During our playtest we were told that despite having a very interesting narratvie based game with no narrative, which is why I have been transfered off of level design and am now instead working on the Narrative of the game and the Dialogue. This only happened after I had finished with the Level design itself, which I had completed reletivly quickly.
Lament has lots of narrative driven gameplay but actually has a very lackluster narrative in the GDD. The story goes no further than saying that the player is fighting this grief due to the “loss of a loved one”. On top of this the setting is in a sort of “liminal space” which can make building a story quite difficult.
My inital idea is to have the player see the characters trauma in a sort of dream like state, where they then wake up in the world of Lament and get initally introduced to the Tree of Sorrow who sets them up for the tutorial.
One problem I’m having with creating a decent stroy has to do with how the story beats are going to be shown to the player. Lots of games tend to provide a larger very ‘completable goal’ which is then broken up into more realistic tasks. For example, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (BotW) has the first mission be to ‘Defeat Gannon‘ who is the very final boss of the game. This is then broken up into 4 regions the player can explore to make this goal easier, and by doing this the player will naturally end up completing a lot of the side content, like minigames in the form of Shrines and Korok Puzzles which act as mini levels in the overarching open world game.
This is a problem for Lament as the goal is very vague with ‘Overcome Grief’ so I think that the best way to counter act this is to hide that goal and set a fake one, being to return the Terra Souls to the Tree of Sorrow. By doing this the player is introduced to the story and the player character can overcome the ‘grief’ in a much more natural way.
Narrative Pipeline
- Introduction to World
- Tutorial
- Tree of Sorrow sets goal
- Level Plays
- Boss intro
- Tree of Sorrow story
- Next level repeat x 5
- Final Tree of Sorrow story
- Game End
Every boss fight will reveal various parts of the story meaning it would be best to create a sort of ‘cliffhanger’ based story, like a long standing TV series. Only progressing the ‘plot’ so much each beat to drive players to want to keep engaging in the story.
There are two engaging story beats that I can think of that I believe fit the theme of the game. The first:
The player has experienced the loss of a loved one and has to battle the grief interanlly. Defeating the bosses quite is a literal representation of defeating the stages of grief in their mind, allowing them to overcome grief in the end.
The second:
The player has set out on a journey to ressurect a passed loved one, fighting the stages of grief to collect the Terra souls for the Tree of Sorrow to revive their loved one. In this journey they talk to the bosses and begin to accept the passing of the loved one, ultimatly deciding not to revive the loved one.
I have put this up for a vote in Week 6 for my group to vote on and see what direction we want to go in.
Following a group discussion and looking into how we want the story of the game to fit with the gameplay, we unanimously decided to go for the second choice. (refer to the image below for the poll)
After this, we also had big discussions over our next stage with the tutorial and our next playtest. This is where I’ve made a flowchart to see how the tutorial and story mix in a way to introduce players to the core game mechanics as well as the basis for the story and the protaganist motivations.
I made the flow chart in miro which you should be able to view here.
or here: https://miro.com/app/board/uXjVLkusF18=/?share_link_id=392157321797
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