How can I convert a linear narrative into a branching narrative?
Suppose I would like to create a text adventure game, but my imagination is not sufficient for creating a whole game. But there are fiction books (in the public domain) that are very imaginative and could potentially make a great game. The main problem is that, a standard fiction book is sequential, while in a game there are many branches. Even if I have, say, only 10 branches, I still have to write 9 of these on my own.
Is there a process that can make this easier? A structured procedure by which I can work, that can help me convert a novel to a text adventure, with minimal need to use my "rusty" imagination?
I looked around the web and found some links that apparently discuss this topic, but with few details:
- Five tips for turning a book into an interactive game - mainly discusses what should be in a book in order to be able to make a game out of it, namely: scalability, strong characters, first-person narrative, and genre. But, it does not speak about the conversion process itself.
- What the heck is interactive fiction? - a subsection titled "Converting Fiction to IF" gives some hints: pick a shorter story, think about the choices your character makes, think how to display text on the page, think outside the page. Again, few details about the process itself are given.
EDIT: thanks a lot to all the repliers for the wonderful ideas and the warm welcome!
This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/q/47021. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
1 answer
Creating a branch is the easy part
To create a branch, as you read the book take note of every choice the character makes. Map those out - what that choice leads to, what does that in turn lead to, and so on.
Then, consider what could happen if the character chose instead to do something else instead. What happens then?
Some of those alternative choices necessarily lead to a dead end. For example, if Frodo chooses not to take the Ring from Rivendell to Mordor, there's no story. So that's a choice you don't offer the player.
Other choices offer possibilities. Frodo chooses to try to go over Caradhras rather than through Moria, maybe he has a different adventure there, with different consequences. What would that adventure and those consequences be? That's for you to decide. That's where your creating work must come in.
The hard part is getting all branches to collapse back on themselves
You don't want to be creating ten different games depending on ten different choices you offer your player. You want choices to offer some variations, but ultimately you want the story to stay more or less on the same track. For the most part, all choices should lead to the same environments and the same boss fights.
The trouble with books is that very often, in order for the character to arrive at the ending, they had to pick a specific choice at each branching point. Which is not what you want.
Therefore, right from the start, you need to mark for yourself the points in the story that are non-negotiable. Continuing with the Lord of the Rings example, perhaps the destruction of the Ring is non-negotiable, but Frodo's survival, other companions' survival, the survival of locations like Minas Tirith - those would depend on players' choices. Then, whatever choices you allow the players to make, you have to guide the results of those choices in such a way that they still lead to the non-negotiable parts, perhaps by way of the negotiable ones.
An important note: if only a very specific progression of choices leads to the optimal end, while all other paths lead to extremely non-optimal ones, players will not like you. That trope is called Guide Dang You!. (The trope also encompasses other situations when you absolutely need a guide to the game.) It follows that more than one path should lead to optimal results.
However, it's possible for more than one ending to be optimal. For example, maybe Boromir ruling Gondor isn't a worse option than Aragorn ruling Gondor.
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