I'm looking for an outline or cheatsheet for designing a story. I only now am starting to look around for game design information and I thought I would ask about this.
Even if it's a short 1-2-3 step idea, it might be helpful. The idea of course is point and click adventures, but if you have links to different adventure like genres, I would be interested also.
I also want to ask a two more quick and related question. How many scenes would make up a decent short game, medium game and long game? and when should you consider adding a map scene to let you go from distant location to distant locations.
http://grumpygamer.com/puzzle_dependency_charts
He talks about laying out the puzzles, but this technique could also be used to design the story, I like to use Twine.
http://twinery.org/
On map scene; I suppose it depends on how far away your locations are from eachother in that world. I like to use a hub room on a couple of my games, it doesn't necessarily have to be a map, it could be a notebook with pictures of important characters and locations.
I would say at least three locations to justify a "hub" or "map room". Any less than that you'd probably call a taxi or click on a unicorn to ride it to the other location.
Hah! great thanks, I did not even think about transportation such as a taxi. I'll have a look at the link and I did hear about twine, so I'll look more into that.
I'm continuing to search and I also want to contribute here. This looks user friendly for beginners and I will look further into it.
how to write an adventure game (http://www.bit-tech.net/gaming/pc/2007/10/08/how_to_write_an_adventure_game/1)
More on puzzle design:
http://junk.dk/puzzle/
If find that if I flesh out the characters (i.e. write their history) the story tends to tell it's self.