gameplay and story is how you can creatively work around your limitations. For example, if you are trying to do a game about massive battles with thousands of individual units, do all of the units need to be represented in 3D, or will a 2Drepresentation work just as well? Or, perhaps you never need to have all of the units in the world at the same time; you could tell the story of such a gigantic conflict from the viewpoint of a single soldier in that battle, with between-mission updates that show the larger picture. For an example out of my own past, my ill-fated game Gunslinger tried to capture the myths and storytelling of the OldWest.
We had a technology that was perfectly suited to rendering sprawling outdoor environments in 3D, so it was a natural fit to the game. But if we had only had a 2D engine, there is
nothing to say we could not still have done a tale about the legends of the Old West in a 2D game with a god’s-eye view of the proceedings. As a game designer, it is possible to get stuck in a rut of how a game “needs to be done” and forget the potential for alternate implementations that may be a better fit for your technology.
perfectly addressed in a project with wargame-style strategic play, with the gameplay adjusted in order to best bring out the aspects of Waterloo with which the designer is
primarily concerned. Does the designer want the player to have a general’s-eye view of the game? In that case, gameplay that allows for the tracking of tactics and logistics should be used. Or does the designer want to tell the story more from the view of the soldiers who had to fight that battle? Then gameplay that would allow the player to track and manipulate her troops unit by unit would be appropriate. If conversations with non-player characters (NPCs) are an important part of communicating the story, the designer will need to design game mechanics that allow for such conversations, using typed-in sentences, branching dialog choices, or whatever will work best. The designer needs to find gameplay that will allow the player to experience the most important elements of whatever story she is trying to tell.
Of course, the technology will have to match up with the story as well, primarily in order to support the gameplay the designer decides is best suited to telling that story. If
conversations are an important part of communicating the story, the programming team will need to be able to develop a conversation system. If world exploration and discovery are a big part of telling the story, perhaps a 3D engine is best suited to the gameplay — one that allows the players to look anywhere they want with the game camera. The designer may find that specifically scripted events are important to communicating aspects of the tale;
players must be able to observe unique events that transpire at specific times in different parts of the world. In this case, the programmers will need to give the level designers the ability to implement these scenes. The technology is the medium of communication to the players, and thereby the story is directly limited by what the technology is capable of telling.
Maniac Mansion was the first of the story-centered adventure games from LucasArts to use the SCUMM system.
Good examples of story-centered or at least story-dominant game design are some of the adventure games created by Infocom and LucasArts. All of the adventure games from these companies used very standardized play mechanics and technology. The game designers worked with the company’s proprietary adventure game creation technology, either the Infocom text-adventure authoring tool or LucasArts’ SCUMM system. By the time the game designer came onto the project, her process of creation could start more naturally
with creating a story she wanted to tell. Certainly the story had to be one that was well suited to the adventure game format and that could be implemented using the existing tool set. And of course, there was a lot of game design still to do, in terms of coming up with what the player’s actions and choices would be in that specific story, what puzzles would be encountered, and so forth. Both Infocom’s and LucasArts’ tools were general purpose
enough to allow the designer to create a wide range of games, with a good amount of
variation in terms of storytelling possibilities, even though the core mechanics had to consist of a typing-centered text adventure in the case of Infocom and a point-and-click graphical adventure for LucasArts. Thus the game designers’ primary driving motivation in the game’s creation could be telling a story, with the designing of game mechanics and technology development much less of a concern. Just as film directors are limited by what they can shoot with a camera and then project on a 2D screen of a certain size at 24 frames per second, the adventure game designers at Infocom and LucasArts were limited by the mechanics of the adventure game authoring system they were using. Since the mechanics of the medium were firmly established well before both the film director and the adventure game designer began their project, they were freed up to think beyond the nuts and bolts of the audience or user’s gaming experience.