$12256 / $11500
Hi fellow OGAers,
having trouble coming up with story quests that are a bit more inventive than "find the red key card."
As always I have 8437 projects on the go. The one I'm thinking about right now is a fantasy story.
We start in a largish city in the middle of the night. The city is being invaded by a foreign army who are marching the people out of their houses to prison camps.
We see a teenage boy waiting for his friend (a girl) in the dead of night in the old park. He doesn't know for sure if she escaped like he did, but he hopes she will find him at their childhood meeting place. At last, the girl appears. They exchange stories about how they evaded the soldiers as their families were being taken by the soldiers.
Now we start the gameplay. The first mission is to escape the city.
So what makes this quest challenging? I prefer story-rich challenges, but environmental challenges like climbing could be ok.
Thoughts??
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I can't suggest any specific quests, but in my experience, when you have that kind of problem it's for a lack of theme. What's your story about? And by that I don't mean what happens in the story, but why. Why is the story so important to you that you need to tell it? What's the point of the story? I don't mean the moral. Stories don't need a moral. But the do need a point.
So what's this story of yours about? Love? Family? Broken innocence? Coming of age? War? Freedom? All these and more could easily fit the events you just described, and depending on the combination, they could make for a very different game.
Edit: come to think of it, who are your protagonists, exactly? What kind of backgrounds are they from? Are we talking a spoiled rich boy who's in love with a poor girl, whom his parents were trying to keep him away from, and now they can be together... except he's in shock after the night's events, and totally out of his depth? For that matter, what flavor of fantasy are we talking about? Because that will impact the sort of things your protagonists can do, and the sort of obstacles they might encounter. Not just in the "they can totally have cool clockwork guns" sense, but also in the "this is a highly rigid Venetian State-style society, with firm ideas of everyone's rightful place".
Quests, are pretty much all "get X and take them to Y". The trick to this is to cast an illusion on what the goal is.
The end result is something like:
# Bring me 6 apples.
# Get 6 apples and take them to Granny Smith
# Slay the apple stealing goblins and bring back the 6 apples they have stolen
A more complex way which better casts the illusion is to combine multiple objects into solving a quest.
# Appease all the elders to release your friend
- this is then broken down into reading between the lines of the elders speech and people around them to find out what they really like - it is then down to you to *assign yourself an imaginary quest* for "get X"
As a suggestion for your "escape", let's say there are 3 guards/stages to get past. The story should focus on observing their habits and the talking of the people.
1. Fat guard - always eating. Solution: slip into his food prunes or add laxitive - basically something to remove the guard without triggering an "alert".
This is the closest to the standard "quest", but don't spell it out. Have some old people talk about prunes or whatever their laxitive is to help them go to the toilet. You might even need to steal it from them (environmental sub challenge).
2. Drunk/gambling guard - wanting a drink/money. Solution: money and a promise to look out for him ;)
The one for this is how do you get money? Have a system to generate money in many different ways (farm/make & sell - many things to get and sell. The other is steal)
3. Exceptional guard - environmental stealth challenge + plus item - think putting a bomb/loud noise or something with loud noise to cause distraction, as well as leaving unseen
foz, the first two wouldn't even make sense given the OP. :P The city is crawling with invaders dragging people off in the middle of the night. Anyone who escaped that fate is too busy hiding in a basement to chat about laxatives, and a drunk guard would be quickly found out by the omnipresent patrols. Generic adventure game shenanigans just don't fit.
(By the way, are we talking a medieval army dragging people off as slaves, or a more modern, 17th-18th century army pre-emptively arresting those who could mount a resistance?)
Here's one piece of advice I've seen with regard to designing puzzle chains for interactive fiction: start with the end goal -- in this case leaving the city -- and work backwards. To take foz's example, a vigilant guard is watching the little side gate the protagonists were hoping to use (since the main gate has an entire enemy army in front of it). So they have to distract the guard with a bomb, but the bomb is under lock and key. Luckily nobody thinks to watch the place in all the chaos... but they can't just break down the door, it's too solid and would attract attention anyway. A set of lockpicks would be useful... but their owner is hiding in a basement, as mentioned previously, and wants to know that someone they care about is all right before they agree to help. And so on and so forth.
Wow excellent! Lots to think about.
-The themes are coming of age and teamwork, and power corrupts on the part of the villain.
-My main characters were envisioned to be "everymen", very average. I think I'd like to stick to the premise that their backstory is unspoken and uninteresting, so that players can comfortably assume their persona.
-The city 17th-18th century in terms of culture. The tech level of the world is varied because it was once occupied by an advanced race who potentially ascended or destroyed themselves. The invaders are seizing the land and people to achieve power and "order".
You're making me think about a lot of things I hadn't considered! I suppose that "teamwork" is the most clear theme I can build gameplay around. For "power corrupts" I can make the evil forces over-estimate the protagonists. For coming of age, I suppose the quests would emphasize education, mentorship, perserverance, planning, communication etc. This is a very interesting set of potential problems. I'll have to think about how to use them.
The guards with unique flaws is an interesting idea, I will start thinking about using some of this.
More questions or thoughts are welcome, it helps me to solidify the ideas.
Glad to be of service! I can't think of any more questions for now, but from my reading on RPG design, a good way to emphasize teamwork is to make sure each party member has distinct skillsets and abilities that don't overlap, The tried and true way to achieve this is with a class-based rule system. But I have little experience designing either kind.