One experience is we once made a pipworks puzzle while the players health decreased till they solved it, however players were unable to work out you had to join the pipes
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That’s…weird. And it was just a typical pipe puzzle?
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Yeah but if you’re trying to go horror with your game, you should probably not give too much information. Fear of the unknown is a key horror element. Plus, having your story game be more sandbox while still having the guiding factor will drastically improve it. It gets quite boring to go on exactly one path all the time with 100% predictability.
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Well, there goes my next hit game idea where you get chased and killed by a pair of woebegone socks. What a shame!!1 
In all seriousness, this is a fantastic resource. I only have one gripe with it:
I feel it’s important to acknowledge the average attention span of a Roblox player. Most aren’t going to spend hours into one game if it’s just build up and character development. The alternative is to make them change in one saving moment, but you shoot down that idea as well.
Despite this, there isn’t really an ideal solution other than making it longer. Maybe splitting into short “chapters” like other games could work, but that seems like it’d lead to sections feeling rushed if done poorly.
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Something else that also always puts me off- deus ex machina.
For those of you not familiar with the term, it’s when a problem is solved with an unreasonable ending, that nobody predicted, nor could it actually happen.
Take, for example, a situation in which someone is about to fall down a cliff. The story takes place in real life. The story is almost done, how could she be saved?
Then, a magical unicorn swoops in and saves the main character. We’ve never been introduced to this unicorn, and weren’t even aware that magic existed in this world. It’s the very end of the movie, and the ending makes no sense.
This phenomenon that is deus ex machina is something I see way to often in story games, simply because the story writers need a quick fix and don’t know what they are doing.
It’s a terrible practice, please never fall victim.
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If you are able to mix character development in with events and gameplay, attention span shouldn’t be a problem (or your characters may not be interesting enough). Characters can develop without you consciously thinking about it.
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This topic is detailed well and I definitely agree with a lot if not all the concepts you presented. I have to say, it was fun when Camping introduced itself to the public being a new creative game coming to Roblox. Though, nowadays all the story-plots are the same and it’s obnoxious. I don’t want to see Bobby getting murdered by some creature/murderer every time and then you save the day by making them go poof.
Where is the spice.
In addition to all of this, when making a story one should also add more than 3 endings. It’s too generic to have Good Ending, Bad Ending Secret Ending. It would be better to have more than three.
Or, even better…
Leave the players with three endings but each of them are neither good or bad, they just are. This relates to your discussion on how the ending affects society and similar to how there is always a lose in every victory. If you were going to make a story based on a catastrophe, say an incoming tsunami there could be two endings neither good or bad- just are because a tsunami is inevitable.
One ending could be everyone makes it to high ground but all the buildings are destroyed oppose to the Second Ending where you some how build a wall to shift the tsunami’s direction but losing your NPC friend in the process instead of losing buildings.
Neither ending is good and both and one was losing an entire city while the other was losing your friend. This adds depth in a story and can teach someone about how not everything is always good or bad, they just are.
Does that make sense?
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Hi, everyone. I will be adding extra thoughts at the bottom on the post. Feel free to check ever so often!
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Personally, I would love to create one :cough: but I feel like creating a big game with a memorable storyline is a very hard and long task, especially with choices driving the game in different directions.
Additionally, because of how long it would take to make hours of cutscenes manually, there aren’t many story games with that experience.
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This is WAAAY too correct. If we would be able to detect if someone is under 13 or not would be useful (Without getting the age itself, of course. That’d be too much. )
As a person that likes story games alot, it’s definitely visible that other games succeed more. Even if the story is better, the other game’s community will handle it better.
I am currently working on a gigantic medieval game with experienced people. It will be a group based and gameplay based game. My main concern is that the story missions/quests will be too hard to understand for children, we are going out of normal boundaries here. So what are my options? To NOT go so advanced.
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It may be an old comment and I just found this thread and would like to read it all and possibly comment on it later, but I found this too good and felt it would be a crime not to state my agreement of this.
This may be slightly off topic so apologies in advance, but the anecdote I’d like to share is important in highlighting the value of this point and how it’s applicable not only to just story games and what the OP is outlining but to development in general.
I lead the development of a roleplay group rather than a story game or something of the sort. And if I don’t assume my players are stupid, then I just end up generating mob mentality and hate over something I do. It’s difficult to make a change without mass outrage from one side or the other. The people in this community are well into their teens as well, still have to treat them like they’re five.
We currently have a dynamic in our game where prisoners can fight off guards. Guards have riot shields to block bullets. When I announced an update to add armour to give bullet resistance and that shields would be temporarily removed to demo the gameplay dynamic, people didn’t read “temporarily” and assumed I was removing them permanently. This led to all of the following:
- An entire department threatening to strike
- Several members threatening to resign
- Increased toxicity for around an hour
- Ad hominem attacks to my person
- A change-org petition to have me removed from my position (I’m honoured to have done something enough to have gotten people to make a change-org petition against me, lmao)
It wasn’t until I had to literally talk to them as if they were five years old that they understood what was happening in the update and conceded (although didn’t want to admit they were in the wrong and found another point of attack, but that subsided and is also irrelevant).
You can trust your players to make inferences or make them gather their own information through gameplay, but you shouldn’t tip the scales by giving them overwhelmingly obvious expositions about current circumstances nor obscuring it and hoping they’re smart enough to know things. It’s a weird scenario that you have to find an equally weird balance for, often impossible to do.
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I really love this! It was definitely worth it to read all of this. I LOVE how you put so much detail into your writing! I would definitely give it a 
!
Keep up the great work!
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Indeed, you need a good balance. In the example I gave about Bobby walking into a room in which we know a murderer is waiting, it should be pretty obvious that that’s what’s going to happen—it had to be significant earlier, and we have to at least know Bobby pretty well. Stemming from this, developers, don’t make characters mid-story just to make us like them and have them die. Make them important.
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In November me and a couple of friends developed Do Not Look Up with the intention of creating a story game based off of the SCP canon. In hindsight the entire plot was SCP: Containment Breach without the SCPs, however a lot was learned about story games. I’d recommend looking at games like Detroit: Become Human or The Last of Us for good story games that have interesting mechanics which improve games from a story, to a narrative.
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I work on a game like Entry point, great cutscenes, great story, as much as realistic as can be… (I am not copying entry point, I am making something inspired by it and some post apoc games)
I am working on a game like the last of us, since december 2019…
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I agree with you on this. Don’t get me wrong, whenever I play story games I have a fun time, but I’ve noticed the plot for each one is very similar to each other, which gets repetitive. I’ve actually thought of making a game with a good story with elements from Avatar: The Last Airbender, Star Wars: The Clone Wars, and so many other shows that did well, with my own elements added, of course. And when I mean elements I mean adding some of the plot points from them(Not sure if that makes sense, but hopefully you’ll understand it). Anyways nice tutorial, hopefully we’ll see more story games with better plots.
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This post was quite a story itself! Nice job!
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This reminds me of the anime The Promised Neverland. The characters are approaching death under the name of adoption and that happy little life was all just an illusion. Oof, time to escape! If this was a roblox game, I’d want the players to think for themselves to gather items and dodge the mom’s radar. It would make a good story.
This is one of my favorite post
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