Response: Building Game Mechanics to Elevate Narrative
Sean Krankel (of Night School Studio) gave a talk at GDC about the game ‘Oxenfree’ and how the story ended up driving the mechanics. Games tend to separate narrative and mechanics, but in Oxenfree, their goal was to make Story Mechanics: mechanics that only serve to drive the story.
When Sean talked about falling in love with the narrative of ‘Oxenfree’ really quickly and before defining mechanics, I could relate with my development of my IF game ‘Unplugged’. Oxenfree was actually my favorite IF-based game that I played before starting my own development and I was incredibly impressed by the way the game and narrative were interwoven.
The creative decisions to “smooth out story interactivity” were particularly interesting to me. For exploration, they managed to keep the player in control of the game continuously while exploring areas and themes. This was something I’ve struggled with in Unplugged — how do I get the player to continue through the narrative if they have complete control? I think I may have underestimated my players and the natural course of discovery, but also Oxenfree’s writing for dialogue added communication as an ability, not a menu choice. Every time the main character talks, it’s the player’s decision — the sheer amount of text and dialogue possibilities in the game make it feel really special and unique in that the other characters fill in the communication if you choose not to talk.
Although the visual design doesn’t directly relate to my IF game because I don’t include images, even thinking about what the scene would look like in my head helped me think about making my game more immersive and real. I want my game to keep people as engaged as a visual game would, which is a challenge to balance text to describe things and a natural flow of the game. My game is probably more directly related to the deliberately paced first act of Oxenfree because of the time constraints of this assignment and the way they establish characters and the basis of the story in the beginning. I don’t have time to develop the full story I’ve developed in my head, but I can spend time establishing Luna as a character that people can relate to and through that connection I hope to push players to confront some difficult decisions and realities. This talk helped me narrow down what I am focusing on for the final project — I won’t achieve perfect polish, but if I can make my characters real to players and make them invested in their lives, I’ll be extremely happy with my game. I can always continue with my story, but players will be able to tell early on if they want to know what happens next.
