Making Player Choices Feel like They Matter in Your Narrative

I've seen and read this sort of narrative breakdown plenty of times before (or, I thought I had), but I was very impressed with Tony's clear and practical presentation. I started the video but then found myself pausing and lunging for my notebook.

I'd rather have a fake choice than no choice. The emotions i go through on deciding which choice is morally best are AWESOME to me.

when he talks about booleans this reminds me of the talk from Sorcery! where the dev says instead of booleans you can also use Enum State Variants to have 3 or 4 or 5 resulting states for an 'encounter'

Imo, the best way to make the player feel like their choices matter in a game is to make the story branch depending on the outcome of the player character's current goal. The more the player wants to fulfil the goal of the player character, the more significant they will feel like their choices will matter, especially when their in game skills not only determine the outcome of a given story mission, but also determine the direction the story takes. To implement something like this, you can use a Dictionary to store the outcome of any given mission like this: `public Dictionary missionOutcome = new Dictionary();` Each Mission would be given a unique string name or id as their key in this Dictionary, thereby allowing you to easily query the outcome of missions at any point during the story. By default, missions would have a value of null to indicate that the Outcome has not yet been determined. Missions with a true value indicate they had a successful outcome. False indicates the player failed the mission.

13:03 - that may not take a lot of effort in a visual novel, but if you've got recorded dialogue that then needs to be lip-synced, that can quickly spiral out of control...

Very good presentation. One thing I would like to add about callbacks is that it can feel like it destroys an entire playthrough if choices you made a long time ago give you a bad outcome that you would have wanted to be good and you feel the reasoning is unfair to you. I think a good way to make callbacks impactful is to transform different paths for future callbacks, rather than turn it into a good vs bad outcome. I don't dislike nitpicking but it can feel less immersive if the choices are really an illusion of choice rather than true choices, that's when you want to minmax the playthrough rather than just go with the choices that match your personality better. In the end if is more a failure of the devs than of the player if a game feels like you need to minmax it to enjoy the content. If we're talking of lewd dating sims, I think a game that mixes heuristics very well with callbacks is Man of the House. Especially the older sister path. I will definitely check out Scarlet Hollow now because good choices matter SFW games are way too rare, I feel like dating sims really made the whole field progress a lot more than triple A ever cared to try.

Great talk. Thanks!

Yesssss black tabby games needed to do one of these sooner!

Super helpful!

Great

Reese best boy

I would rather have no choice than a fake one

dang 2022 😮 creators dont make u wait so long for their patreon early releases

Opps

Unfortunately, this game pretends to have choices that are equally weighted, but they don't. Like: a) let a human die x b) let a dog die - and the correct answer is to let the human die, because the dog will be much more important throughout the game than the human