What the community and third parties are building in StoryNexus
Play-Testing: Curio City
@_The_Bard_
Posts: 14
10/10/2012
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Howdy all,
The world is: http://curio.storynexus.com
The story revolves around a character who wakes up one night in the middle of the street and follows his (I am writing from a 1st person, present tense, male character point of view) journey of self discovery. This journey includes befriending a priest who helps the character discover his identity, a love interest of a girl he meets in a bar, some exciting adventures based around item hunting and character building through working at an office.
Only the very early stages are implemented to test out the game mechanics but the overarching story is fully story-boarded and just needs fleshing out; so feedback, comments, suggestions etc at this early stage will help me build the foundations correctly going forwards. Thanks in advance and...
Welcome to Curio City...
NOTE: I'll be editing this post as I add new stuff to the story...
12 Oct - Fixed a bunch of typos.
Coming very soon...
A rewrite of major content to make the story clearer and better. Hopefully.
edited by @_The_Bard_ on 10/13/2012
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http://curio.storynexus.com
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Hierophant
Posts: 782
10/13/2012
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Some stylistic feedback (I think @Little The wrapped up the mechanical stuff just fine -- except that I think you should double-space your paragraphs to improve readability):
...after what felt like an eternity. I am lying horizontal with a piece of cloth on my body. No shoes though.
I proceed to climb to a vertical position but rise too quickly causing the blood to rush to my head. I'm now seeing stars as well as the street I'm standing in.
The more I play Story Nexus games, the more I think that every single game needs to do three things right up front:
- Establish who your character is. (A specific person? A general avatar? A single-celled organism?)
- Orient the reader's narrative camera -- that is, establish what the reader is looking when they start playing.
- Let the reader know how much they're supposed to understand about the world. This can range from "you're a normal person on earth in Baltimore" to "you're on Mars and the year is 2029" or "this is a prose poem, you don't have a character at all."
The games I think are successful so far -- the ones I've enjoyed playing -- do all three of those things ASAP. (I think Zero Summer does all three. So do Samsara and Fallen London.)
Why are those three things important? Because they tell the player what to expect. Priming -- getting the audience in the right head-space -- is a huge part of narrative design! You don't have to give away every secret in the game, but players need to know who they are, what they're looking at, and why it matters. Otherwise their job is Figure Out What I'm Playing instead of Enjoy The Game.
The text I quoted above is from the first storylet in Curio City. I don't think it does a very good job with any of the three things I think SN games need to do. Specifically:
- It doesn't establish the player's character. It does tell the player that Curio City is going to be told in the first person -- but it gives no details about who that person is. Nor do any of the subsequent storylets.
- It does orient the reader's camera, but it doesn't have enough description to really explain what that camera is pointed at.
- It doesn't tell the reader anything about the world. Is the narrator in Seattle, 2012? Is he on Jupiter? This gets clearer as the game goes on, but not much clearer and not fast enough.
I would strongly suggest that you go back through the first part of Curio City and work in a lot more descriptive text. It doesn't have to be long-winded or purple or pointilistic. It does need to give your players a better idea what's going on, and where, and why they care.
As far as how to do that: there was this really excellent piece in the Atlantic recently about how good writing is about objects, not ideas. What I tell myself and my staff is that every single piece of writing in Zero Summer needs to do two things: it needs to contain at least one physical description of what's around the player, and it needs to evoke the setting somehow. I think you might benefit from trying to do the same.
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Head Writer
Zero Summer
zerosummer@outlook.com
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