Caravan Experiment Newsletter #4
Hey Everybody!
One month down and 3 more to go! I’m feeling… strong as an Altoid.
Thanks for reading, and please continue to reply with comments and suggestions or just give me a call. I’d love to hear from all of you.
Follow-up: Help Me Create Some Music and Ambience
We have music! The incredible Cesar Salgado (https://soundcloud.com/iamvolk_music) has made some beautiful compositions for the demo build. We don’t have the tracks hosted on a public forum yet, but I’m really excited for you all to hear them in the game. Thank you Cesar! And thank you Michael and Lorena for making the connection.
Follow-up: Create a Creature
This newest denizen of Caravan comes courtesy of Natasha Vinik:
We call it Fecollect! It’s a dung beetle inspired creation that makes do with your poo. It’s ROT type and has a special non-combat ability called “waste collector”: When camping, this creature can turn excess food into “mutation power”. How useful is that? Very.
Call to Action: Nothing!
I can’t think of anything this week! So just take it easy.
Design Notes: Storytelling in Caravan
Let’s get a little pretentious and talk about storytelling in video games. Firstly, if you’re not a video game player, it’s important to know that people do try to “tell stories” with video games now. We’ve come a long way from Pacman in a short amount of time and you wouldn’t believe how seriously people are taking this crap now. Game developers all over the world are reaching beyond reflex tests and brain teasers. They want to “elicit emotional responses”, and you better believe they have the high-minded words to talk about it at conferences: “Violence in BioShock Infinite, Ludonarrative Dissonance, and Historicism” — a real thing in our world.
Ridiculous.
Well... I suppose the medium of video games does have a few tantalizing properties:
the player can act out the story
the player can influence the story
It’s easy to imagine the potential of the first: video games get us closer than ever before to walking a mile in someone else’s shoes. Usually it’s shooting a million people with someone else’s gun, but some games do manage to deliver some real empathic weight. Would that message resonate more if it was delivered in a traditional medium like a movie or a book? I don’t know.
The second property seems powerful: a storyteller can tailor an experience for the player based on their unique influence. Unfortunately I think it’s difficult to bring that to bear in reality. Games that afford a lot of player influence struggle to deliver concise viewpoints if the player chooses not to play ball. Games that restrict player influence feel uncontrollable and might as well be a film. But it’s not surprising to me that collaborative storytelling is difficult: humans don’t really do it. With niche exceptions (role-playing, improvisation) human stories are predetermined things.
Luckily, Caravan doesn’t have a story. Or, rather, it hasn’t been written yet.
Woaaahhh what?
The storyteller of Caravan is the player. I don’t have a story, just a set of rules that acts as a scaffolding. I strongly believe that video game players play games to win. They have resources, a goal, and a set of tests they must pass to reach the goal. The problem of the game, at any point in time, is how best to manipulate your resources to pass those test. When considering what action to take, I do not believe that players ever make subpar strategic decisions in favor of fulfilling some emotional goal. From my point of view players never make capital-C Choices. Choices are calculations.
But this is actually very good, because it allows me pull off a sneaky magic trick. All I have to do is put an emotional coat of paint on the choices the player is making, and the player (because they are human) will subconsciously create stories. Humans are extremely good at pattern recognition. The emotional resonance of my game relies on the enjoyment and automaticity of pulling signal from noise.
Here’s the example:
In your caravan you have two creatures: Jane and Jack. Jane has 50 health points. Jack has 10. You have no food left. You see a path on the tower that leads to more food. You move towards it and you are presented with a choice: either both of your creatures suffer 10 damage, or one creature suffers 30 damage. You could keep both creatures alive by having Jane suffer the damage, but you notice the path you are on has a fork. You elect for Jack to suffer the damage. Jack dies and you butcher his corpse, rewarding you with 20 food. You then change direction and go down a path leading to treasure.
In this scenario, the player has made an obvious logical choice: it is better to have one strong unit, food, and treasure, than to have two critically damaged units and food, but because the resource manipulations the player made are colored in a stark way, a story of betrayal and cannibalism might take seed in the players mind. Did Jane push Jack into harm’s way? How can she be so ruthless? Will she need to feed again?
Every time the game is played there are myriad choices required to win. In a different circumstance the choice between 10 damage and 30 damage could be relatively inconsequential. The beauty of the random nature of the game is that the player choose what story to tell based on the choices that they think are interesting. I don’t have to design anything at all.