Power & Responsibility — Day 4: Story
November 9th, 2006 by Pierre-Alexandre Garneau
Brem mentioned in yesterday’s comment that he’d like to know more about the storyline. Indeed, I haven’t talked about it much so far, so that’s my subject for today. Let’s start with the world’s story and then continue with how the story progresses in-game.
Background Story
Super-hero worlds really gain from having a reason why there are many super-heroes. It’s just plain easier to say “there’s a bunch of mutants in the world” like in the X-Men, rather than have to find a unique story for each character. That story needs to make some sense, but it can’t be realistic: no matter how much human evolves, nobody’s ever going to blast laser from their eyes. So here’s the story for this world…
It all starts in the near future, two weeks before the USA presidential elections. Terrorists have obtained the deadliest and most advanced weapon of mass destruction available: a grey-goo nanotechnological bomb. This bomb is in fast a mass of self-replicating molecular-sized robots: each robot creates replicas of itself by picking individual atoms around them, eventually transforming all matter into a shapeless mass of nano-bots. This bomb was detonated right in the middle of Washington DC.
Luckily for humanity, the Pentagon was working on a solution to this type of crisis. Their solution was a mass of reverse nano-bots that decompose the grey-goo bots and returns the original atoms in their original location. They’re able to stop the grey-goo effect, but not after it has engulfed most of Congress. Global catastrophe is averted, but the government falls into chaos as most leaders are now dead (the President escaped this fate as he was elsewhere that day). Elections were post-poned until the situation would stabilize — none have occurred in the years since.
Some nano-bots still roam free, destroying the environment they encounter, but their effect is undone rapidly by the counter-bots in the environment. The counter-bots sometimes make mistake — when they affect humans, these mistakes are often fatal. But sometimes, they rearrange the person’s body in novel ways, giving them strange powers. Our hero is such a man.
Storyline
Now, what about the storyline while playing the game? Continuing with the idea of giving control to the player, I’d like to generate the story automatically as he plays, giving a custom experience each time.
When I played pen & paper role-playing games as a game master, I rarely had a detailed story to guide players through — I was much too lazy for that. Instead, I had an overall idea of what I wanted to do, but adapted it to the actions of the player. That’s the process I’d like to emulate with this game.
The idea is to generate the story based on the current situation of the player based on story patterns. The game would look at things like whether the player is good or evil, whether he causes a lot of damage to the city or not, whether he cares about his girlfriend and so on. Based on that, pieces of story are woven together to create a mission. If the player is close to his girlfriend, the game could select the “save kidnapped girlfriend” scenario along with an appropriate villain and location.
Most short stories would be composed of 3 missions, each corresponding to an act in the typical three acts structure. Missions are generated by creating an interesting problem, but leaving the player free to find his own solution to it.
Multiple stories would be woven together, a bit like a TV show. You play the first part of the story, but then complete the final part of another one in progress and so on. Stories could involve each aspect of the game: work, love and super-hero life.
Generating the story automatically has the advantage of making it easy to automatically adapt the difficulty to the player. That way, everybody gets a fun and balanced challenge. You can also continue the story even if the player fails. He isn’t able to stop the villain from running away with his girlfriend? There’s no “Try Again” screen, the game just generates another mission where the player has the chance to save his sweetheart.
Conclusion
Admittedly, this approach is risky technically — generating stories is pretty complex, so there’s a good chance these ideas wouldn’t work in an interesting way. But hey, this project isn’t likely to be realized so I can have fun coming up with dangerous ideas from time to time!
I’ll try posting tomorrow, but it may be shorter than usual as I plan on going to the Arcadia festival in town.
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