I've already talked in this blog before about interactive and procedural narrative, it's a subject I love and already tried to explore a few times. this project is the most recent attempt and I make no promises if it's gonna be finished, but I'm more confident than previous times.
a bit about how I situate this project on the realm of interactive narrative. I prefer technics that give more authoral control to the algorithm and I eventually encountered and fell in love with the storylet structure, or QBN (quality based narrative) conceptualized and popularised by Failbetter Games, who made Fallen London. however, I like that procedurality opens up the row of options that can be given to the player, because the procedural system can adapt and better react to the impact caused by the player, and even expand it through its ramifications and consequences.
the synthesis that I sought in previous projects was to think, in abstract, of a narrative deck of templates instead of full completed stories. I think the best procedural technic for this are expansion grammars, that allow for the desired degree of authoral control, but when well planned can be very open ended.
something that attracts me in the QBN structure and the procedural method of grammars is that both involve the constant choice of self contained chunks. lines of texts or storylets. they're methods for composing chunks of content (sorry for using this awful word) and presenting it to the player. I say this in opposition to more simulationist methods. I think this makes it easier for the designer of the system to qualify the choice of these chunks, through tags for instance. I find it very useful that a grammar can return to me the tags that make up the structure that it just generated and that QBN can use these attributes or qualities to decide what it's possible for the character to do.
this preamble tried to contextualize a bit my taste for narrative systems, now I'm gonna talk more specifically what influenced the harlequin project.
I took a liking recently for idle-game aspects in games, largelly because of tft. I like the idea of watching my own game and the back and forth relationship the player stablishes with the system. I also find it very useful a structure that normalizes that the player doesn't have exclusive agency even over what is technicaly their own pieces.
this institutes an interesting form of gameplay where the system can change and reorient the state of the world, so the player takes their turn trying to organize it like they want, or getting close, and where the player handles something to the game (like characters deployed on the field in tft) to then see what the game does with it. I find this form of game much more interesting than games that are a challenge to be conquered or solved, but also "creative" games that are overtly open, sometimes barely acknowledging what you're doing.
this can become a game where you assemble your little lego castle and the game knocks it down for you to put it up again. It seems dwarf fortress is a lot like that and it trully doesn't interest me much. but there's an interesting potentiality when you don't have the chance to assemble the same castle as before. it's more about the game disorienting you, making you reorient yourself after that, either finding a new destiny or a new path.
a possible solution is simply not giving the player their own pieces. allowing them to impact the state of the world, just as the system can do, but without anything being a representation of them in the world or their possession on it. like a narrative game where the player influences the story without having any characters for themselves. I've seen projects like, but never played any of them.
the player not having exclusive agency over a character makes it less frustrating when the directly impacts the directions of things, but precisely because the player gets less attached, which is also not good. I go back to tft, because I think its structure was really fun in this respect and wasn't frustrating.
tft is a combat game, you can't say it has much narrative in the traditional sense, but it has the narrative (in the sense of a series of events leading into each other) of the combat, culminating in the conclusion of who won the match. when I used to play, I always felt like I was assembling a little stage, with the fighters as actors, to then see the drama that unfolds with the combination of the arrangement I made in conflict with the one the opponent made. that's why I always saw a great narrative potential there, you organize the stage, the setup of the scene, the game takes control from you and shows you the drama that unfolds.
an aspect of the structure of the game that made me way less frustrated with this lack of control is that the moment of your agency and the moment of the game's agency are well demarcated. you have full control of your characters at a given moment and on a certain aspect. you choose your characters, assemble your group and position them in the field. following that the system takes control and the characters act according to their AI. but even if there isn't constant direct control over the characters, there's a clear moment where they're yours to play and organize freely inside the confines of that phase.
I think this clear separation between the round you manipulate your little dolls, without the AI's intervention, and the round it takes control of the drama without your interference both gives you a confortable moment of full control and grants you an intense moment of drama when you lay back and see the conclusion of your actions without interfering.
I'm gonna leave talking about project harlequin specifically for later, since this preamble already got pretty big. to summarise all of this, I started developing the game having the QBN structure and expansion grammars as methods and thinking about the game's basic dynamic as a drama where you organize the stage and the system takes control to show you the scene that happens because of it.
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