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Using the Hero's Journey in Games
How
Do I Design With It?
The most important thing is to figure out how many levels you have, and which ones already need to have a particular story line within them. The fewer levels you have, the more elements you must try to squeeze into a level. It is possible to move levels into different acts or parts of the hero's journey in order to lengthen or shorten different areas. It is also possible to cut out a chunk of levels to shorten the game -- or to add levels to lengthen the game. The general concept of what constitutes a level can be fairly vague and misleading, so make sure early on that you have a clear understanding of how large your levels will be and what will be included in each level. Some games have levels that last five minutes while some last five hours. A RPG may be one large seamless world without any true levels. If you have a large, open ended or seamless transitioning game, you'll generally still be breaking it down into regions, areas, or tasks which can still be represented just like a level. In the case of a game with really large levels, a single level may encompass many different acts of the story or different stages of the journey. Regardless, it must be fairly clear to the player which part of the story they are in, what they are trying to accomplish and why. Game
Length This chart help determine the desired amounts of game play. I use it to add up (bottom to top) to the total gameplay time desired. Your game may have other things in it to take into consideration, so think about everything the player will be doing in the course of the game.
Begin using the outline of the hero's journey by filling in the known blanks, my example is available in Listing One. Start with how little or how much you know and then use the guidelines for a hero's journey to fill in the blanks. The outline will often tell you what should go into your blank spots, it also is another good initial guide to get you thinking about different characters and how they fit into the story. I find it useful to add additional lines that say "Introduce Good Character #1" or "Fight Bad Character #2", when you know that you need to have an additional character, and then you can later decide which character fits into that spot. A great place to introduce characters is during the beginning of the fourth act (link #3) when the main character often finds some new ally to help him. The
initial story concept doesn't have to be precise or perfect, but it
gives you something on which to build. Sometimes using this outline
as a brainstorming tool is very helpful. You may know that the hero
has to start somewhere and get to somewhere else, so now you have the
beginning and the end (hey, it's a start!). As you think about the different
stages of the journey and how they relate to the different acts of the
story, you'll begin to realize that certain things can only happen in
certain places. This makes it much easier to start filling in the blanks
because you know that there are points in the story where conflict must
exist, and that the conflict is generated for a reason. Your job is
just to figure out how to make it fun and interesting. Having the story take place in a single location throughout the game can be very boring. Take a look at any good James Bond movie, and you'll notice that he almost always travels to several locations, usually three, throughout the movie. If the game travels to a really wide variety of locations then you'll find that it becomes hard to come up with reasons why the player is constantly on the move. A few types of games, like a space combat or exploration games, might use this to their advantage, but it has to be done carefully. Having three different locations in the game will add enough variety to the game to keep it interesting, but not so much as to make it more difficult to produce. The point of having a new location in the game is to add interest and variety for the player. When you're laying out your game structure, think about having it progress to several different locations, this will also help you think of some new ideas on some levels because you are either having to transition to a new area or are exploring one. It's
really hard to write a story or design a game without taking into effect
all the other potential problems, restrictions, needs and requirements
that your game will have. If you spend tons of time writing a great
story that takes places on twenty different planets, over the course
of a hundred years, and meets hundreds of characters without taking
into consideration all of your limitations, then you will have to spend
a lot of time reworking your story or figuring out how to limit it in
some way. If you've read the entire Dune series of books, and
you were given the task of making a game based on this license (Westwood
did a great job with Dune II but the story is very minimal),
you would know how difficult it would be to make a game encompassing
that entire universe. It's better to start off with a simple story and
refine it slowly over time. Start with events that relate to the levels,
and then progressively refine the rest of the events in the story. There
is room to polish the story and the dialog later, so the most important
thing in the beginning is to make your story fit the game play and vice
versa. "Hero with a thousand faces" Joseph Campbell - http://www.jcf.org/27wm.htm The Writers Journey Christopher Vogler - http://writerscomputer.com/cgi-bin/SoftCart.exe/store/info/writers_journey.htm?E+writers Conflict Action and Suspense William Noble, ISBN: 0898799074 "Nine Act Story Structure" by David Siegel - http://www.dsiegel.com/film/Film_home.html Mythic Structure in Role-Playing Games J. Patrick McDonald - http://www.interink.com/~jpm/myth.html
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