I mentioned at the end of the introduction that the basic loop for a scene is organizing the stage and then handing it to the game's system to show you the drama that occurs. I'm gonna explain better what that means concretly, but before, I'm gonna talk a bit about how I choose to represent the whole drama part.
usually narratives in games tend to follow the form of traditional narratives in either text or graphics, usually cinematography, even when they're procedural and interactive. this usually means it is made up of blocks of narrative that internally follow a conventional narrative structure. procedurality and interactivity usually come in to determine what chunk (cutscenes, paragraphs, etc) is chosen to be shown to the player and what happens inside of it. that's the case of QBNs.
when a narrative system is more simulationist and involves agents making more granular actions moved by an artificial intelligence is likely that the game either uses a curating algorithm to find interesting narrative patterns or that it leaves it to the player to perceive and assemble these stories in a turmoil of singular actions.
meanwhile, it's common to talk about the difficulty of telling stories in games in contraposition to combat mechanics, but starting from the perspective of the introduction and seeing combat in games as the narrative of the combat, in no way does this combat look like either combat in real life or other narrative forms.
instead of worrying about insuring traditional narrative blocks about combat, these systems tend to involve singular discrete actions, that alter the world state in some way, decreasing hp or giving buffs, address some target and can maybe combo with some other action or an element of the world. the narrative arc of combat in games is formed by the sequence of actions like these, the way one influenced others or led to the choice of using others and the effect these actions had on the world, something just in terms of reducing the hp of enemies.
I wanted to test a narrative system for this project where narrative actions formed a pararel to traditional combat actions so I could take as much as possible from the structure of auto-battler games into a narrative game. on account of that, a narrative scene will be made up of a series of discrete actions, adressed from a character or a small group to another, altering some value in the world.
how I eventually decided to test that: every scene has two decks of different types of narrative events, a deck of "expressive acts" and a deck of "narrative acts". both types of act still conform to the principle of simple actions between two sides of a small amount of characters. each "turn" of the game, one act of one of these decks will be chosen to be displayed to the player and occur, like a card being drawn.
expressive acts have this name because they simply express the current state of the world, without changing it. in the test scene I'm composing, where a character discusses with another, these acts are things like character A yells at character B, character B tries to calm character C, character A stops to consider character B's comments. these actions reflect the relationship a character has with another and the roles they acquired inside the scene template (more on this later), but don't change that.
however, each expressive act has tags that represent the type of event that is happening there. with each expressive act, these tags will sensibilize narrative acts associated with them, increasing the chance that one of these acts will be chosen to be executed by the scene in lieu of an expressive act. for example, expressive acts with the tag "conflict", like a character yelling at another, will increase the chance that a narrative act like "character A hits character B" happens.
narrative acts have this name for changing the state of the world, they're the engine that makes the narrative move fowards. in the above example, a narrative act where a character hits another during a discussion can lead to a worsening of their relation and will make the scene transition to a brawl.
the idea here is that watching a scene means observing this series of simple (and admittedly repetitive) expressive acts increasing continuously the chance that a narrative act will go off and change the state of the world in some significant way, which would be like a mini climax in the scene. not that different from watching a battle in tft, where the characters execute their repetitive attacks until someone triggers a skill or a character gets defeated. at least, that's the idea.
this is the automatic elapsing of a scene, but we still have to talk about the interactive part, which is where the narrative roles enter. each scene template, like the discussion one I'm testing, have various roles that can be occupied by characters that get inserted into the scene. some of the roles are mandatory and some optional. the discussion scene for example, have necessarily two sides that are arguing, but optionally can also have mediators, supporters of a single side of the argument, authorities trying to end the conflict, etc.
each role has certain pre-requisites that have to be fulfilled for a character to be assigned it. the two sides of the argument need to have a low opinion of each other, mediators need a good opinion of both sides, etc. multiples characters can fill the same role in a scene.
the most basic form of interaction the player will have, at least initially, is the hability to insert characters into a scene. these characters will be assigned some role and, on account of that, certain expressive acts and consequentially certain narrative acts will trigger during the scene.
an argument where there's only two sides in conflict will almost only be made of agressive and conflictuous acts and will tend towards more violent endings. this same scene with lots of characters occupying the role of mediator will have more acts of conciliation, having more chances of peaceful endings.
the player changes the characters available in the scene, this leads to different roles being fulfilled, narrative acts related to these roles will be available at the deck and this will change the probability that certain events will happen during the scene.
a form of interaction I want to explore later is the possibility to play tarot cards that would influence the scene towards the themes it represents, in the form of the tags I mentioned before, increasing the probability of certain narrative acts to happen.
the world itself would be represented by entities (like characters, groups, maybe places and special items?) with certain relationships between them, but unlike more simulationist approaches, none of these entities would act on their own accord. the world is a priori static, what would lead it to change, its narrative engine, would be the narrative acts of the scenes.
a narrative act only goes off if its model was composed by the author, so nothing happens if it wasn't foreseen by them, but can only be available on the narrative deck of a scene if its roles can be fulfilled by their characters, characters that can be inserted or removed by the player before the scene begins. the idea is that the narrative be strongly authored, but easily manipulated by the player.
this foundation in the idea of roles and archetypes is the reason why I chose a theatrical name for the project. the idea is that the player interacts with the story by combining a bunch of elements together in the stage of a scene, like characters and tarot cards, to then watch the drama that unfolds through the series of acts that follow each other because the elements of the setup allow for these acts to happen.
the sequence of acts being drawn from the deck can't be very interesting as a traditional narrative, but I want to see if it can be interesting as the narrative of events that led to the triggering of the narrative acts and the changes made on the world state, in the same way tft is a fun game to watch.
now some screenshots of the current state of the game. you can at least get an ideia of the way I'm choosing to organize the screen during a scene, borrowing the structure of visual novels. the graphics came from Tactics Ogre and the names from Final Fantasy, but I don't know the characters.
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