The Problem With 4D
The problem with a story in a game is the fact that these days multiple ways to get to an end need to be possible, its your decision and you should be able to respond on your own way to certain problems. To get a simple way into the system we are building its good to build a simple presentation of what we would like to accomplish in a short amount of time using limited tools. In this case its a visual picture game where the player can combine pictures with one another in order to create a hot cup of coffee.
MMMM Coffee!
To give the player multiple options we have added a few random props such as a balloon, scissors and the fact one can either have a cold or hot cup to work with. Rather quickly it became clear there is a great danger of a so called “Combinatorial Explosion” in creating this game. This stands for the big “Kaboom” that takes place when giving the player multiple options and/or paths to follow. The rule, “everything that can happen, will happen,” applies here.
Kablujeh!
This won’t be a problem for the players of the game, but it does create a rather big dilemma for potential creators of these games. Adding new options to a non linear game will become a hell for people if this can’t be guided in a simple way that keeps track of all the pictures needed. Its a good thing science provides. A linear model came up first with the help of some people who like solving these problems, your story is moving on the red space below and above there are squares with possibility’s around them, every time you move forward on the red line new possibility’s are determined on the action you have made to get there.
See it as a train that needs to fit the right cargo in its wagons.
This offers a rather solid base for expanding our afterward idiotic plans of non linear games. But there seems to be a rather interesting way of showing particle physics visually, a circle as it where with color coding, shapes and the linking property’s! Perfect for using in our system to keep track of possible paths one can walk. You could for example go past all outcomes that will shape the “particles” in a path explaining where the player will go trough. This also gives extra possibility’s to making several starts and ends to a particular sub story or mission.
Its simply walking from A up to GZ to the middle… or the other way around! No wait…
It seems complicated but using a shortened 4D vision it should be possible to filter out a great deal of this for the eventual story creation. Tasks that remain for now is making this work in a proper tool.
The game we are creating will be on this blog once we feel its expressing the emotion of drinking coffee in the early morning. So stay tuned on that one =)
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