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   clarity flowers (clarity@xoxo.zone)'s status on Sunday, 04-Aug-2024 04:29:30 JST clarity flowers

   idea: fail-forward video game where losing boss battles (or whatever) doesn't stop progression and instead adjusts variables on what ending you get. but the ending you get for acing every battle first try is the "bad ending".

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     clarity flowers (clarity@xoxo.zone)'s status on Sunday, 04-Aug-2024 04:32:51 JST clarity flowers

     in reply to

     I really hate "game over, try again" screens for story-based games because it basically tells the player "you being bad at this video game is not a canonical event". But most people struggle with games like Pyre that ask you to live with your failures and suffer penalties or a worse ending for them. I think there's a place for that design, but hey, why not make the "I am bad at this game" the more canonical mode of play? I feel like it'd fit a fight-shonen narrative very well lol.

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     clarity flowers (clarity@xoxo.zone)'s status on Sunday, 04-Aug-2024 04:36:15 JST clarity flowers

     in reply to

     Maybe there are stories/items/mechanics/whatever that you unlock by being good at the game, and other (mutually exclusive, equally if not more appealing) ones you unlock by being bad at it. Unlock all of them by doing a NG+!

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     clarity flowers (clarity@xoxo.zone)'s status on Sunday, 04-Aug-2024 06:18:52 JST clarity flowers

     in reply to

     • wizzwizz4

     @wizzwizz4 these are generally solvable problems in the same way they are solved in other IF works, as long as you don’t frame “you lose” as a thing that hard-branches and instead as a thing that affects variables (see, again, Pyre)

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     wizzwizz4 (wizzwizz4@fosstodon.org)'s status on Sunday, 04-Aug-2024 06:18:54 JST wizzwizz4

     in reply to

     @clarity Making these "you lost" branches out-of-scope makes it much easier to write the story for the remaining branches. (See, e.g., https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Morrowind:Essential_NPCs.)

     Naïvely, if there are ten fights, and the game has to cope with you winning or losing each of them, that's 1024 possibilities. The combinatorial explosion is huge! I've got a few Clever™ things in mind (e.g. modelling character decision-making in software to see whether I can re-use dialogue), but it's still really hard.