Josh Ling @ Adopt Me!

Ingold cites The Last Express and Blade Runner adventure games as (severely flawed) masterpieces that manage a lot of complex world state for effective plotting #GDC18pic.twitter.com/NHUJDOrDhv

ok now here's the meat for narrative designers: Ingold argues for an "atomic" model of systemic game narrative, where all story beats are "self-branching" based on world state, player's knowledge model, and time / relevance #GDC18pic.twitter.com/WFzCeFLh3D

their solution is "scope" / to put story atoms in 4 "buckets"... it goes from local / very specific on the left, to global / always applicable situations on the right #GDC18pic.twitter.com/FcRKThFPJ3

you should also define your story structure / story loop for your game... Heaven's Vault uses "episodes", which are also atoms with their own preconditions ("leads")... no dead air, the next most relevant episode gets triggered #GDC18pic.twitter.com/bgD9zXDTGm

big implications for quest design here: episodes have minimum exit conditions and maximum exit conditions... Ingold emphasizes reaching the maximum point is bad, it means the player is staying too long and boring themselves, so you have to literally kick them out #GDC18pic.twitter.com/RDPrry8A0U

The engine procedurally generates your investigations / "evidence", can tune it easier or harder, can automatically avoid redundancy (e.g. instead of finding another clue about X, it will generate Y instead)... separation of game writing from game narrative (!) #gdc18pic.twitter.com/rOjs9mfw4T

now finally approaching emergent authored narrative in games; you just write so much story you can't possibly hand branch it all... that means you need "narrative debug" tools that automatically test your story chains to help find edge cases and balance the unlock curve #gdc18pic.twitter.com/lZikl1YA3G