from Hacker News

Standard patterns in choice-based games (2015)

by Ariarule on 1/13/25, 12:35 AM with 69 comments

• by dejobaan on 1/13/25, 2:36 AM

  This is great. I've been a game dev for about 30 years, much of which I've spent working with narrative design/writing teams. One thing I've learned to watch out for, especially among junior designers, is what the author labels the "Time Cave."

  Narrative branching, done well, is fantastic—it gives the player agency and lets them make the story their own (as it were). But when you're creating the story graph, it's easy to get lost in it and lavish care on one path at the exclusion of the others. You can easily end up with one or two long, greatly-detailed paths, and (because dev time is finine, and you need to move on to writing other parts of the game) a pile of other paths that are shorter and less interesting. If the player takes one of the shorter ones, they end up missing out on all your coolest stuff. The tools I would design for the kinds of games I created specifically made it easy to create a main story trunk with side paths (that rejoined the trunk), and more difficult to branch/loop/etc.

  Of course, that's not the only (or even the best) way to do narrative design—Disco Elysium is a masterwork because it did the branching, merching, loops, jumps, random checks, and so forth, so well!

• by tunesmith on 1/13/25, 4:45 AM

  This is fun, and holds true in the creative writing group I run. We use a website I programmed that helps us collaborate on writing branching fiction. We have a mapping utility that creates graphs like in the article, except more animated (d3.js, elkjs).

  As different authors can start their own new stories, one thing I often have to deal with is that they want to design their story to have both long path lengths (multiple chapters before an ending), and also high choice count. Those of you who know something about geometric series know that this causes problems. I often have to tell them they can't have everything they want, which causes minor drama. :)

  As a result, one of our stories basically shot its "choice budget" in the first few chapters, leading to many linear paths in the latter parts of the narratives, which is fun in its own way.

  Another of our stories has just started playing with the "gauntlet pattern" as the article describes. For this one, we decided that all chapters must be in the "same universe", just following different characters' perspectives, and are planning for certain "anchor chapters" where all characters come together for a meeting. Probably the detective questioning them as a group (it's a murder mystery).

  All of our stories are supposed to be literary, so usually in third person, sometimes first, never the second-person. So we don't tend to use choices and chapters as directions and rooms; it's all about how the plot moves. We also don't track state; they're designed to be able to be printed as books people can page through.

  Overall a super-fun project for me and a handful of other writers, it's been a consistent way to spend a few hours of fun each week.

• by quotemstr on 1/13/25, 3:44 AM

  Nier Automata is my favorite example of the relatively rare "Loop and Grow" pattern. You play through the game three times, with each iteration enriching and elaborating on the story and characters. Brilliant and weird narrative structure.

• by tantalor on 1/13/25, 3:58 PM

  Here's the story map for The Stanley Parable:

  https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fm...

  Looks like a "Time Cave"

• by hcs on 1/13/25, 10:21 PM

  I picked up some TutorText books recently, a programmed instructional series from the late 50s to 60s. At the end of every section there's a multiple choice question, one answer leads to the next section, the other to an explanation of why that answer was wrong. Pretty pure Gauntlet, I don't think there's any follow up questions on a dead end path, though I haven't mapped them all out fully. I like the idea of tailoring explanations to specifically anticipated misconceptions.

  Indexed here: https://gamebooks.org/Series/457/Show

  And some exposition from Hackaday a few years ago: https://hackaday.com/2020/08/28/a-tale-of-tutor-texts/

  It looks like I need to take a closer look, that last article says

  > often the wrong answer pages take you on a detour path to correct your thinking before rejoining the main line of the book.

  which is what I was hoping to find.

• by timonofathens on 1/14/25, 8:07 AM

  Always nice to share: the Grim Fandango Puzzle Document (pdf): http://gameshelf.jmac.org/2008/11/13/GrimPuzzleDoc_small.pdf

  Perfect example of the "Branch and Bottleneck".

  It even includes similar graphics at the start of each act.

• by orthoxerox on 1/13/25, 12:20 PM

  I don't quite understand what "floating modules" are. Is it something akin to sidequests in a CRPG or a "sandbox VN"?

  One interesting (and very complex) approach I've seen in VNs is multiple interleaved paths. Each path looks like a branch and bottleneck, but at certain points a decision taken on one path blocks or forces an outcome on another. You can linearize it into a single "branch and bottleneck" with extensive state tracking (this is how it's implemented, after all), but it's far easier to model it as multiple paths.

• by kelseyfrog on 1/13/25, 3:10 AM

  Reminds me of Disco Elysium Explorer[1]. Conversations 7, 8, 9, and 10 are great real life examples.

  1. http://134.0.119.41

• by flpm on 1/13/25, 2:15 AM

  This is very interesting, thanks for posting! Makes me think of the big choice diagrams in Detroit: Become Human. I wonder if there is any literature about this?

• by numbsafari on 1/13/25, 1:21 PM

  I loved the Lone Wolf and associated books as a kid. One of my favorite things about them was seeing glimpses of possible story paths as I flipped around the book. When I would get to the end knowing I had missed some enticing possibility in the story line, I would immediately flip back to the beginning and start over.

• by Over2Chars on 1/13/25, 5:07 AM

  gauntlet looks like GTA V's story mode pattern.

  GTA2 with it's competing gangs seem to have a "state" tracker in the form of reputation scores with the game, while having an open world map. As your reputation/state changed opportunities would become available/unavailable.

  I still think GTA 2's system is impressive.

• by rzzzt on 1/13/25, 8:29 PM

  IIRC in one of the "Fighting Fantasy" books the hero is captured and can choose if they want to spend the rest of their lives in a standing-only or a sitting-only cage - the story ends badly either way. I was a bit angry reading it as I didn't have a "save state" earmarked with the index finger.

• by chrisjj on 1/13/25, 10:27 PM

  > To avoid obliterating the effect of past choices, branch-and-bottleneck structures almost always rely on heavy use of state-tracking (if a game doesn’t do this, chances are you are dealing with a gauntlet).

  I do not see that branch-and-bottleneck relies on use of state-tracking any more than gauntlet.

• by eugenekolo on 1/13/25, 3:41 PM

  This was actually a really cool analysis. Fun to see how these things can be broken down so cleanly into graphs.

• by codazoda on 1/13/25, 2:52 AM

  This is fantastic. Does anyone have any book references that help you do writing in some of these formats.

• by andrewstuart on 1/13/25, 6:33 AM

  Nicely timed I’m making a CYOA game right now so very interested learn more.

• by yapyap on 1/13/25, 7:38 PM

  could chess be considered a choice-based game?

• by ninetyninenine on 1/13/25, 6:02 AM

  Ai can produce a new type of game where choices are dynamic and outcomes are generated by LLM agents. Fiction is an hallucination and LLMs are master hallucinators.

  Basically LLMs have to be given assets and game components that they can easily compose.