AuthorTopic: What makes a good plot  (Read 6302 times)

Offline TheSilentRoomate

  • 0001
  • *
  • Posts: 49
  • Karma: +0/-0
    • View Profile

What makes a good plot

on: June 09, 2010, 10:41:17 pm
So i've been working on an exploration platformer for some time and I've got pretty much everything in the engine and the only thing standing between me and finishing the game is a plot line. I've been a really big fan of the mother series' plot lines, mainly mother 3 whose ending was sad enough to make me cry haha. So i was wondering what everybody likes in a plot line and how you go about creating one?

Offline Bieber boy

  • 0001
  • *
  • Posts: 11
  • Karma: +0/-2
  • Freelancer
    • View Profile

Re: What makes a good plot

Reply #1 on: June 09, 2010, 10:55:23 pm
Draw inspiration from games like Halo which offer extraordinarily unique plot lines and characters. The more violence the better, and make sure it's easy to follow so your audience doesn't get lost.
God made everything out of nothing, but everything still shows through.
-Bieber boy

Offline TheSilentRoomate

  • 0001
  • *
  • Posts: 49
  • Karma: +0/-0
    • View Profile

Re: What makes a good plot

Reply #2 on: June 09, 2010, 11:12:10 pm
Draw inspiration from games like Halo which offer extraordinarily unique plot lines and characters. The more violence the better, and make sure it's easy to follow so your audience doesn't get lost.
really? I didn't find halo's plot to be all that interesting, yeah easy to follow is always important haha
ps theres gonna be one less lonely girl

Offline Gil

  • 0100
  • ***
  • Posts: 1543
  • Karma: +1/-0
  • Too square to be hip
    • http://pixeljoint.com/p/475.htm
    • View Profile
    • My Portfolio

Re: What makes a good plot

Reply #3 on: June 10, 2010, 12:57:37 am
I think I explained this in a previous thread, but story progression is one of my pet peeves.

The following rule applies to almost anything in life: "You can't appreciate the grand, without having known the mundane". If you have giants in your game, you have to include regular sized people or they aren't giants. If you want your music to sound very bombastic, do it right after a quiet moment.

Like with art, everything is about contrast.

How to apply this on stories? You will never have a grand finale if the beginning wasn't small. Comics tend to start out from the superhero's appartment. If we see Superman in costume on page one, you'll never get the same scale of emotion as when you have him tear his clothes to reveal the costume in the middle act. In terms of games, start of small. Start in a village, with nothing out of the ordinary. Start in a blissful world. Let the player see the world as it is, before you rip it to shreds. Let that blissful part linger for just too long, get the player bored, lulled into false security. Make the entry into the game sudden.

Lots of games find these parts hard to use as a starter. It's too slow and doesn't suck the player in right away. They remedy this by starting with an action scene, maybe even unrelated to the main character. After that, the game goes to the small village. The small village can be anything, but it's the environment that best exemplifies the main character. For Superman, it's the newspaper office, for Frodo it's the shire, for Chrono Trigger it's the town square, for Naruto it's the village, etc. It can also be a person, for Luke Skywalker, it's Ben Kenobi for example.

You can always come back to this location when you feel you need a breather. It's the safe haven to which the character can return. In the final act, it's also the best place to blow up if you want some drama.

These quiet parts are what gives the scale. The bigger the contrast, the bigger the drama.

Offline TheSilentRoomate

  • 0001
  • *
  • Posts: 49
  • Karma: +0/-0
    • View Profile

Re: What makes a good plot

Reply #4 on: June 10, 2010, 01:43:40 am
Wow thanks that post was really good!
Do you think i should start the game off with a mundane start and then bring something in? Is it worth boring the player with the begining and risk losing their interest, or should i go with what most people do and have the action prelude thing? Or maybe just a little mysterious thing (could just be a shadow flying over or something pretty small) to catch the players attention in the slow beginning?

Offline zeid

  • 0010
  • *
  • Posts: 200
  • Karma: +1/-0
    • View Profile
    • Pixel Class

Re: What makes a good plot

Reply #5 on: June 10, 2010, 01:44:16 am
Personally I think what Gil is talking about is a little to generic for my taste.  Not to say it isn't a good approach or hasn't been done well.

But to contrast it I recall a game where you wake up in a morgue, to the surprise of those around you, (Can't recall what the game was called though) needles to say that was a pretty dramatic and memorable way to start a game.  It also leaves a lot of questions, why where you in the morgue, did someone try and kill you?  Why the hell weren't you still dead?  In another game you had to begin by hiding a dead body, also leaving the player with a lot of questions that can be uncovered as the game progresses.  Why am I hiding this body, did I kill this person?  Why would I want to kill this person?  Why don't I know anything up until this point?  I think it's not a bad approach.  Think of the way Lost was structured, they used this formula over and over (I would argue too much) so that there was always a question the viewer was left wanting answered.

I'm no expert on plots, but I don't suggest looking at the triple A games for clever story structure.  They are very generic and tend to all follow the same kinds of formuala.  That said finding a good plot to follow in an interactive game is fairly difficult.

I also have to say I usually feel a little insulted by the way triple A games go about forshadowing and such, it's usually so obvious what's about to happen.  This being combined with interactivity is just frustrating; think how many times you have said to yourself, "Oh man, I know that guy's about to batray me, why the hell wont the game let me do anything about it."  In a movie or book it just makes you feel like the character is a dumb ass, in a game it forces you to be that dumb ass.
« Last Edit: June 10, 2010, 01:51:07 am by zeid »
View my Devlog... unless you aren't ready to have your mind blown.

Offline Darien

  • 0010
  • *
  • Posts: 435
  • Karma: +0/-0
  • ...nine...ten...draw!
    • View Profile

Re: What makes a good plot

Reply #6 on: June 10, 2010, 04:53:53 am
I agree that Gil's suggestions seem a little typical.  I would suggest that you don't look to other games for plot ideas.  The turning your hometown upside down thing has been done to death, and although games like Mother 3 find ways to do it in new or interesting ways, I think it's worth considering other options.

It might be worthwhile to not bother establishing the status quo at the beginning of the game, especially if you already are thinking of it as 'boring'.  For instance, The Grapes of Wrath starts with Tom Joad coming back from prison and finding his family kicked out of their home and packing to go west.  We don't need to see them working in the fields to get an idea of what their life is like.  The Odyssey starts with Odysseus away from home after fighting in a long war--I'm not too familiar with the poem myself but I don't think Homer felt the need to show Odysseus holding hands with his wife so we know what he is trying to get back to.  The Road by Cormac McCarthy, a critically acclaimed American novel published in the past few years, starts well after some sort of civilization ending war/tragedy.

I think for starters you ought to think about what your main character or characters motivations are.  Again I would advise against the typical video game epic motivation: save the world.  The Grapes of Wrath, the Odyssey, and The Road are epic narratives or modeled after epics, but the primary character motivations are pretty small in proportion to the world.  The Joads are trying to survive/keep the family together, the father and son in the Road are trying to get someplace that might have a better climate/food/good people (more accurately, it is the father's goal to get his son to some place that isn't so dismal).  And in the Odyssey, perhaps the most important epic in Western literature, Odysseus is simply trying to get home so his wife doesn't marry another man.  Now, there are elements in each story that have grand proportions--the Joads are in the midst of the Great Depression, the father and son are in a dismal post-apocalyptic America, and Odysseus is constantly facing challenges from the gods, but what drives each story is a motivation that is self concerned and deeply personal.

I didn't pick these stories as examples because I like them, but that I think journey stories are good for illustrating the spark of a plot, especially for a platforming game, which inherently suggests travel and action.  I don't think your game would have to be 'epic' at all, but you ought to consider why your protagonist is platforming to where he is platforming and what that means to him.

Offline Rydin

  • 0011
  • **
  • Posts: 925
  • Karma: +0/-0
  • ...zzzt...
    • @thickDumps
    • View Profile
    • thickDumps

Re: What makes a good plot

Reply #7 on: June 10, 2010, 06:52:44 am
I like stories that are about movement.  Who moved where, and for what reason?  Also, how did the characters deal with the interruptions in their plans?  Did they accept their circumstances and give up, or did they do what had to be done and keep moving?
Man cannot remake himself without suffering for he is both the marble and the sculptor.

Offline crab2selout.png

  • 0011
  • **
  • Posts: 643
  • Karma: +0/-0
  • lost my left-most pixel in the war
    • View Profile

Re: What makes a good plot

Reply #8 on: June 10, 2010, 09:21:22 am
The following rule applies to almost anything in life: "You can't appreciate the grand, without having known the mundane". If you have giants in your game, you have to include regular sized people or they aren't giants. If you want your music to sound very bombastic, do it right after a quiet moment.

Like with art, everything is about contrast.

How to apply this on stories? You will never have a grand finale if the beginning wasn't small. Comics tend to start out from the superhero's appartment. If we see Superman in costume on page one, you'll never get the same scale of emotion as when you have him tear his clothes to reveal the costume in the middle act. In terms of games, start of small. Start in a village, with nothing out of the ordinary. Start in a blissful world. Let the player see the world as it is, before you rip it to shreds. Let that blissful part linger for just too long, get the player bored, lulled into false security. Make the entry into the game sudden.

So true when I think about it. People always make fun of hte fact that most stories or games would end if the end bad guy had just sent his elite soldiers after hte hero first instead of sending progressively stronger soldiers that merely serve to prepare the hero for the fight coming afterwards. But it's this progression that makes you realise how powerful the badguy was in the first place. How can you understand how repressive a worldwide emperor is without experiencing the tyranny of his country, state, and local employs?

Offline NaCl

  • 0010
  • *
  • Posts: 437
  • Karma: +0/-0
  • When it rains it pours
    • View Profile

Re: What makes a good plot

Reply #9 on: June 10, 2010, 10:22:25 am
Some very good points and insights made, I feel. All I will add is that I feel a simple story can work well in a game. Stories can definitely be complex, but they don't need to be. Sometimes a simpler story benefits the game. Many of my favorite games have simple stories, with simple yet powerful motivations. Ocarina of Time comes to mind; beat the bad guy, save the princess, restore balance to the world, with smaller goals stringing you along. Shadow of the Colossus, kill the big guys to bring your love back to life. Some games like Super Metroid and Doom have absolutely minimal story, and having a more elaborate one may not even make them better.