As scenario designer and the initial writer of Fading Hearts I was reflecting on the sheer amount of undergrad math-type of problems there was. Is it possible for a certain event to happen before another event? What character knows what when the event occurs? Does a normal game writer have to deal with all these math proofs about the story structure?
Fading Hearts requires more active thinking than most of the visual novels I have seen and studied. It's more like a game because there are certain "rules" that the players could take advantage of or be held back by. Trying to make the game more accessible involved a lot of stats and probability. What would be the most common actions towards endings that each game player would take on their first tries? How could we reward players who figured out more about the story? Give them a better item? Get the NPCs to say how cool they were?
One of the hardest parts about designing Fading Hearts was designing the conflicts and the system of the A.I.'s. The way that the small collection of A.I.s is supposed to work to make an interactive story is to cause a conflict or problem while acting like characters that players can relate to. How can I set this up? Could I design few well intentioned characters and potentially a few bad ones to create some interesting conflict? How could I program their behaviour? What could the player do to change the outcomes?
The implementation of the "A.I.s" was implicit in the event logic, flag variables and the dialogue itself. Next time I'll probably make it more well defined.
Then I came across some economics problems which was just what I was looking for. One of them is called the Tragedy of the Commons. It talks about how a shared resource like a field for cows owned by several farmers can lead to ruin if every farmer acts in their own best interest by having too many cows. The A.I.s would be the farmers and the conflict would be the impending doom of the farms. How would you stop it? This problem by itself is a bit too simple for a full interactive story game but it would be good enough for part of a game.
That is what these games are. Dealing with a bunch of interpersonal relationships with individuals and groups to get an ending. Learn how each character acts and thinks from observing them and understanding which events leads to what. To master an interactive story game is to understand what forces are at work and how they can interact with each other.
