something to work with. I needed to move all the aspects into the centre of the page, then get on with adding the coding required to actually get the text box working.
I went and got a book. Yes, a real book. With real pages and words in ink, from the LRC in the college. It was titled "The Web Developers Cookbook". And talked through a lot of HTML5 guidelines in making various kinds of games. Chapter 2 focused on text-based games. Exactly what I needed.
The challenge in this activity was to build a tower made purely out of spaghetti, string, tape, and a marshmallow. We had to make the tower as tall as possible, and top it with the marshmallow. It’s simple, the tallest tower wins.
The picture above is all we had to work with, bar the marshmallow, which was in the box.
We started off by planning what we were going to do. We decided on a tripod design, as it would use fewer resources. Plus, it would be stable. Of course we wanted to make it taller, so we’d have to put a smaller base some of the way up. We decided on making a tripod with a triangle connected in the middle.
We started by making the triangle that the legs would connect to, using tape to stick the corners together. Due to the flimsy nature of spaghetti it was very fiddly, but we managed to make a triangle, if not a little lopsided.
The next step was making the tripod legs. We realised after spending a little time on them that they wouldn’t be able to hold up a pasta tower and marshmallow, so we decided to stick three pieces of spaghetti to each other for the legs, wrapping tape around it and keeping them all roughly the same length.
We then tried sticking the legs to the triangle we’d made, using tape, but this time also string, to make sure they would be moving as little as possible. Again, it was a fiddly task, and we were running out of time, and tape.
We managed to get the basic tripod shape out of it, splaying the pasta out so as to provide stability. It wasn't overly stable, but it could stand, which was the good news.
The bad news was the tower was nowhere near finished. One of our group members had been working on the upper part of the tower, sticking legs compiled of just one spaghetti strand each, through the tape holding the next triangle together.
The only problem now would be getting the second instalment of the tower to stay up on the first. Which we could have done quite easily, had it not been for physics causing the tower to fall over continuously.
Eventually we managed to get it on the base. It was having trouble standing on its own, but we did have it standing.
Of course, we'd forgotten one detail: The marshmallow. We had nowhere to put it, and we had a matter of seconds left. We ended up just placing it on the end of one spaghetti strand and taping it to the side. Flawless.
Eventually it came to actually reviewing the towers, to see who got the tallest.
Our entry looked something like this:
After completing the challenge, we were told to fill out a sheet about the task. The sheet has been listed below.
Height of my groups spaghetti structure: 0
What parts of your structure worked very well?
Binding multiple pieces of spaghetti together, the tripod design
If you were to build the structure again, how might you change your approach to making it?
Start off using the marshmallow and build off of it, then add more supports and a better base.
What did this activity show you about working as a team?
Communication is key, failing is fine, and to keep unique ideas while collaborating so as to combine different plans
How does this activity connect to what you do as an interactive designer?
All designs fail in one form or another. As long as you learn from it, the same can be applied to interactive design.
What have you learned from this activity?
Fail lots; do not give up after so many attempts. At some point, you will get it right.
Text-Based Games Research
In this section, I will be looking into the mechanics of text-based games and finding out how I can use certain features for my own idea. They can be extremely flexible in their own respect, more so than some fully fledged games with visuals and 3D rendered environments
The concept
Text-based games have been around almost as long as computers, and are incredibly simple, yet incredibly fun to play for a lot of people. They give you basic pre-written commands, which are reasonably simple to work out on your own. Things like: "Pick up cloth" or "Look around" which then deliver lines of dialogue depending on the situation you were in.
This games construct an entire map around the player, which could feasibly be drawn out as navigation for the level. These environments could be whatever the Author, and the reader imagines them to be. The Author controls the basic details of the level, painting a picture in the readers head, while the reader has their own take on it, imagining it for themselves.
The Reason
So why are text-based games made? Why not make a full on game? Text-based games were first introduced around the 1970's, and were more common around that time until the 1990's. Most popular around 1980. Mainly due to their simplistic nature. Text-based games are much easier to program, and more can be made quickly. Some developers still make them today, to get the hang of programming and putting together an interactive story. They do not take nearly as long as bitmap or vector graphic games to make, and can be flexible to use. There is also the fact that the entire games look is determined by the readers imagination.
With the ability to go wherever you want in a level, at any time, unless certain areas have been blocked off. This may sound similar to normal games, but in these games, virtually anything mentioned will have intractability to some extent. Whereas games with graphics will place random items in the room for aesthetic, text-based games do not need to worry about this as much, and so only mention things the player can interact with, even if they are not plot relevant. A statue might not be able to be picked up, but the player can read anything on it or examine it further.
The Aspects
These kinda of games are incredibly simple in their design, but incredibly complex in the way you can navigate around an imaginary environment and interact with almost anything you can see. In these games the player has some element of choice in what they do as well. There may be a split in a corridor in which the player can choose to go either East or West, and their choice determines the way the story goes. One thing these games can do though, is they can allow you to take the East corridor, then change your mind and go down the west one instead, which often normal choice-based games do not allow.
In Practice
In "The Stanley Parable" The player is faces with two doors to start off. Whichever door they walk
The choice of going left or right in The Stanley Parable
through, closes behind them. This may be because their choice activates a line of dialogue which plays upon walking through one door and if they allowed the player to change their mind, they could walk back and interrupt the dialogue, destroying the flow of the game. However with a text based game, the gameplay is provided in chunks of information. The player must read all of it to progress, meaning nothing will really be interrupted. Whereas games are very reliant on timing, text-based games can be free from that restriction.
Personal Experience
I'd once played a text based game, where I'd drawn out the map and rooms, writing down details about each one, and keeping a compass near the top, so when I wanted to go North, I'd be able to see which way North was. The fact that this game managed to get me really thinking and interacting in the real world showed how good it was at creating an environment, and a story.
On one occasion, I actually tried making a text-based game myself on a website designed to allow you to do so. I made one called Orbit, all about finding your pod in space, docked with a much larger vessel, and exploring this new environment. I may have chosen to continue with this idea for this project, but the difficulty would come in trying to get the scenery right for filming, and having the actor walk around a space station. The idea I come up with needs to be much simpler than this, despite how simple it may sound upon reading it.
As you saw in the video, it was quite unfinished, and still had a few things to fix in it, but this is the sort of thing I aim to create, with videos for everything you type in. When he types "Look at storage unit" A video would play showing the character examining the storage unit, a few zoomed in details etc. While normal text-based games would have a basic physical description with a command, I would have to go into even more detail, showing the cracks and scratches on the unit, showing how the player could open it, since the video would show what it basically looked like in the scene beforehand in the introduction.
Implementation
When it comes to creating the text-based game to go with my final major project, I will need to think up all the commands the user would type in, using the story as reference. With each command, there would need to be a decent length clip, for example: If the player just wanted to move into the next room, they would maybe be shown entering the room, with a basic panning shot to show what the room looks like. However, I would also need to decide what to do should the player decide to go back into a room the second time. Should the video be played again? And I just make it skippable? Or should another video play of just a few seconds, with the actor walking into the room once more, this time used to its sights.
Multiple-Choice Games Research
Here, I will be talking about how multiple choice games can involve players in a unique way that not many other games can manage. How I can incorporate this mechanic into my own game, and how I can mix this mechanic with the other things in my game, how it will affect what the player can do, and will do, and why I want to use this idea for my own game. I will be showing multiple choice games in action through videos and screenshots, and be explaining what's happening in each.
The Concept
Multiple choice games, are essentially, any game, where the player can affect the outcome to some extent. Either by making choices, following certain actions, or even creating your own storyline in a game. Say a player was standing in a corridor. Another corridor branching off left, and right. The player would then have the choice, to down the left corridor, or the right corridor. Depending on the players choice, the outcome of where they would end up would change.
As said before, these choices can be made through physical actions, such as walking in a certain direction, or killing a certain target etc. Or they can be made through dialogue, telling a character information they may not otherwise have known, or even affecting a relationship with someone in the game. Having people friendly towards you in a game can be life saving in the right situation. And if it's a multiple choice game, the right situation will most likely come up.
The choice to rescue or to harvest a Little Sister in Bioshock
For example, in the game Bioshock you are constantly given the choice to save characters called little sisters, or harvest them, to get stronger. The more you harvest, the more points or "Adam" you will receive, meaning you can buy more abilities in the shops, upgrade what you already have, and overall be a lot more powerful. However, if you save them they will leave gift for you around the levels. Baskets of extra Adam, though not as much as you would have gained from harvesting them. I have yet to complete the game, but I have heard that saving them will affect the ending.
Choice-based games are usually set up to show that these games can change depending on your choices. It's not often the choices you make will be a background feature, but it does happen. An overview of choice-based games can be seen in the video below:
[Choice-Based games montage video here] The Reason
So why do games include multiple choice? It might seem obvious, games are meant to be interactive right? The thing is, many games out there are very linear in their story. Games like half-life for example, seem open ended in the environments created, but unless you follow a specific route, you won't be getting through the game. You may find secrets and such, but that's all. This is the illusion of free choice. The developers will give you a level that seems open, and make only one route out of it. The player will look around to try and find that route, and when they do, it'll feel like they made that discovery themselves, that really they were the ones that broke free, whereas there was only really one option to begin with.
This can be shown in an example. In one level, you walk out into a city under quarantine by some sort of authority. There will be blockades everywhere but a certain area you can explore to look around the level and see beyond the blockades. Everything out of sight, does not exist in the game, the developers haven't made it. So even if you found a way to get past the barricades, you could only go as far as you can see from the blockade, before turning a corner and falling into a non-existant portion of the map. But because the player can see beyond, the world feels open. Once the player locates a way out, in this case an alley, they will believe they found this exit themselves, whereas it was the only real way through. Even when the player knows full well that the game is linear, they'll still get the feeling that it's open ended.
The Aspects
As mentioned above, You can have completely linear games that feel open ended. They feel like you're making an effect, but they just have the one path. In these games the only thing you as the player can change, is how the character gets through areas. And this has no further effect on the story, except maybe you have less health further up.
Some games are based around a multiple choice system. Where the player can go down a previously set number of paths. This is when various things happen in which the player is given a series of choices they can make. Either by simply clicking on the choice or doing something that changes things in the story. However, despite the fact your choices change the ending, there are still a set number of endings.
In every choice-based game, there are various paths you can take, following a particular story based around your decisions. But whatever happens, this story has been planned out before, your choices are already pre-thought out. There is still quite a bit of limitation in these games, they just have multiple similar stories to tell. So why is this method of choice based game so effective?
There are certain games created, that are completely based on the players choices, but are not classed as a choice-based game. Usually because the base of the game has more aspects than solely choices. Certain games, such as Minecraft, Project Zomboid and Neo Scavenger, all based around what the player chooses to do, but in very different ways.
In Practice
Minecraft, is a very distinctive game, and is played by people all over the world. Mainly because the player can do almost anything they want to do in the game. They make their own story! With their own rules. It's less of a multiple choice game, and more of an infinite choice game. Usually, in a multiple choice game, you'll be given various moments in the game where you have to choose what you want to do in a situation. In games like Minecraft, this is practically all the time. There are usually multiple exits from areas, everything is randomly generated in the world and therefore a different story is told every time. The player can make choices, such as whether they want to go out mining, or whether they want to build a castle, a block of flats, or just a hole in the ground. The player makes their own story, and has a goal of their own, set by themselves.
Project Zomboid is quite different in its mechanics. But it still keeps the same basic idea. Complete freedom to do as you wish. However the difference in this case, is you have one main goal. Survive the apocalypse, by any means necessary. The game world does have a story, and you can hear this through radio broadcasts or television. The only thing you will change with your choices, is your characters fate. And also the environment. In the future, things may get more interesting with the introduction of NPCs. Once these non-playable characters are in the game, you will be able to make dialogue choices that affect their opinion of you in a group. Say you killed someone in the group in front of someone, then convinced them not to talk, that person may not trust you as much, and may be scared of you for the duration of the game. And, anyone else who was friends with the person you'd killed, may also get suspicious of you, and if they were to discover what you did, their opinion of you would lower. Basic actions and choices will have you make your own story, and the endings could be infinite, with you being able to die at any point and end the story.
Neo Scavenger is quite different in its approach. It's much more reminiscent of text based games than the other two. Still using pictures and basic graphics, but much more simple. It has a story, but it leaves it up to the player to decide how the story is told, and what happens to you as you make your way through this world. The player can die and restart the game at any time, ending the story at one point along the way, and quite a bit of it is up to luck, since the whole world is randomly generated. The player can already interact with basic NPCs along the way, asking them for information before they move on and piecing together the story through multiple game sessions. All the while trying to survive. The player can make many choices in this game, mainly based on actions rather than dialogue, like the choice to let someone live or try to take that from them. To keep heading in one direction, or double back for more water, taking more time to get where they need to go. Whatever choices the player makes, the story is still there, but the player can wander around in the story as much as they like, and try changing aspects about it.
Personal Experience
In the past I've played quite a few choice-based games, games like Mass Effect, Fallout 3, The Stanley Parable, The Walking Dead, all of which I've felt like I was free to do as I wished. In Mass Effect I felt like I was part of this universe and my decisions had affected the world around me, any mistakes were my fault, and many characters I was talking to would only react in a certain way because of my past actions, as well as the fact that some had even died after my choices were made.
Fallout 3 was a little different in its choices, certain quests would give you terms, in one quest I was even asked to blow up a town. I refused, and told the governor of the town what this man was planning. He came to arrest him, and the man almost killed the governor, so I shot him. In this game, choices are not made in cutscenes unless they are dialogue choices, so I had to act fast. In Mass effect, you make the choice to shoot someone, and your character does it for you in a cutscene. In Fallout, you would actually have to make the decision there and then with no prompt other than what was happening on your screen.
In The Walking Dead game, almost the entire thing is a cutscene, with a few interactive bits here and there. But the way you interact mostly in this game is through dialogue choices, choosing what to say to other characters, or clicking on an action to perform. This still feels like you're involved in the story, though its style means it is much easier for the developers to tell the story with your choices the way they want to tell it.
The thing is with choice-based games, is that they can be played in a manner of different ways. The player can play through the game, making choices as they go, or they can replay sections of the game until they get their desired outcome, making the story the best possible version of it. I personally play these games with the choices I made first. If my choice results in someones death immediately afterwards, I'll stick with it, keeping the choice. Whereas another person may choose to reload a save and make that choice again, only differently for a new outcome. Some people stick with their choices through one session, then replay the game again making completely different choices until they find what every outcome would be. Even the way you choose to play the game is a choice. Implementation
So, how will I add choice into my Text-based "Video" game? First off, the player will be able to type in commands on what they want to do. I will provide an environment and objects, the player can do whatever they like with them. Choice is a given in the game I plan to make. They will be able to go anywhere they like, pick up anything their character can manage, eat and drink what they like, open and close doors; it's really up to them. Once I have a location to film along with a story, I can start building this around all the choices the player has, and add in a few more commands to progress the story, such as activating story items etc.
Multiple-Choice Books Research
This section will be focusing more on how multiple choice aspects can be used outside of digital media. Books can be used, and interacted with in a very similar way to games on computers. And they have been used for this for many years. They are not the most common, but they were one of the first forms of interactive storytelling.
The concept
Many multiple choice books use the mechanic of spreading the story out among the pages, giving you the option to turn to one page to show the outcome of one choice, or another, to show the outcome of another. This means the various paths of choices are found scattered throughout the pages. The start of the story, being the first page, but multiple endings to the story on pages around the book.
One big problem with these books, is the reader will have to flick through the book looking for the next page, even when one page hasn't given you a choice. Each page has its own path it follows, and changing to another page would mean navigating around all the others with different paths.
The Reason
Originally, the only games you could play were pretty basic, tag or hopscotch etc, back before computers were invented. But people still wanted to tell a story and get the reader involved, they wanted to tell a story that the reader could live and make choices in and change the outcome. Choice-based books were made. The reader could now live in a world constructed in someone else's mind, making choices and following their own version of the story, with the main character being incredibly relatable, since it was usually you. The Aspects
So what makes a multiple-choice book into what it is? The usual formula for a multiple-choice book is the pages, are not in the right order, and this will be noticeable from the start. The first page, of course needs to be first, so the reader has somewhere to start, then at the bottom of the page it will either tell you to turn to a page number, or make a choice and turn to one of two page numbers. This is the usual formula for a multiple-choice book. They may be longer than some other books due to their branching paths, but they may also be a lot shorter, due to having to keep up with the complexity of the many different forms of story being told.
Personal Experience
In Primary School, I was once given homework to create a project on the slave trade. I decided to take things one step further, and write a book where you played as the slave, being captured and transported away. I'd been reading a lot of a Goosebumps book in which this multiple choice aspect had been shown to me, and decided to utilize it myself. I had various different choices that you could make throughout the book, meaning your capture was different depending on what choices you made. Unfortunately, most escape attempts ended in death, the only proper ending being the one in which you were captured and taken away. With every ending, I placed small pouches with laminated cards containing information about the situation you'd just found yourself in, showing their historical accuracy, and more information on the ending.
Implementation
One idea I had toyed with was putting in a multiple choice mini book into the plot as part of the story, as a small tribute to others of its kind. They may prove to be a little over complicated however with everything else I plan to do.
Web pages and Coding Research
In this section I will be exploring the process of coding together a website and a text-based game. In my project, I will be creating a text-based game, with commands that activate videos when typed in, so I must figure out, first: how to code a page to place all my work on. Second: How to code together a text-based game with commands that work. Third: How to add the code for the text-based game into the web page I've created. And fourth: How to make a video play for each command typed on the page that can also be skipped or paused if the player has seen it before.
This will mean I'll have to look up several sites that already do a similar thing to what I plan to do. Sites that are created solely for the purpose of running one game, other sites that include text-based games, sites that have videos running in them etc. And I'll also have to learn how to put one together myself to be posted on the internet after filming all the various pieces I need.
Idea Research
- Mindmap (In Progress)
-- Summary of ideas (Not Done) - Sketches (Not Done) - Storyboard (Not Done) - Command list (Not Done)
