Question for the developer: Why is this game so limited?

[Jiraboas]

Like the title says.

Why did the developers decide to make this game so limited? I really like the idea about a more "open" and experimental puzzle game.

But unfortunately I didn't enjoyed the overall game experience. At first I thought, this game does something exceptional new and innovative, but soon I realised the game is so limited and repetitive.

As someone who wrote his own bachelor thesis about interactive storytelling and wrote a onthological story logic system myself, I am really curious if this was never the idea or the concept of this game, or if the developers decided during development, that it would be too difficult and thats why they sticked with a rather common approach of a puzzle game.

Glad do hear from the devs or anyone who want to talk about this.

I still like the idea of this game and I hope we will see a real interactive storytelling puzzle game one day :)

[IndieGameFanatic]

I'm curious about what exactly you mean by "too limited". Do you mean limited as in how you can approach a level and solve it?

[Jiraboas]

Originally posted by MisterKudo:

I'm curious about what exactly you mean by "too limited". Do you mean limited as in how you can approach a level and solve it?

Yeah. Its limited by the scenes, props and characters you can use for a certain story. And its limited by a predefined logic. Instead of being able to solve the puzzles in many different ways, based on the actuall logic of events, most puzzles just need to be solved in exactly one kind of way.

I mean that pretty standard for a puzzle game. But this game seems to be different at first. It seems like the devs had the idea for a more open puzzle game with a innovative mechanic that make it possible to find many different solution, but in the end the game is mostly limited by one or two predefined solutions.

I am just wondering if the devs actually wanted to make this game this way or not.

[IndieGameFanatic]

Originally posted by Jiraboas:

Originally posted by MisterKudo:

I'm curious about what exactly you mean by "too limited". Do you mean limited as in how you can approach a level and solve it?

Yeah. Its limited by the scenes, props and characters you can use for a certain story. And its limited by a predefined logic. Instead of being able to solve the puzzles in many different ways, based on the actuall logic of events, most puzzles just need to be solved in exactly one kind of way.

I mean that pretty standard for a puzzle game. But this game seems to be different at first. It seems like the devs had the idea for a more open puzzle game with a innovative mechanic that make it possible to find many different solution, but in the end the game is mostly limited by one or two predefined solutions.

I am just wondering if the devs actually wanted to make this game this way or not.

If I had to guess, the reason that the game is not as open as it could've been is for these reasons:

1. The game might end up beint too easy if there are too many possible solutions, which is an even bigger problem for Storyteller, since it is pretty short (though, the creator does plan to add free updates). Levels in this game are usually limited to 2-3 possible solutions at most.
   
   
2. Part of the game's experience is using knowledge you had already obtained from earlier levels to beat harder levels. This is likely why actors and scenes need to behave consistently.
   
   
3. It's also possible that actors and scenes that behave inconsistently can confuse or frustrate the player as opposed to predefined actors and scenes.

[daniel.benmergui]

The underlying logic of Storyteller is divided into two systems:

One takes the layout of the level (which settings/characters are placed where) and spits out a series of events (a "story").

The other one is that each level queries that sequence of events to find out if they fit the title or not.

So yes, Storyteller would allow multiple solutions if you were to make a level that allows them and many levels do (more than you would believe).

The reason why the game does not feel "sandboxy" is because we wanted players to be challenged into figuring out how to express interesting stories with the given characters and settings, and so we had to do a tradeoff between freedom and interesting storytelling challenges that erred on the side of puzzle solving because it just felt better. If you found the game repetitive (for the record, I don't think it is) imagine if you solved many levels doing the same thing over and over again because you always picked the laziest solution.

So, there is a game or addon that could give more freedom but it would need to be a very different game in order to be interesting.