Here is my first interactive fiction game, The Jinni. You can play it right now, and it will only take a few minutes. :)

As short as it is, it took me a long while to finish it. I had to completely overhaul it at one point because I'd reached the end and realized that the story had lost its way. I had gone down side-roads and explored background in the hopes of creating a richer experience, but it was just muddled. I would estimate that story was about 90% done before I chopped it down to just the beginning few screens and started again.

I'm so happy I did that.

Not just because the story is better for it, but because I actually saw the problem. There are so many stories that I don't realize are bloated and wandering until after I put them out into the world. The Jinni has a lot of rough edges still but I'm really glad I caught myself going off the rails this time.

What's left is smaller, less ambitious, but hopefully a lot more readable.

The kick in the butt I needed to finish this story after the restart came from watching Cassie Phillip's presentation from GDC called "All Choice and No Consequence" (http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1023072/All-Choice-No-Consequence-Efficiently). It lays out where the value of branching stories is, and it gives one really helpful writing tip which (like so much advice) is obvious in hindsight--Write your story first. Go from beginning to end, and then go back and add branches and variation.

Forcing myself to the end of the story made me realize what the rest of it was actually about, and it really clarified my revisions/additions. Again, obvious stuff, but I thought it was neat that this advice is specifically applicable to game writing.

If you have any desire to tell a short, interactive story, I highly recommend Twine. It takes some figuring out, but the tool is simpler than most and you can have a simple Choose Your Own Adventure going in a hour or so.

This year, I decided to enter into the 200 Word RPG Challenge. This is an awesome contest that forces you to be succinct and creative. My entry was not selected as a finalist this year, but I'm really glad I made something for it. I've seen a lot of the other entries and there are some fantastic (and crazy) ideas in the finalists.

Lots of these games don't use dice to resolve the actions in the game. My own entry uses cards and a trick-taking mechanic similar to bridge. But some games involve burning matches, drinking water, or throwing darts. All in all, the tight constraints in both time and word count make for some cool experiments. You can find out more about the contest here: http://schirduans.com/david/200-word-rpg-challenge-2016

This is my game as submitted for the contest. I'd like to add to it and clarify some things, but maybe that's not in the spirit of the challenge and I should just leave it as is :)

Township
“Beasts, rebels, and raw nature threaten your town. What will you sacrifice to survive?”

Setup:
Place the jacks and kings of a deck in front of you. Shuffle the rest.

“What talents do you bring to your town?”

Spades - Authority, Insight, Leadership
Hearts - Compassion, Connections, Inspiration
Diamonds - Wealth, Negotiation, Wit
Clubs - Labour, Fighting, Hunting

Take your suit’s jack and king, plus 4 cards.

Play:

• Dealer draws 4 cards and decides what Threat they represent
• ​She lays them face down, announcing each suit
• She narrates the Threat. Ex. “The nightly howling drove the miller mad. He ran into the woods.”
• Describe your character’s reaction
• Place a card next to a Threat card of the same suit
• Flip and compare all the cards
• If the Threat is higher, the dealer takes the trick
• If the player wins, they choose:

1. Take the trick and describe how the character helped themselves
2. Give the trick to the town and describe how it is better off

The dealer raises the stakes each round.

Ending:
If the town has fewer tricks than the dealer, it is destroyed. No one survives.
Otherwise, narrate your character’s fate based on their tricks:

Tricks        Ending
0        Ruined/Killed
1        Shamed/Hurt
2+        Rich/Lauded

Welcome the second and final part of this look at game that focus on story while avoiding words. In the first post, I talked about Ico and Shadow of the Colossus. This time, I'm going to speak about Journey and Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons. Again, since these are story-driven games, I encourage you to go play them before reading further. I'll be talking about every part of the story with no regard for spoilers. Consider yourself warned!

For a long time, Shadow of the Colossus was at the top of my list of favorite games. It created a story of desperation in a strange land that I totally dug into. The mechanics of the game tied into the story in ways I hadn't seen before. And it did this with almost no words, proving my secret fear that writers are useless (not quite, but it's an important point).

This is going to be a multi-part look at a few games that I feel are related in terms of narrative design. We have Fumito Ueda's two acclaimed titles, Ico and Shadow of the Colossus; Journey, by thatgamecompany; and Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons by Starbreeze. As a game writer, I want to see how they made stories that I loved while using little or no real language.

Also, I am going to spoil all of these games. They are all games that try to put forward an interesting and surprising story, so if you don't want them spoiled, you should stop reading.

Readers and critics often talk about plot holes, those spots in a story where the writer didn't explain how the characters got from the crashing airship to the top of the volcano without getting hurt.

Recently, I spoke to a group of people at my work to explain how you write a game story, and it felt a lot like writing intentional plot holes into a story. I went with Little Red Riding Hood as an example. Of course, this has already been made into a game called The Path, but I haven't played it so this isn't about that one. Here is a rough transcript of my short talk:

As a writer, sometimes my job is to decide whether the made up word “dino puffle” is hyphenated, or whether Captain Rockhopper is actually a pirate or just an inveterate liar. But mostly, my job is (in collaboration with dozens of other people) to create a place for stories. Which is a little different than telling a story. Think of it as trying to trick a player into telling you a specific story.

Let's use Little Red Riding Hood as an example. You are allowed to tell the player what they are capable of, where the story takes place, what the other characters are doing; but you can't tell the story. How do you make them tell you the story of Little Red Riding Hood?

In games, the star of the story, the main character, is the player. But you don't know your main character, not even their gender or age. So our story cannot start, “Once upon a time, there was a girl named Little Red Riding Hood that went into the woods to see her Grandmother”. Instead, our story starts, “Once upon a time, there were woods, your Grandmother lives in them, and there is a path to get there.”

Game stories are often told through details---art, sound, and other elements of the world reinforce the story that we want the player to tell. Our Red Riding Hood was told that she must stay on the path on the way to her Grandmother's house. So when our player/Red Riding Hood comes to the shortcut through the woods, what does it look like? Is the art foreboding and dark? Does the regular path look a little boring from here on out? Can we use music to bring up some tension at this point? These details are incredibly important to giving the player what they need to tell their story.

Another key part of stories is the driving reason for action. The thing that makes this particular part of these characters' lives worth telling. Why does it matter if Red Riding Hood gets to her Grandma?

It is a very different story if I say “Red Riding Hood was out one day picking flowers. On the other side of the scary woods, her grandmother was sick. Her grandmother died." It's still a story, and one driven by the player, but we don't want to tell it. So, we give our player the information that Red has medicine and food for her grandma.

Consequently, our player's actions must affect the world in ways that we set up. When she gives her the medicine and food, and Grandma gets better. We wouldn't want to forget this facet, and leave Grandma simply standing there, freshly arrived from the wolf's stomach.

If we give our players the setting, and some characters, and some reasons for action, will they tell us the story of Little Red Riding Hood? Probably something similar, but each one will be a little bit different. Each one will be their story of saving Grandma from the big bad wolf. Though I'm the writer of the game, I am not the only one telling a story. The players will tell the stories, and I work to make them as compelling and rich as possible.

Bonus! - I've described this as a single-player game. But I'd be curious to see how it would change as a multiplayer game or an MMO. If anyone feels like tackling that, post it in the comments.

Hello. These Side Quests will be small posts in between the longer weekend ones.

I saw a neat article at Quarter to Three about a character that is in the background of Assassin's Creed IV. It's very short, go read it :)

I love that the author of the article creates a little story just from some snippets of animation. I thought it was a cool example of how character can be developed in subtle ways.

Also, I highly recommend Brandon Cachowski-Schnell. He has a very unique, funny voice and his more personal articles, like this one, are fantastic. In addition to Quarter to Three, he also wrote for No High Scores if you'd like to read mor

So, as I mentioned in my post about tabletop games, I've been playing RPGs since I was a kid. This has waxed and waned, but it's certainly been going strong for the last few years. In the last couple of years, I've been trying new things. Despite "D&D" being used as short-hand for the entire medium, they are thousands of different systems to use. The most popular games are ones that follow the trends set by the ubiquitous Dungeons & Dragons. You and your friends play through the stories of heroes in a fantasy world. But there are tons in other genres, from the expected (like space opera), to the prosaic like a game about fire fighters, to totally off-the-wall ideas like a game about playing a living Twinkies on a post-apocalyptic Earth.

But there are many systems that don't use any kind of setting or genre, they only provide a framework in which you play through whatever stories you make up. My favourite of these is Fate Core. Fate was one of the first games I tried outside of D&D and I stuck with it through a few different variations. It was a breath of fresh air to have something that allowed so much freedom. And that's really where Fate shines, it lets you take all kinds of ideas and turn them into a game. Hence, the mish mash of heroes they use on their book cover (the image above).

From this point on, I'm getting into the nitty gritty. If you're not into RPGs, it may not make sense, but I'm putting this here as fair warning :)

The one big innovation in Fate is the aspect system. Aspects are short descriptive phrases that are an attribute of important things in the world (usually characters). So, in a Fate game about cowboys, a player's character might have the aspect "Fastest draw in the county". That is chosen and worded by the player, not selected from a pre-written list. It is true, and it will come up in game.

And that's why aspects are so interesting to me. We all find ways to describe our characters in RPGs, but in Fate, your description becomes a functional part of the character. In many ways, it breaks down the barrier between the narrative of the character and his mechanical actions (fluff and crunch, in RPG gamer terms). Because a player can literally direct the story using their aspects, it entices players to make "meaty" aspects, ones that have external story built in. The above aspect could be changed to "An even faster draw than my father". Now the character is still a quick gunslinger, but he also has a rivalry, either open or concealed, with his father, who was also a renowned gunslinger. Considering each character gets several aspects, it means that they  can have a lot of pull in the story.

However, if you had a whole party of characters constantly pulling the spotlight onto their own personal story (and for the most part, players love nothing more than a little spotlight on their character), you would have a very disjointed narrative. The system limits this in play by using a resource called fate points, and it tries to head this off at the pass (following our Western motif) with collaborative creation.

Each player gets a few fate points at the start of each session. They can use them to power an aspect to do something for them. If we go with the previous example of "An even faster draw than my father", we can see that this would help the character in a duel by giving him a bonus to his Shooting roll. But it could also be useful if he needed a contact in town. The player could invent one that knew his character's father and pay a fate point for it. Now, if the player is out of fate points, his ability to pivot the story around his character is gone. But, and here is another lovely bit of design from Evil Hat, if the GM uses an aspect to complicate life for the character, he gives him a fate point. For our gunslinger, this could come in the form of a band of outlaws looking to prove themselves but killing the prodigy in front of the whole town. It rewards the player for coming up with an interesting aspect to hang a story on, and as a GM, I love anything that gives me more direct hooks to the player. It prevents me from calling story and conflict down from the blue.

Now, before the game even starts, there is the collaborative creation. Your first session of Fate begins with the GM and all the players sitting down and coming up with the key parts of your game together. That includes both the characters and some starting locations or stories. This is such a great part of the game. When it goes well, you all feel connected and driven to play through the story that was created. The GM and the other players don't have to worry about the game getting derailed to follow one character's quest to see his sick grandma -- That quest, if it is important, will spring from that initial creation session. The creation is structured according to a process in the book so that each character has already met and interacted with a few of the others, they share common ground, and they even have some aspects that are inspired by these backstory crossovers.

After creating the characters and the setting together, the fun of the game is in watching it all play out. The system is fairly light in terms of tactical decisions and it uses a lot of abstraction in conflicts to make them go by simply.  This means that you can usually get to the heart of the story quickly and see how it all pans out.

Now, Fate isn't a perfect game. It certainly has drawbacks compared to some of the other systems I've played in. It doesn't handle long-running campaigns as well as something like Pathfinder or 13th Age. That's because there is little mechanical change from the early game to the late game. Character's capabilities can increase, both by getting higher bonuses and by getting wholly new skills, but it'll still feel much the same in terms of gameplay. Also, it requires creative buy-in and a desire to see a unique story play out. If you want a story and setting ready-made for you and your group, there are better games for that.

And, that core concept that I just gushed over (aspects), may not be what you want as a player or a GM. But as a writer who loves games, and who loves when mechanics are story are inextricably linked, I think it is amazing. I suppose it's no surprise that a game that rewards creatively worded phrases is a hit with a writer. I suppose if there was a game that let you draw for bonus points most artists would dig it as well. I will say that if you feel like seeing how a particular kind of story will play out (and you really are interested in the story), there are few better games for it.

For those who want to hear more about this, I'm going to write a post on how to get the most out of that collaborative creations in a little while. For a different kind of game that I also really enjoy, look for an upcoming post on 13th Age.

I knew that Bastion was something special as soon as I saw a trailer for it. (If you haven't played it, here is a good clip from of the opening). The player's actions were narrated by a gruff old cowboy voice that oozed charm. This one simple thing made me both incredibly excited and a little heartbroken.

On the one hand, it showed how easily strides could be made in game narrative. And this is something I already knew intuitively, but it provided a great concrete example. I mean, video games are very young as a narrative form. You would think we'd be coming up with cool ways to tell stories through them all the time. But, though there is always movement, it isn't the breakneck pace we might expect from a new medium. But, this lovely little conceit of having the players actions narrated in real time was a definite step forward. Every game that used that tool after it owed a debt to the creators of Bastion.

And this brings me to the heartache. It was an undiscovered trick that had been revealed by someone else. When it was made, I was still working in QA, spending my free time trying to find ways to create actual games as opposed to scripts that might maybe someday be in a game. I saw the trailer for Bastion and felt this pit in my gut. It let me know that there were some very creative and brilliant people that were way ahead of me when it came to game narrative. It was probably one of the biggest motivators for me to work on my game writing.

Now, if the conceit had been the only thing going for the game, or it had been badly used, it would have faded away both from my mind and those of other gamers. But Bastion succeeded due to some clever decisions.

The first was the voice of the narrator. It was deeply rooted in the world of the game. From his first gravelly words, Rucks lets you know that this game is going to be stylized, but serious. It then comes as no surprise when the world starts forming around the player's character (The Kid) and you're confronted with strange creatures like windbags or gasfellas. It all flows properly in this kind of fragmented but beautiful post-apocalypse. And it was kicked off by the art and Rucks' voice.

The second is that Rucks will never repeat a phrase. The first time the player smashes a bunch of boxes looking for items (or just because smashing stuff is fun), Rucks makes a comment. After that, you'll never hear it again. This is nice for the player because it prevents him from hearing a line over and over. But more importantly, it maintains the illusion that Rucks is a real person. He is a character in the world, but if he were to repeat the same phrases each time the player did a certain action (like falling off a platform), he would quickly become just an extension of the game's mechanics---and an annoying one at that. With him saying each line only once, it feeds into the fiction that he is telling a story, and not belabouring details that we already know.

I highly recommend this game for people that like challenging action games or great storytelling. I believe it's available on basically every system from last gen (there is even an HTML 5 version), and I'm very excited for Transistor, the next game from the same team (Supergiant).