Come give your opinion on this

[Rui 'Trovatore' Pires]

(I hope this is the right forum to post this in. If it's not, feel free to move it at once. Or don't. It's your call, officer.)

  Ok, so here's the thing. A long time ago (5, 6 years) I played Broken Sword. I really liked it, and because I was (still am!) such a bookworm, I suddenly thought - "Wow, what it, when I finished the game, it created a .doc or .txt file with the story of the game, just like a book! (this was shortyly after I found out Gabriel Knight existed as a book).

  Of course it didn't, but I recently realized you could do that very thing with AGS's file read and write functions. A story that writes itself as you play it, and becomes available when you finish the game. And of course, great games with several ramifications and side-quests would make for several sets of stories!

  So, what do you think of this? Is it laughable? Is it reliable?

EDIT TO COMMENT REMIXOR'S POST WITHOUT ADDING ANOTHER ONE - Yeah, that's exactly it! Paragraphs for, say, "You enter the store", "You leave the store", "You say (here follows dialog), but NOT for, say, "you try to use object x and it doesn't work", or "It doesn't need touching."

 Thank you for your oppinion, I was afraid this might be a bit stupid. Now, I'll implement it into my game (LSL2 remake) and check it out!

[remixor]

Go for it!  If you pulled it off it would be pretty cool I think.  I imagine you'd have to have the different possibilities come in big chunks... of a paragraph or maybe several paragraphs, with maybe certain words being variables.  If the game just generated a sentence at a time whenever the player does anything, it would be a rather convoluted story.  I like the idea though!

[Barcik]

Great idea!

[m0ds]

Sounds pretty ingenious, but I would think the game would have to have some different paths, and different ways to go about solving the puzzles, merely for the fact that each story created isn't exactly the same? ^_^

Oh and this is the right forum.


m0ds

[Rui 'Trovatore' Pires]

Yeah, if you want to make an amazing, out-of-whack adventure. But even if it were completely linear, I for one would really get a kick out of reading in story-form what I just played. Of course, this WOULD require the game's creator to actually WRITE. I'm not ust talking about simple messages like the one I used to exemplify, you see. I'm talking about full-blown narrative. Like 'Babel', you know, that great text adventure? If you copy the text of that game as you play it, remove the player's commands and the 'That Doesn't Work' thingies, you'd have what I'm talking about.

  Also - it is unavoidable that there would be at least five "He opened the door and stepped inside. " and "Since he couldn't afford anything, he said his farewells and went back outside." as players go in and out of places trying to figure out what to do. But by the time they finished the game and are able to acess the file, the file has become a text file, available for editing, so thay can do that themselves. Or keep it as a remainder of the effort it took them.

One more thing, while I'm at it - when I try to test my game, it shows an error message about the game crashing, and making sure ACWIN is in th folder, which it it. I'm not sure if I should post this in the technical forum or wait until the next beta comes out.

[RickJ]

This is a very intriguing idea.  I have had an idea to keep a PC journal and make it available to the player during the game.  Ratracer actually implements such a thing in his latest game "The Uncertainity Machine".    But I never thought about having a readable story after the game was over.   Neat idea, I'd like to see how it turns out.

[Jimi]

Me too! It would be alot of programming, but it'd be worth it!  

[Eero]

I like this idea!
And then we could measure people's IQ by the size of the text file...

[Ginny]

Great idea, though could be a little hard to implement, but too cool to give up trying!

[Shattered Sponge]

  To be totally honest, though it initially sounds like a good idea, I think that this would really be a waste of time - I don't want to sound like a complete wanker, but the fact of the matter is there is no point in reading something if you already know EXACTLY what is going to happen.  Reading is a reasonably time-consuming task, and unless it was exceptionally well written and was a work that simply demanded study (which is, let's face it, unlikely) most people would elect to read something new, rather than something that they had already experienced.  That's without even bothering to mention the ridiculous amount of work involved.
 However, if the 'adaptation' was to view the plot from a different angle, to put a new spin on the events of the game that the player was unlikely to have considered, than it might be worthwile...
Anyway, that's all just IMHO, and most of you seem to disagree, so it's entirely up to you what you do with your game.

[WildCaToad]

 ...The fact of the matter is there is no point in reading something if you already know EXACTLY what is going to happen.

ACK!  Thou dost make this teacher writhe with pain and agony!!  Somehow or other, if there truly was no point in reading something when the plot was already known, Barnes and Noble would be out of business but public libraries would be thriving.  

There's always more to pick up on the second time around...especially when the story is delivered through another medium.  Games that have *true* replayability may lay this claim based on more than just the virtues of its multiple plot endings or engaging puzzles.  They truly offer more in terms of plot, theme, or characters the second time around when you're not so concerned with which banana to use on which cat.   This concept could be quite similar.

Okay, it's the weekend, so I'm hoping off my teacher soap box now.  

--Jason

[RickJ]

...However, if the 'adaptation' was to view the plot from a different angle, to put a new spin on the...

ShatteredSponge makes a good point,  if what you end up with is just a journal of events then it would be quite boring.  

As both ShatteredSponge and WildCaToad point out, the end result would need to be more and deeper than  a simple chronology of events  to be worthwhile.   There would be an opportunity to develop the characters and story in more detail than is possible in the game.  Sort of like how you normally get more out of the book than the movie.  

[MrColossal]

i think an example of a way to go would be taken from the longest journey

she kept a journal and she added her thoughts to it and she slowly [kinda] grew up as she went through her journey that was quite long

in the beginning she was using Like and Totally alot and then she kinda backed off of that

i think they didn't do it as much as i'd like but anyway that's not the point

[Gonzo]

It's a little bit like, as you progress in 'Grim Fandango' a screenplay script gets added to. That's just speech transcript though, not even stage directions as I recall, so this would require more depth.

[Rui 'Trovatore' Pires]

 ...there is no point in reading something if you already know EXACTLY what is going to happen.

I'm the kind of guy that never gets tired from reading Gabriel knight 1 & 2, even though I've already finished all GK's a LOT of times. I just assumed there would be more people like that, that's why I posted this.

[Jimi]

Also, what if in the game, you go into a building. Don't do anything, then come out again? You will have "He walked into the shop. He walked out of the shop." Which would be pretty naff.

[Rui 'Trovatore' Pires]

I have given this some thought already - No way around that.  The player will have to edit the text himself after the game is over.

Another thing. Player saving and restoring? Anyone think of that?

I though about printing a big thing like

*******************
PLAYER SAVED
*******************

******************
PLAYER RESTORED
******************

and before you say anything - I know it WILL be a nuisance on the poor player, trying to work it out, but then it souldn't be that hard. And I say again - I, for one, wouldn't mind ding all this.

IF the prose was good.

[DragonRose]

My 2 cents.

I'm not sure if I'm going to explain this too well, (I'm a writer, not a programmer) but here goes.

As an example from the demo game

What you really do:
Walk through door,
return to street
return to AGS factory main room
Buy blue cup
return to street
talk to man

What comes out in your TXT file:
Ego walked through the door, not knowing what to expect.  The room he found himself standing in was very different from the street outside.  Clear pipes transported some sort of lime green liquid around the room.  On the back wall, a bright neon sign proclaiming "AGS FACTORY!" flashed on and off.  In the centre of the room was a sales counter, manned by a rather badly drawn short man wearing a gray jumpsuit.

Ego rumaged through his pocket, and pulled out a few coins.
"Can I buy one of those blue cups?" he asked.
"Of course," replied Roger.  A few coins changed hands, and Ego became the proud owner of a blue ceramic cup.

Ego left the AGS factory main room and went to the street.

Ego turned to the man standing beside the door.
"I've been to the other side of the door," he said.

And so on and so forth.

You would need to make variables for a few things:

Entering a room for the first time.
Where certain actions take place (all things in the AGS factory are 1, all things in the street are 2)
The most recent room description printed.

Whenever you do an important action for the first time, like entering a room, talking to someone, getting piece of inventory or whatever, it prints out a bit of text.  When you do something that doesn't affect the story (like the first time Ego leaves the AGS factory) it doesn't print anything.

Now, when you talk to the man by the door, the description in the text doesn't match where you really are.  So the computer keeps track of that.  It knows that the most recent "description" variable it printed wasn't for the same room that you can run the "conversation with man" variable.  So it pulls up little fill in the blank thing, "Ego left (where you were) and went to (where you are now).", prints where the last description was for, prints where you are now, and then continues to print important actions.

I hope that made some sort of sense.  It would cut down on a lot of the "He entered the store, he left the store" stuff, and any useless stuff that happened between one important action and another.

And DON'T put in the "player save" stuff.  That would sort of ruin the idea of reading it as a story, wouldn't it?

[Pumaman]

It's definately an interesting idea.

I think the issue with the save/load is that if it just kept adding to a single text file, then the story would get messed up when the user loaded a save game as it would change the point in the story.

Technically speaking, this might best be implemented as a plugin, since it would be able to store the story written so far, and save it into the save games during the gameplay.

[mercurycs]

I personally think that reading game stories is a blast. I loved reading "The King's Quest Companion" and "The Space Quest companion" and basically all they were was a narration of what went on in the games and a little insight on what was going on in the character's mind. Excellent idea!!! EXCELLENT EXCELLENT!!!

[RickJ]

Dragonrose has the right idea.   Further, when repeating events like returning to the street the nth time, you would want to remember that you were there before so that the first time you would get one description and different description(s) on subsequent visits, Dragonrose suggests (or even no description at all if there is nothing intersting to tell).

You could get around the save game thing by saving the game chronology in a numerical array.  You could then have a function that walks through the array and produces the text file.  The function could be run on demand.   In the event of  restoring a saved game the numeric array will be restored to it's previous state.

[Rui 'Trovatore' Pires]

If it goes as a plugin, it's totally out of my hands and I invite plugin makers to do it, because I just can't function with plugins.

As for Dragonroses' "2 cents", I'd like to thank him for having obviously done such an amount of thought on this (I never thought this topic would grow so much!) and tell him - absolutely right, very well thought-out, that variable thing.

And, if I ever get my game working again, I'll implement the thing the way I first meant it. Why? I said I got a kick out of several things, and one of them is seeing exactly what I did in the story, and re-organizing it and come out with that piece of prose. Including Player Saves and Load. And only after THAT worry about the bit of reading it might provide.

But remember that, if the game is linear enough, all this might be overkill, and we could have a story already written to be available to the player at the end of the game. A game linear like "Phantasmagoria". Possibly even add to THAT text once the game becomes not-really-linear (chase scene and what you can get during it).

[Fabiano]

well, I had a gross problem with FF9, that I never finished, The problem was simple. I saved the game in a certain point and stopeed playing for2-3 months. When I start again, I havent IDEA what point in the game I was, and what do next. So, I just walked aimless around the world without knowing what to do. In Metal Gear Solid, the Journal appears everytime you load the game and you KNOWwhere you are and what youre doing. Its a simple way to not get lost.

[Jimi]

I guess it all depends on what kind of journal you want.

One the player can read afet the game in the form of a story,

or

One that gives a list of events up to the last save, that helps you recover if you have done something/what you have done.

[Rui 'Trovatore' Pires]

I feel like an a**hole, for not having noticed this before, but...

Hey, can you make paragraphs this way? Or would it all add up in the same line?

[DragonRose]

As for Dragonroses' "2 cents", I'd like to thank him for having obviously done such an amount of thought on this (I never thought this topic would grow so much!) and tell him - absolutely right, very well thought-out, that variable thing.

Thank him? Tell HIM? I'm a girl!  Oh well.  

[Pumaman]

Thank him? Tell HIM? I'm a girl!  Oh well.  

Hehe indeed

What would you people's opinions be on enabling the "Gender" thingie which is displayed under the custom title to prevent such future mishaps?

(for an example of what I mean, see http://www.justadventure.com/cgi-bin/yabb/YaBB.cgi?board=AdvGameDiscuss;action=display;num=1048286189 )

[remixor]

Not a bad idea, in my opinion.  Since you can already check it in the profile, I don't see anything wrong with putting it below the avatar.

[MrColossal]

gender, don't make it compulsory, i like my androginous name/avatar coupling

[Pumaman]

Yep it would be optional, just as it is at the moment. If you enter a gender into your profile it would be displayed below your avatar - if you didn't enter one then nothing would be displayed.

[Andail]

yeah, it's really a burning issue around here...

[Rui 'Trovatore' Pires]

Let's get back on track for a minute.

I found out how to do what I wanted to, and I thought I'd share! So far, it's bug-proof, although I haven't tested it extensively.
Here goes.

Internal script header -
add "int handle;", which makes it usable in every room.

First time player enters first room in your game -
add handle = FileOpen ("*.*", FILE_WRITE);
add FileWriteRawLine (handle, "Write intro here.");

Now for the real beauty - don't use FileClose, instead add SetGlobalInt (0, handle);!!!!!!

Next time you wanna add something, just do
add FileWriteRawLine (GetGlobalInt(0), "Write here.");

You see? It won't be available to the player until you do FileClose, which should be at the end of the game; having int handle in script header makes it usable EVERYWHERE, and setting GlobalInt ensures we're always talking about the same handle, and therefore don't have to open it for editing, and therefore we can just go on adding without worrying about overwrite! The thing about save/restore is still an issure, though.