Invisible quality ?

StoryNexus
1

Hi,

I would like to organize the flow of possible cards for the player based on a given implicit property of the player, but without being visible by the player.

Simple example :
The player is exploring a crypt. After a certain event, the player discovers a hidden passage. The hidden passage leads to a new funeral room that the user can explore. This is very easily done. One card has the action of discovering the hidden passage and set the the quality “discover hidden passage” to 1. The card related to the funeral room is available to the user only if it has the quality “discover hidden passage” equal to 1.

Is it possible to make the quality invisible to the user ? I don’t want the user to have to deal with such quality. For him, at one point he was not aware of a hidden passage, after the discovery, he is aware of it and can enter. Using a quality for that is a technical detail and he should not have to know about the quality.
Is it possible to do without multiplying the amount of quality by a lot ? Many of my stories are locked by such boolean value and it requires a lot of them for the entire world. Is it the correct way to do it ?

Thanks,
Rominet

2

Instead of ‘discover a hidden passage 1’, have you considered naming the passages, and having progress qualities instead? (e.g Passing through a hidden passage:A dark corridor, ‘A slimy corridor’, ‘A snake pit’, in sight of the entrance,half-way through) - by having some passages being filled with menaces that can trigger, such as snakes or a lethal trap etc., this wouldn’t be advantageous all the time, and the player could refer to it as something exciting rather than something granted to give tons of treasure. You don’t need to make all the content passage-unique, though.
I think it could add a lot to the player experience, but you might already have done that in some way or another?

The action to enter the throne room could be triggered with ‘Passing through a hidden passage: Within steps of the exit’ or something, alongside the passage-quality, other options would be hidden.

Edit: I suppose you could have a storylet for discovering a hidden passage - which doesn’t describe the passage very well (e.g. A dampness on the stones or shards of diamonds in the rocks(which could very well for the snake cave)), and on entering being unable to return the way you came (in some passages, at least)?
edited by Aximillio on 12/18/2012

3

Remember qualities don’t show and disappear if they are zero. So the hidden passage quality won’t show until the player gets it.

Another strategy is to name qualities vaguely such as “You feel increasing heat!” as the player approaches the lava chamber, or “Discoveries” to control a series of available secrets without revealing their exact nature in the quality name.

4

Thanks for the suggestions.

My problem is not for when the quality is 0 (indeed, it is not shown), but is more once it is discovered. I want to keep the information than the passage was discovered. If the player wants to go back to this place, it will be already available, and he doesn’t have to find it again.

Maybe I should describe a bit more the gameplay of the game. The game is based on a main quality which is the location. Each value correspond to a certain location. Each location gives access to different cards/stories. One of the card is always to be able to move to a different location. One of these locations, a church, will have a crypt and then, this hidden passage. Searching within the crypt should trigger the opening of the passage, which allows access to the card corresponding to what is behind this passage. All this is fine and working. The state of the player has changed (he has the knowledge of this passage), which is well represented by this quality. But the player will have a lots of these small knowledges about the world, and it leads to having a multitude of qualities, that are all independent. It really clutters the quality panel in the UI. I will have dozen of such small discoveries that are useful only in very specific situation (when the player is at a specific location).

5

I’m afraid this is just a property of the platform, which FBG have made very clear is a design choice that they won’t be changing. (As it happens, I think it’s a good choice - because it means, as a player, you can review the qualities and spot things you might have forgotten about. I know not everyone agrees. Point is though, it’s a decision rather than a missing feature.)

You might be able to reduce the number of qualities by drawing a tree of possible routes through the game. For example, if opening the secret passage is a prerequisite to opening a coffin, which later and in a completely different part of the game is a prerequisite to meeting a ghost and being given a key, then all of these things could be recorded by a single quality.

Or, you might consider using Things rather than Statuses. One benefit of Things is that you can group them into “containers”, to keep related items together. When I did that in my world, it made a step change to how polished the whole thing seemed.

And of course, you can be creative with names. “Treading Hidden Pathways” sounds much more portentous than “Knowing There’s A Secret Door”, doesn’t it?

Cheers
Richard

6

[color=#009900]The other thing about a whole bunch of Boolean qualities is there’s just a pain in the arse to keep track of when building the game! One alternative possibility would be to have one, or a few, ‘Knowledge of Secret Ways’ qualities. As it rises, you’d have access to more secret passages which unlock at different levels of Knowledge. This would work well if the player is reading maps or talking to NPCs to learn about secret ways, but could have weird effects if, e.g., you search the chapel and find out about a secret passage in the gazebo. You could, of course, combine the two approaches, and have some Boolean qualities for really key access routes.[/color]
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[color=rgb(0, 153, 0)]This level of [/color][color=rgb(0, 153, 0)]gentle[/color][color=rgb(0, 153, 0)] [/color][color=rgb(0, 153, 0)]abstraction was what SN was built to support best - but it may not be to your taste, of course.[/color]
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[color=#009900]One irritation here is that you can only lock storylets, not branches, by presence in an area. This is more a missing feature than a design intention, but isn’t very high priority I’m afraid.[/color]

7

Ooh, I can’t agree with you there, Alexis. (One trusts this isn’t a faux pas. I wouldn’t want to make a tiger angry.)

A Boolean quality which controls a single storylet - or a small group of them - is the simplest thing in the world to keep track of, from the creator’s point of view. That’s why so many people want to use them. Admittedly, for something Fallen London sized you’d end up with hundreds of the things, but you only ever have to think about one at a time.

I think you’re over-generalising from a related case, where you have character-driven qualities which potentially affect everything everywhere. (The Neutral Good Russian Werewolf thing I saw you refer to in a blog somewhere.)

But that is perfectly fair enough, of course.

8

Ooh, I can’t agree with you there, Alexis. […] A Boolean quality which controls a single storylet - or a small group of them - is the simplest thing in the world to keep track of, from the creator’s point of view […]
I think you’re over-generalising from a related case, where you have character-driven qualities which potentially affect everything everywhere. (The Neutral Good Russian Werewolf thing I saw you refer to in a blog somewhere.)[/quote]

[color=rgb(0, 153, 0)]No angry tigers: you’re right, I wasn’t clear. A few simple Boolean switches are fine, appropriate and effective, but I am making a stronger version of the case than just talking about extremes. If a creator has, say, a dozen Boolean qualities [/color][color=rgb(0, 153, 0)]all related to the same piece of fiction or gameplay [/color][color=rgb(0, 153, 0)], it might be time to rethink the design. Is it really necessary to track every one of these separately? Isn’t there some way to apply parsimonious creative tension by combining some of them into the same chunk? Would you gain some benefit from making them scales rather than on-off switches? Do you want to condemn yourself to swearing at the quality dropdown as you try to pick out exactly the one you want, fifty times? How likely is it you’ll end up applying the wrong one to the wrong event? [/color]
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[/color][color=#009900]Sometimes, yes. If you were remaking Ten Little Indians in StoryNexus, you’d just need ten dead or alive Boolean qualities (well… maybe you could extend them to health stats, but you’d still need ten separate ones). And of course i[/color][color=rgb(0, 153, 0)]f you have a dozen Boolean qualities representing a dozen completely different things in a complex world, you probably need them, and it’s a straightforward approach.[/color]
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[/color][color=rgb(0, 153, 0)]I’m always reluctant to talk about the ‘right’ way of doing things in StoryNexus. The inventor of the hammer didn’t know the ‘right’ way to build a church organ (I’m assuming a church organ has nails in), and I keep seeing people using SN in smart ways I didn’t expect. But minimising the number of qualities is, generally speaking, a Good Thing. A very large number of qualities is the SN equivalent of spaghetti code.[/color]
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[/color][color=rgb(0, 153, 0)]…but that’s still only a general principle. If rominet is building a game in which precise geography and granularity of secret passage access is key, then a dozen different boolean ‘found secret passage’ qualities may, still, be the right way to go.[/color]
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[color=rgb(0, 153, 0)]EDIT: added key ‘only’[/color]
edited by Alexis on 12/19/2012

9

[color=#009900]I wrote that and then added three new kinds of diamond to Fallen London. Just in case anyone ever accuses me of consistency.[/color]

10

I’ve always thought the point of rules was to make you think before you break them. :)

11

I believe the main reason for such request is that I am trying to use StoryNexus for what it was not really meant to. Rather than presenting a story, I want to present a world, and let the player explore it. It leads to all these independent elements.

I tried Morton’s advices. I linked many pieces of somewhat independent elements into one story line, that I called quest. So, now, I know that the player has knowledge about the passage because he has already finished the part X of quest Y. This is good because it helps me to create more refined stories. This is bad because it fixes the order of many things (within the quest) and it leads to the player having the impression to follow a story on rails (first go to the mountain, then go to the churhc, find the passage, go to the castle, etc).

I haven’t tried the idea of ordering all these pieces of knowledges as item, I’ll try that. But that sounds like a work around, rather than a proper solution. Any plan of adding the same kind of ordering feature for qualities ? :)

12

My own two cents on this are that you shouldn’t ever have to make qualities invisible. After all, it’d be nice to allow the player to see what all passages they’ve uncovered! However, you can most definitely reduce the number of qualities by making some of them not boolean. For example, with the example given of a church, which has a hidden crypt, which itself has a hidden passage, you could have a quality that, when at 1 indicates the player has found the crypt, and when at 2 indicates that they have found the hidden passage. Since the hidden passage is IN the crypt, it goes to show that the player would need to have found one to find the other.

13

I’d welcome an invisible quality. If the story is investigating a mystery, I’d quite like a Poking Around In The Right Places quality, which when it gets to a certain level triggers the bad guys to do things. However I wouldn’t want an explicit tip off to the player that they had just found something very significant, rather implying some significance through narrative. More of a sandbox style of adventure than linear narrative at least to begin with. I guess it is just a personal preference. I don’t have a glass walled clock in my home - I just want to know what the time is rather than watch the gears go around.

Regards,

  Tim
14

Unless and until you get your wish, you could always kludge it by using obscure and/or whimsical QLDs to conceal the exact purpose of the quality. There is precedent for this (Airs of Fallen London, I am looking at you).

Having said that, the Airs of Fallen London irritate me intensely. It’s personal preference, as you say. Pleasingly for your metaphor, I own and love a glass-backed pocket-watch.

Cheers
Richard

15

@Martin and other invisible quality supporters: you’re really underestimating the bug testing load. It’s hard enough to manage a medium-sized, relatively-uncomplicated system with everything visible. If you start making things invisible, things can and will break – in a way that’s challenging-to-impossible to diagnose.