MVP for short story driven experience?

How do you envision an MVP for a heavily story-driven experience? For example, Brothers: Tale of Two Sons, Little NIghtmares, ABZU, etc. Or Inside, Limbo.

 

That would be text based twine

 

I'm not familiar with these games, but I imagine the process for figuring out your MVP is the same.

You go through, identify the absolute core, required mechanics/elements and which are 'nice to have'.

Is this cutscene absolutely crucial, or can we do the same thing with a textbox? etc.

 

I'm not sure that ABZU is what I would call heavily story-based, at least not in a traditional way. It is more like a fairly simple message that is communicated through the environment to the player in many different forms. Which is really where games shine in terms of storytelling.

The way I see it, writing a story begins with a simple message. In written stories, the message is demonstrated in words, through dialogue and (if the story is badly written) descriptions or (if the story is well written) evocation.

But words are only a substitute for the existence of the thing itself. In games, the thing exists visually. Instead of a declaration of something in words, which is unfortunately necessary sometimes in writing, in games things can react to behaviour, can show the effects of something dynamic that leads over time to the same conclusion.

In short, even for a game that is heavily story based, I would MVP the shape, form and movement of the game world first, and fill whatever is left out in words later.

 

All those games have few hours of gameplay. 2-3 hours.

Examples below.

Inside:

Little Nightmares:

Brothers:

ABZU:

At the same time the central "core" of the game is relatively simple. (minimal platforming, simple puzzles, etc).

Story-driven. ABZU isn't difficult mechanically, and is largely centered around unfolding the story for the player. Like the rest of the games in the list.

 

Not familiar with most of those games, but Limbo actually had a demo which you could consider an MVP/vertical slice.

To me it was more mood focused than story focused, but it was a great demo.

 

I'd want one scene that can stand on it's own (in terms of delivering an emotional impact), and also utilizes all the core gameplay mechanics.

Games like this depend on the art and sound to deliver the emotional impact, so I don't think you can abstract that away.

 

Huh. This is helpful. I need to think it over.

 

As story is important, getting feel for the flow of the beat is paramount.

I know I'm working on such a game, you have to write with leading action and clear broadcasting of boundaries.

Thrust me, I'm a visual person, going by visual first will lead you astray and make you enamoured too early with potential roadblock. The reason is that gameplay and visual can be abstract and independent of each scene, because they have self contain emotion. Unlike story where emotion is build up through the progression, therefore consistency is key.

Or else you can spend 10 years like me trying to retrofit ideas that work together. It will be painful. I started with ad hoc gameplay, then vignette images, but in the end nothing beat text.

Basically text will be your production list, gameplay and visual will derive from it, to implement the concept they hold. Tou you still have to write with gameplay and visual in mind. Just like movie being visual do start with a written scenario.

 

I have played those. For an MVP, you could build the core gameplay mechanics just to test to see if people connect with that. The story probably would not be in an MVP game, but the story for the game could be presented in the form of a short 30-60 second video.

For Brothers: Tale of Two Sons, I would imagine the MVP would have tested the unique control scheme for controlling the brothers. For ABZU, the control scheme was straight forward, so maybe the MVP would have been a small scene with some of the visual assets to check out the vibe of the game.

 

In my opinion, and MVP is a product that can be shipped as a product and support as a viable business, the very minimum of that. So in this case, an MVP for a game like that depends on the business model, if you're going to sell it for $20, then you need '$20' of content in your MVP. That content could be complex or it could just be text (a book is a story driven experience and sells for $10-$20 and has no other features except text).

Otherwise if you're talking about an MVP more as a proof of concept or a prototype then that's different. All you need to do is prove what you think is the biggest risk with regard to your project and your team. If you're great at writing story, you don't need to prove that, instead you might want to prove the mood, look and feel. If you've never written a story, then maybe a book or comic or a series of short stories is where you should start.

 

This.

MVP is minimum viable product. It's the absolute minimum required to ship, not a prototype or proof of concept. The idea is to identify the absolutely crucial elements, and separate those from the 'nice to have' or non essential elements.

For a heavily story driven game the MVP would like cut optional side content, non essential cut scenes, etc.

In terms of doing a proof of concept, I think this would probably be closer to storyboarding in film.

 

Actually, I define MVP as just enough product to gather as much feedback as possible from potential early adopters. In physical product development, an MVP can even be as simple as merely an image used in a pre-order form. The main goal of an MVP is to gather feedback early in the process. An MVP can find out if the market wants a product before large time and monetary investments are made into developing the product.

 

I view an MVP as an important tool to use well before what you are describing. I think of an MVP as a tool for gathering feedback. A good MVP should be able to get enough feedback before deciding whether or not to actually build the product. An MVP should try to answer the question "Does the market wants this product?"