Resources for Testing Game Story Ideas

I will soon be trying out simple nonlinear narrative ideas for my thesis research, and wanted to find (freely available) tools that will make doing so much easier.  Here are a few, some of which are great for beginners and non-programmers.  (Know of any other great tools? Let me know in the comments!)

inklewriter

 
If you want to create branching stories quickly and easily, this free graphical tool might just be for you.  It's not likely to be useful for me without access to its source code, but non-programmers should have some fun with it.

Ren'Py

This is how Ren'Py describes itself:

Ren'Py is a visual novel engine that helps you use words, images, and sounds to tell stories with the computer. These can be both visual novels and life simulation games. The easy to learn script language allows you to efficiently write large visual novels, while its Python scripting is enough for complex simulation games.

I like that beginners can use its simple scripting language to create interesting stories, and that I will be able to use Python to make more sophisticated games.  This is probably the first tool I'm going to download and try since it should be really fast to get going on the simplest of ideas.

Fabula

As per the Fabula website:

Fabula is an Open Source Python Game Engine suitable for adventure, role-playing and strategy games and digital interactive storytelling.  Fabula can be used as a library to develop your own games. As an alternative, you can use the Pygame-based graphical editor and the default game engine that come with fabula.

With this tool, you get into programmer's territory, but still get a lot for free.  I like that the engine was designed with storytelling in mind, and that like Ren'Py it uses Python, which should make it fairly easy to work with. I will likely give this one a try early on as well.

Orx

According to the Orx project site:

Orx is an open source, portable, lightweight, plugin-based, data-driven and extremely easy to use 2D-oriented game engine. It has been created to allow fast creation of games and prototypes.

The reason I include this project is because I think 2D is the way to go to test story ideas, and such an engine would make creating a 2D game much easier.  If the other tools aren't flexible enough to customize things as much as desired, then this might be the way to go (assuming you understand C/C++ programming).  I probably won't use this one right away since I don't need the power, but I have a feeling it could come in handy later on.

Indie Game: The Movie

I am very grateful that I will (hopefully) be lucky enough to see my vision for my Gram's House game developed professionally with research grants.  After watching Indie Game: The Movie, this sentiment has only increased.  Though the documentary only presents one experience of independent game production, it's not an experience I particularly want to have.

I thought that this documentary was really well done.  The filmmakers did a great job of finding a good story with tension and drama in the development process.  I felt such relief when good things finally happened to each of them.

The elation experienced particularly by the Super Meat Boy creators got me thinking: what happens to those who spend a few hellish years trying to finish their masterpiece, but end up with little to show for it? I wonder how often the risks pay off? I'm sure not everyone drops everything to work on their game, and even those that do probably don't always forego any sort of life balance to do it.  But I would not want to see anyone experience risking everything and losing.

Of course, great success doesn't always bring happiness.  Braid's creator was shown to be fairly (even deeply) disappointed even after his game broke indie records.  People loved his game, but they didn't get it.  The reviews focused on superficial mechanical elements, but not the deeper meaning.

Which brings me to the issue of games as art.  After listening to all the game creators talk about how much their games reflect themselves, how the games express what they think and feel, I don't know how how anyone could say that games can't be art.  If you aren't yet convinced yourself, watch the movie and listen for those moments.

Overall, I definitely recommend this movie, and hope more like it will be made to show a variety of indie game creation experiences.

Two Interesting Games With a Message

I found a couple of interesting games after reading Kotaku's recent article The Complicated Truth Behind Games That Want to Change the World.  One has more gameplay time than the other, but both can be experienced in a short period of time, making them worth a quick look.

Sweatshop

The first game is called Sweatshop.  It is essentially a tower defence-style game where you place workers instead of towers to create items of knock-off clothing instead of kill enemies.  You start with a child worker that costs less than others.  As you move up through the levels, you get different types of pricier but quicker workers to place, such as a shirt maker or a hat maker.  You need to place them around the conveyor belt strategically so that they are able to finish creating and packaging each item before it reaches the end.

The thing that intrigued me about this game was whether it used procedural rhetoric to make its point.  From the Kotaku article:

The game aims to educate players on workplace conditions around the world. "I think its strength comes from putting you in the role of the manager, someone who is still a guilty party but has some capacity for empathy," she [Mattie Brice, social justice activist and game critic] explained. "The game forces you to be efficient and min/max to keep profits high, and usually has you doing some unethical things to your workers. Instead of having an artificial story put on top of a detached mechanic or so, the game twists how you already interact with tower defense and uses that to create a connection to what's going on."

So it seems there is an argument for this.  To maximize profits and thus win the game, you have to be unethical and act as they really do in sweatshops.  I think designers of games for change need to pay more attention to procedural rhetoric if we want to see more good games of this type.

Unmanned

Unmanned, on the other hand, is more of a story-based game experience.  The game is presented with a split screen.  In the screenshot above, which comes from the opening sequence, the main character is shown on the left asleep, and what seems to be his dream appears on the right.  Much of the time, one side of the screen is dedicated to dialog and dialog choices.  Though you can earn medals by choosing the right dialog, this example is much less game-like than Sweatshop.

Kotaku doesn't say much about this one; just that it's "nothing short of remarkable."  The story follows a man who is apparently a soldier.  He seems to be working to stop terrorist activity.  You follow him through a typical day, where at one point he's on the cell phone talking to his wife (?) about their son, and after work he's playing war games with that son.  You get a disjointed feel for his character, and you help build it through your dialog choices.  There is much left unsaid so that you fill in the blanks, and I think that is what makes this experience so potentially powerful.

Research Snapshot for Fall 2012

Now that I'm back in school full time, it's a good time to have a look at where I am research-wise.  Here are some of the projects I'm working on and what progress I've made.  (My last snapshot was from Fall 2011, before I went on maternity leave, and has more detail about some of these projects.)

Cognitive Advantages of Augmented Reality

My work in this area was finally published with a learning spin at E-Learn.  You can check out the final abstract and paper on my website or read about it on this blog to see some possible future directions others can take.

Gram's House

Since last fall, this project has moved forward a bit.  One of our team members ran a pilot project that just wrapped up.  The study compared a slightly updated version of Gram's House that tracks player stats, and a new game created by my colleague's students.  It will be very interesting to see the data that was collected during the study.

In the meantime, we are also finding some new researchers who want to try for an NSF (or other) grant to further develop the project.  We've got a few ideas on how to make our project stand out among the many trying to do things like this with games, and I'm excited to see where we go!

Although not everything is public right now, you can track the project on my website.

Teaching and Learning Computer Science With Story

This project centred on the study we did in this past year's mini-course.  The study went well and we learned some interesting things (like the fact that story had little or not benefit over context).  However, the paper we submitted to SIGCSE was not accepted.

We are in the process of deciding what to do next, but I am leaning toward taking what we learned, doing a follow up study, and submitting to next year's conference.  I am not sure if I'd like to stick to the middle school age group or try something in an undergrad class.

Nonlinear Story in Games

This is the thread of research that will be my thesis.  In fact, my supervisor liked the ideas I had put together while on leave, so I have a good, solid direction now! In a nutshell, I want to use procedural rhetoric as a way to break apart story episodes in a reasonable way, and learning theory to dynamically arrange those pieces as well as entire episodes.

Before delving too deeply into my specific ideas, however, I'm going to finish some work I started last fall.  We're looking at nonlinear stories (that is, stories whose events are presented out of chronological order) and comparing them to nonlinear stories in games.  We are trying to see why games shy away from more sophisticated uses of nonlinear stories, which may lead to new ideas on how to do it.