Gamebooks: the value of doing it with dialogue

Eighteen months back, Leo Hartas talked me into starting work on an interactive story app. Leo is a very persuasive fellow, and it sounded such a beautiful plan the way he told it. I’d write the thing, Leo would do the artwork, and his coder friend would put it together in his spare time.

I really should have known better. Spare time is pretty much a mythical concept anyway, and so the chance of such a project ever happening decreases exponentially with the size of the team. After six weeks and two Skype calls, the coder admitted he was too busy and Leo got a contract to illustrate six kids’ books. The project went quietly back to bed and set the alarm clock for never.

Still, all experience is useful. Some of the writing made its way into a novel called The Mage of Dust and Bone that Jamie and I may yet finish. And I had enough fresh insights about gamebook app design to fill this blog post. So not a total loss.

The app, which was going to be called Winter’s Rage, was a sandbox adventure based on the Christmas scenario here a while back. The map would serve as the top level of navigation through the story, as in Fabled Lands. Nothing new about that; it’s been a staple of CRPGs from Might and Magic right through to Sorcery.

Encounters

‘When you have an encounter, you’ll drop down from the map to a location screen that will be mainly text.’

‘I could do illustrations for each location,’ said Leo.

‘No. Doesn’t work. See, we’re used to using a map in real life without thinking about it. Our brains have the subroutine that means we look at where we are on a map and that’s part of our seamless word-view. But as soon as you put a picture of a church, say, in front of somebody who up till then has been picturing the world as a map or via text, suddenly they’re thinking, hmm, that’s not a real church, that’s a drawing. So then you’ve broken suspension of disbelief.’

‘But I thought you said you'll be wanting little mugshots of the characters’ faces for when they’re saying something?’

‘That’s different. When the brain is used to interpreting images symbolically – a figure on a map, a face next to some dialogue – then artwork doesn’t pull you out of the story. Given that we have to have text, simply because it’s cheap, we need to let the text be the player’s main “world rendering medium” and any artwork has to conform to that design principle. That is unless you can find a million dollars down the back of the sofa, in which case we’ll do it all in a 3D environment with audio.’

‘Text it is.’

We came up with a screen template for locations like this:

OK, OK, gimme a break - I'm the designer, all right? Leo would've done the art. Anyway, at the top you’ve got the location name (The Bank Road in this example) and under that a brief description that sets the scene. Then you’ve got the faces of the characters who are here. In this case there’s a Blind Man who you just met at the start of the adventure and who is accompanying you along the road. Your answers to his questions are creating your character at this point – eg he begins by asking if you’re familiar with these parts, and you can answer either ‘I’m an outsider’ or ‘I grew up not far from here’.

But I digress. The point here is that you’ve just had an encounter, that’s why the view has dropped down from the map level. The encounter is with the Robber. So then we look at the pane below, which is the dialogue. This is where the action of the story gets presented. Why? Because the key to keeping the player’s attention is writing in the moment. That’s not new either; it was invented, or at least popularized as a novelistic technique, by Samuel Richardson in the mid-18th century. If you’ve read my Frankenstein app, you’ll see the same technique in action throughout. The entire text there is what Victor Frankenstein is saying to you, so his words must carry all the narrative, rather like in a radio play.

The advantage of placing the narrative emphasis on dialogue is that readers of an app will skip descriptive text. Description is less compelling to an untutored eye even in a regular novel, and when you’re leaning forward waiting for the next decision point, the temptation to scan for surface meaning may become irresistible.

Not so in the case of dialogue, because we’re attuned to care about other people and what they say. Arguably the main reason for these big, energy-hungry brains is to interpret the nuances of meaning in speech.

The way we planned to do it in the app, the dialogue would appear one speech bubble at a time, with a beat between them. You could read and re-read it at your own pace, obviously. The beats were there just to reinforce the sense of them speaking in real time, rather than everybody’s dialogue appearing at once like on the page of a book.

So the Robber says, ‘Hand it over. All your money.’ And it turns out your blind companion also has something to say: ‘Gar John’s-son, I know your voice. Have you turned to thievery now?’

(Later in the adventure, you will typically be travelling with a companion – more about them in a minute. For example, if your companion was Fosse the hunter, in this encounter he’d now chip in with: ‘Huh. Since when wasn’t he a thief? Five years old and I caught him taking rabbits from my traps.’)

Options

Then at the bottom of the screen, under the dialogue for the encounter, you’ve got the DECIDE tab. When you tap on that, you’re presented with your options. Why not display them right away? Extra unnecessary taps/clicks are usually a bad idea on an interface, aren’t they? Yes, but here it’s to stop your eye just scanning straight down to the bottom of the screen for the options. It keeps you in the story.

If you tap DECIDE, in this case you’ll get two options to choose between:

• ‘It’s not gold you’ll be getting from me, it’s cold steel.’
• ‘I don’t need to fight you.’

As often as possible, like there, an option will be a line of dialogue. Say you choose not to fight. That dialogue gets added to the scroll underneath what’s been said already. Then, after a beat, the Robber will reply to you:

‘I don’t need to fight you.’
   {set #Spared_Robber = true}
   // #Spared_Robber is an inline conditional not visible to user
   // sets reminder that Gar Johnson may be encountered later
   {beat}
Robber: ‘I’m starving. I was sick. Couldn’t get no work.’

And your options now:

• ‘Take this coin and buy yourself some bread.’ { if #Status_Noble == true }
• ‘Winter’s hard on everyone. You’ll survive.’
• ‘Come and see me at the manor house. Maybe I’ll find a job for you.’

Options can be conditional, as in the example above where the option to give the robber a coin is only available if the player is an aristocrat.

Companions

You pick up companions at the manor house, which is the player's base of operations for the game. You can only pick one companion to accompany you at any given time. You can change companion when you return to the manor house, though sometimes they may be absent on their own errands, depending on the adventure timeline.

Companions become more loyal to you over time, assuming they see you solving problems and showing good leadership. A companion who is more loyal to you will volunteer more personal information (possibly unlocking backstories) and also uses their skills more effectively. Therefore it makes sense not to switch companions too often. Balance that against the need to have the right companion with the right skills for specific tasks.

When you return to the manor house you can show any clues to the steward or the NPC companions you didn't pick up - so you can get the benefit of advice from any of those four listed with a delay, but only the one companion you pick to go with you will notice things, prompt you during investigation, help in fights, unlock subplots, etc.

A possible mechanism for giving the player hints is that when you’re at the manor house, companions will talk to each other (‘You won’t believe what I saw up on the heath, Sir Werian…’) based on their preset relationships, and if you listen in you will get the benefit of their theories.

NPC companions add an element of communitas and emotional grip to an adventure game - a discovery I made by happy accident when writing Down Among the Dead Men, though I guess the germ of it was there in the interactions with the faltyn in the Blood Sword series. As a rule, people are way more interested in character and the development of relationships than they are in facts and the development of plot. Given that Winter's Rage was to be a gamebook app constructed almost entirely through dialogue, and an investigative adventure at that, having a foil for the player to interact with was essential. Not only did the choice of companion on each mission mean a set of skills and insights that would customize the experience, the companion also gave me as writer another pair of eyes and another voice to interlocute the world for the player. And, as this is an adventure with a ticking clock, interjections from the companions can be used to ratchet up the tension.

Takeaways

Text is inexpensive, but there are some tasks it doesn't handle well. Artwork is useful for the top-level navigation of the adventure (ie the map) and to depict the faces of nonplayer characters. But don't be tempted to use more than that. Presented with a little judicious artwork, the brain interprets it symbolically; too much and your "gamebook app" becomes a broken CRPG.

Also, use dialogue as much as possible in place of descriptive text. Even in the example above, in the final version I'd probably have lost that descriptive line "a robber steps out" in favour of a companion saying, 'It's a robber!' or 'Now who's this?' or 'This guy looks a bit shifty' depending on which companion it was, the time of day, that kind of thing. After all, you know you've dropped down from the map level because an encounter was triggered, and you can see the guy's face has appeared in the mugshot pane. You don't really need a stage direction to tell you what's going on here.

In order to get maximum mileage out of dialogue, focus on writing to the moment. Listen to radio plays. Read how it's done in something like Pamela, Riddley Walker or the Frankenstein app I mentioned above. Anything you can let the dialogue carry, do so. Strip down descriptive text to the barest scene-setting. Don't tell when you can show. There's nothing new about any of this; it's just that it hasn't often been applied to interactive literature before.

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Writing this, I’m thinking it’s a shame we never got to do the game. It was to be the first in a series of interactive adventures set in the world of Legend. If I’d only had a coder with no wife and kids and re-enactment hobby to eat into his leisure time, eh? Ah well, it’s water under the (half built) bridge.