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Game design: thoughts on consequences
🕑 Added 2019-04-21 11:15:49 +0000 UTCPreviously I described my thoughts on choices and its time for consequences. I divide consequences into four types, regardless of choice type:
1) No consequences – the choice isn’t followed by anything, neither now, nor later. This type of consequences adds some simple life into the game, since not every choice is important and changes anything in our life.
An example of lack of consequences is the chat with Ninika before the concert, as it doesn’t lead to anything.
Interruptions are another type of lack of consequences. Those are moments where player faces choice but for some reasons does not manage to make it. Currently there are no such occasions in the game and they won’t be included any time soon. And since interruptions break daily environment, one can’t abuse them;
2) Minimal consequences – weak consequences varying in size of reward, additional lines in dialogues, changes in some insignificant events and other small changes. Such consequences are cosmetic, they colour the player’s path with paint they choose.
There are plenty of such consequences: in the Episode Three during her conversation with Ninika protagonist mentions bite, during the performance Bosy remembers previous choices, Mochi and Farthew notice a certain smell from the heroine.
Minimal consequences serve as concrete, a linking bridge between regular consequences that won’t let the player forget it’s their own path;
3) Regular consequences – main type of consequences represented by additional quests, different ways to walk through some parts of the game and other big events accompanying text and big images.
If we continue the analogue from the previous type, then we can describe regular consequences as bricks of the story. They are the moments that make unique playthrough.
The examples are “road of shame” (first part of the Episode Two) and secret location with Inzhir from Skatitsa .
I stake on this type of consequences though currently almost all of the regular consequences are interchangeable, and I am not quite OK with that;
4) Global consequences – the results of many strictly determined decisions that will affect how the game might end. At the moment I can’t give you any examples but I can say the game already has something that will lead to one of the endings.
I also want to add to these the consequences that last though the entire game. The attitude of NPCs towards the heroine and her attitude towards the world around fall under this category.
E.g., the attitude towards elves will accumulate and will be checked throughout the entire plot. Currently you can see such check in the Witch’s hut near the bookshelf with elven books.
Currently I set only two goals for myself:
1) to increase the amount of minimal consequences in a logical way while avoiding overdrawing;
2) to diversify the ways of presenting the regular consequences.
That’s it for now, next post on my vision of game design I will dedicate to a small question about answering “NO”.
