On Stories in Games and Kleptomaniacal Parrots

Save a few minor tweaks, I've finally completed a writing side project I've been working on for a game called The Pirate Tales. This marks my first completed story for a game. Let me rephrase that: this marks my first completed story for a completed game.

What I did: For someone who likes to dabble in nearly every aspect of the creative side of game development, I found this project to be quite rewarding. Not only did I choose the story, but I got to have a say in the character design, level design, and music. The Andresen brothers (who started the company - TwinTale Entertainment - that is developing the game) were explicit in their desire to have the story become fully integrated into gameplay - which is not something you typically see out of a puzzle game.



In order to make this work, I had to choose which combination of four objective types (clear tiles, plunder treasure, defeat enemies, collect story piece) would be included in each level based on what was happening in the story. The result in 100 levels, or "chapters," of story-infused gameplay.

Having the gameplay and art run directly through the story made my job simultaneously easier and harder: easier in that I didn't have to adjust the story to the art or changing gameplay mechanics (and because my lame one paragraph descriptions of how the characters and scenes should look turn into ridiculously good art by Nauris Krauze and Blake Lowry), but harder in that I become responsible for so much more than just the story.


However, the most trying aspect of making a game in this fashion is that it goes against my core beliefs in what makes a game. Despite being a writer, I'm a firm believer that gameplay comes first. If the story gets in the way of the gamplay experience at all, dump it like your junior high girlfriend after she got braces.

That's what made writing the story for this game so difficult. I didn't want to sacrifice the intuitive gameplay that's at the heart of the Pirate Tales in order to tell a story about a love-sick deckhand and a kleptomaniacal peg-legged parrot. I wanted to do both, dammit!

If GDC taught me anything, games are all about immersion. That's a big reason why Nintendo's been so successful with inferior technology, and why the biggest lines at GDC revolved around technology aimed a making gamers forget that they're using a controller, looking at a screen, or even playing a game at all.



I would go as far as to say most games shouldn't even have a full-fledged story. Start with a quick explanation of what's happening so the gamer can center him/herself in the world you've created, and then let the gameplay help the player tell their own story based on their experience playing the game. That's right, actually let the player play the game. Cutscenes and extensive dialogue pull the player back into reality (horrible, horrible reality) by cutting them off from their character, whether that character be a hulking, chain-gun toting, militant leviathan, or a cursor used to match like-colored bubbles.

Well, The Pirate Tales may make me kind of a hypocrite based on that rant, but another principle of making games is to do something different than previous iterations of games similar to yours. Within the puzzle genre, how many games are based around a storyline (rhetorical question, I don't want any wise guys proving me wrong by citing dozens of examples)? And hopefully this .plan lets you know that the story wasn't included merely as self-indulgence for my writer soul. That's what newsletters are for.

Speaking of my day job, GarageGames will be publishing The Pirate Tales (a TGB game) sometime in the near future.