How important is story and clues

Hi Guys,

After a recent review, it got me thinking about how important a good story is and how to set clues...
Should they just reveal the story or does the player need to unravel the story.

Even something as simple as one corridor can be packed with a variety of clues, but how do you go about setting good clues, do you have subtitles or do they reveal themselves only after you complete an object.

Yeah, I kinda underestimated the work that goes into gameplay and a story line.

What are your thoughts when unravelling a story to the gamer? How best do you deal with this.

 

Somewhat relevant thread:
http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/procedural-vs-handcrafted.395141/

Highly relevant book:
www.amazon.com/Story-Substance-Structure-Principles-Screenwriting/dp/0060391685/

The first question to answer is "Can you write a story that doesn't make people cringe and will be enjoyable and engaging to a good portion of the people who play your game?". If you can't deliver on those two very important aspects, then I wouldn't bother wasting time telling a story that no one will like.

Telling good stories is a skill. People who have that skill usually will have acquired it through a combination of practice, experience and knowledge gained from other sources like books or academic education. Unless you already are an experienced writer, your first big story will suck. You can go ahead and spend the time to read the book I've linked and it will improve the quality of your story by a great deal. But it still might suck, if you lack the general experience in story-writing.

For comparison: I've got two game ideas floating around in my head (totally never gonna finish either of those). For one I've cut out the story entirely (just not explain anything, pure gameplay) and the other would be "Two guys murdering people to get a cup of coffee each, in every level."
If I would go for a real story, I'd want to put in the amount of effort needed to make it not suck.

And I don't even know what headaches come with putting a linear story into an interactive medium like a game. I'm sure it's not a trivial task, but I lack the experience to tell you anything meaningful about it.

 

Browse some discussions on interactive fiction (text game) forums. Since text game developers don't have to worry about graphics, camera, controls, etc., they're free to put a lot more thought into story.

I think you'll find lots of discussion about the different types of story development. Some games have linear "on-rail" stories that can be very tightly crafted but offer little player choice. I think a lot of horror games fall into this category. You can reveal a linear story while still allowing the player to make non-story-related choices. Other games are completely opposite, like Dwarf Fortress or KSP, where stories are completely up to the player, but there's little opportunity for the author to develop a deep theme or plot. And then there are games in the middle like BioWare's where the author hard-codes a few paths that the player can choose to follow.

Each of these (linear, branching, and open world) is an almost entirely different skillset. That's why games written by well-known non-interactive authors are so often bad. Similarly, it's hard to get strongly-thematic stories in open world games because you have much less control (and also the developer is busy on the technical challenges of making the open world work).

As far as dropping clues in your game, no one cares about backstory. But they do care about how the backstory causes things to be in the game. In other words, the items and events in your game need to be consistent with the story and hint at more depth behind them, but you don't want to clobber the player over the head with story. Horror games involve a lot of exploration, and it's more fun for players to feel like they're uncovering the story on their own rather than being fed a story.