Embed The Narrative! And the mechanics?

Embed The Narrative! 
And the mechanics I guess! 

Something I enjoy doing a lot with assets is to embed them into the narrative, again this is simple stuff but often times it goes unnoticed. If done well it pays off in the long run, though this is often limited to assets available when creating levels (in this case I don't have loads). This method of asset placement or mechanic introduction can help teach the player without being intrusive about it.

Here's an obvious example:



Now this is the most rudimentary example of embedded narrative; a dead corpse propped against a wall. First thoughts on seeing this from a players perspective are generally: "eh a dead guy" or "that's interesting" - a few other thoughts are likely related to why the corpse is there/what happened to it/can I loot this etc etc. This can be used to a heightened degree later on, and be more inconspicuous, for example - if you were to create a boss room later on with say a large scorpion boss (Cliche but bare with me!) we could add some small (Read: normal sized bug) scorpions around this corpse scuttling around, in the next room we could add a larger than usual scorpion that is hostile to the player, with several more corpses nearby, followed by a bigger still scorpion before the "big boss scorpion".

The above example is extremely common place and can be expanded to game mechanics too. Let's take our scorpion example again. The first iteration (the tiny scorpion) could be simply attacked/walked over by the player character and thus would trigger say a small acid pool to spawn under the scorpion corpse. The next iteration - the aggressive and slightly larger scorpion could incorporate the same mechanic of dropping the acid pool when it dies, but also adding in a tail attack (This would be telegraphed to the player: Tail becomes raised for 1 second before the Tail lunged forward as an example). The third iteration again incorporates the previous two mechanics, plus a new one in preparation for the boss doing all of the above and (again) one new mechanic.


Teaching without tutorials
Designer Thoughts
"This is a good method of teaching a player more about your level, NPCs, puzzles and so on as they progress through the game. It's a strong alternative to the common tutorial system that is generally intrusive and forced at the starting level of each game. I feel this method of staggering mechanics for several iterations of NPC allow for a more robust/diverse combat dynamic when "trawling through a level" so to say."

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