Betterblog

Being the second installment of our dry, technical and somewhat diagram-infested discussion of storytelling within the casual browser game format. Part one is here.

So, where were we? Ah yes. Storylets: the basic building block of EB. here they are:

If you’ve played the game at all, you’ve come across these. They tend to be discrete chunks of narrative that can be played in any order, as many times as you like. Storylets are unlocked and controlled by...

Qualities! Or stats, if you want to get all beardy about it. However, qualities don’t just relate to your stealth, watchfulness, persuasiveness and, um, dangerosity. Every object in EB is a quality. If you have 4 Jade, your Jade quality is 4, and there are many others besides. The really important thing here is that qualities tell storylets what to do. For example:

This is a storylet from the tomb colonies. Qualities are on the right. Very straightforward: the first branch is controlled by the quality “Connected: The Church”, the second by “Connected: Society”. As we can see, the player has enough of the Chruch quality to play the first branch, but not enough of the Society quality to play the second, which remains locked. Both branches reduce a third quality, Scandal. Qualities also control...

Questicles!

I should point out here that Questicles is very much Alexis’s word. We had to gang up on him and sit on his head until he agreed to change the in-game version to “ventures”.

AK: They all laughed at Wilbur and his brother. When they said that man could fly.

Ventures is arguably less interesting, but it does have the advantage of not sounding like an heroic warrior gonad.

What is a Questicle? Simple: a series of connected storylets controlled by a quality. Chances are you’ve played these too. In the example above, Watchful unlocks the Questicle, and the player gains a new quality called Investigating. Playing the middle storylet gradually increases this quality to 5, at which point the conclusion unlocks, and succeeding there gives you another quality, in this case Cryptic Secrets.

Questicles give the player more of a sense of continuing narrative: they have the fundamental aspects of stories: a beginning, a middle and an end. But they’re still pretty limited. We wanted more complex structures, moral branches, social stories, and so on, so we had to find new ways for storylets and qualities to interact.

Right now, there are around sixty different kinds of narrative structure in EB. Let’s look at three of them.

AK: I am very, very sorry. I take full responsibility. I'll understand if I'm never allowed near a keyboard again.

You have to remember, this was the first pass, before we understood the awesome power of cool-sounding names. Let's try again...

Right, that’s more like it. These, incidentally, are not the best names we have. The best ones we have are “Kittens Triple Fork”, “Blood Gamble” and “On The Horns of Faust’s Ham and Eggs”. Perhaps we'll get into those at a later date. For now though, let's look at THE MARK OF CAIN...

Incidentally, I discovered while putting these slides together that if you add the words “Mark of Cain” to Titian’s Cain & Abel, the result looks an awful lot like a 1970s heavy metal album cover.

See?

Anyway, what is the Mark of Cain? Essentially, it is an exile quality. The Comtessa storyline, for those who have played it, is a Mark of Cain story. Once you’ve finished it, you get a specific quality (I can’t tell you what it’s called ‘cos of teh spoilerz). All the Comtessa storylines recognise this Mark of Cain, and if you’ve got it, they won’t appear. The upshot of this is that you can only play the Comtessa storyline once, and then it’s gone forever...

...and that's all we have time for. In the next and possibly final installment, we discover the secret of the Midnight Starcase, and round off with a crock of tree-huggin' hippy stuff about symbolism and dreams.

The Echo Bazaar team was in London last week for The Story, an informal gathering of folks interested in storytelling. As it turned out, several speakers decided simply to tell stories, which was a little worrying for us, since we arrived at the Conway Hall with a big old bag of narrative theory.

Anyway, since the event some people have asked us for the slides and an abstract of the talk, so I’ll attempt a précis. If phrases like “coalescent narrative structure” make you grind your teeth, or you’d rather not see beneath the bonnet, feel free to skip this post entirely. It’s going to be long and dry. In fact, it's so long I'm going to chop it into installments. There may be spoilers. There will definitely be flowcharts.

OK, here we go. Echo Bazaar is, essentially, a research project. We wanted to find new ways to tell casual but engaging stories in a browser format. Why? Partly to amass some data for Failbetter’s next big project, Prisoner’s Honey (of which more later) and partly because that kind of thing just interests us.

AK adds: "Research project makes us sound more organised than we are. Think of it more as one of those quixotic upstream expeditions in search of the source of the Nile, the kind that returns instead with malaria and a collection of interesting spiders. I would like you, in fact, to think of these slides as a collection of preserved spiders."

So, here we have spider number one. This is a slight exaggeration, but it’s fair to say that the majority of RPG browser games run on this simple hierarchical system: do a mission, succeed, do another mission, succeed, and so on. There’s little in the way of branching narratives for the player to follow, less still in the way of flavour. The pleasure is entirely in the grind rather than the story. Now let’s take a look at a typical Echo Bazaar playing session.

Clearly, this is a bit more complicated. The difficulty for us as writers and coders lies in keeping track of all this stuff while giving the player a coherent interactive story, one where they feel they are carving their own path. The trouble is, the more options that become available, the more tangled this web becomes. Imagine a Fighting Fantasy book where the player has ten options for each chunk of story – it would be the size of the Encyclopedia Britannica.

An aside: when we added the various fail state locations – prison, the tomb colonies, madness and so on, we made an interesting discovery: people really loved it when terrible things happened to them. We had players actively trying to get themselves thrown back into New Newgate, or exiled, or dead. They hurled themselves into situations that were clearly labelled as harmful without so much as a quicksave button. A few even climbed into Mr Sack’s sack at Christmas time, despite being told that it was a terrible idea).

So anyway, we were faced with this apparently intractable problem: how do we give the player an exciting narrative, with lots of different ways to play and choices to make, without making our heads explode? So here's what we did:

It might sound facetious, but this is a fundamental point. You can’t deal with a problem if you can’t describe it. Echo Bazaar, as I said earlier, is a research project for our next project, Prisoner’s Honey, which is going to have crowdsourcing narratives and a lot of shorter, widely branching stories. That's going to be much harder, especially for contributors who haven't tangled with this kind of thing.So our first job was to come up with a pattern language for Echo Bazaar’s narrative frameworks. Here are some of the terms we came up with.

and I'll get into what those mean in part two. Tune in next time folks!

 

Hi folks. The EB team was at The Story last week, talking about the difficulties of squeezing complex narrative structures into a casual gaming framework. Big thanks to the estimable @matlock for the invitation. Quite a few EB players were there (80% of them, according to one tweet...) but for those who missed it, I've uploaded the four page pull-out version of the Unexpurgated London Gazette that we did for the newspaper-style programme. I'm quite nervy about this, because it's the first time we've shown off the full-size map of Fallen London that eventually became the travel interface. We're still hoping to get it onto the site somewhere. We'll do a blog post about the actual talk soonish, complete with sexy flowcharts. yeah, that's right. Uh huh. Flowcharts.

Here's the pullout!

 

Some of the icons in Echo Bazaar took a mere twenty minutes to create from sketch to site, while others - usually the simple ones - took many days.  The most extreme example of this is the little button that gives a tweetable postcard of your location, which took two weeks, fifteen iterations, one very unprofessional huff and a semi-serious threat to replace the existing art with a pair of luminescent green breasts.  And after all that, maybe five people clicked the goddamned thing. Anyway, I thought it might be fun (and pleasantly narcissistic) to run through the evolution of a single icon. Typically, the process starts with a brief from Alexis. In this case:

“A wild-haired lunatic with eyes and mouth agape and a blood-dripping meat-cleaver. Sticky stuff dripping from his mouth. Expensive-looking clothes in disarray, evening dress maybe. Narcotic honey is the drug of choice downstairs. This gent has overdone it.”

Which led to the following, somewhat crappy sketch (done in ArtRage on a WACOM pad):

(Can I just say, I must have drawn a thousand top hats in the last three months? Thank you, I feel better now).

Next we shift into Photoshop, tidy up the lines, cut out the crappy bits, resize and add a cutout filter. Practically everything in EB gets a cutout filter at some point, it gives images a lovely classic cartoony feel, and negates my tendency towards wavy, wishy-washy lines. Like so.

Not sure what's happened to his nose here. Ah well, we'll put it back later. More clean-up and adjustment follows, and eventually we get an outline we're happy with. One of the most useful tricks I've learned on the Echo Bazaar crash-course is the usefulness of clear silhouettes in icons. If you stick a colour overlay on your image and you can't tell what it is, chances are it will be a lousy icon. In this case, it's relatively readable:

Time to add some colour. We go back to the outline and remove all white with the magic eraser. Then we stick a new layer *beneath* the outline - this is very important for cartoony illustrations where you want to lay in big blocks of colour without losing the clarity of the black outline or going over the edges. A third layer holds shadows and highlights.

...and the nose seems to be back, which is nice. Incidentally, nailing the metal shine on that cleaver took ages. I looked at a lot of knives and daggers on Google, but eventually I just borrowed my girlfriend’s cleaver, stuck it under a desk lamp and copied.

Finally, we add a background - just a simple gradient in EB's house colours (pale beige and slightly darker beige), resize and convert to a PNG.

and that's the finished product. You can't really tell he's dribbling honey any more, to be honest. But he does look nice and mad.