I think there should be an exception for "evil villain monologues" though. Or Cardassian monologues since they like to do it so much (not mutually exclusive!)
I absolutely love how much input you guys have given me! I also appreciate the different viewpoints and I will try to implement it into my own style to the best of my ability.
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
My very first Foundry Mission, Healing Old Wounds, has been completely reworked and rereleased!
(Also, a quick shout-out, please visit Starbase UGC for all your Foundry needs!)
I absolutely love how much input you guys have given me! I also appreciate the different viewpoints and I will try to implement it into my own style to the best of my ability.
best of luck to you
These are the Voyages on the STO forum, the final frontier. Our continuing mission: to explore Pretentious Posts, to seek out new Overreactions and Misinformation , to boldly experience Cynicism like no man has before.......
With the Foundry, my goal with my missions was to provide interesting back story and interactive dialogue options. I generally avoided any sort of descriptive writing because it's inappropriate for the medium. Essentially all of the dialogue should be actual dialogue, even if it's a lecture at a mission briefing.
However, I don't agree with the sentiments of one of the first replies which was that "Nobody cares!". I think providing a back story and questions you can choose to ask a character creates for an immersive experience.
I think the major trick is to never force more on the player than is absolutely necessary. Give them the option f getting more information, but don't force it on them. For example, if someone is from a low gravity world, you put a dialogue response that says something like "Tell me about your home world." or "Where are you from?" Then the character would respond with the relevant information. At worst if the player decides they're not interested they can skip reading and click back to the main dialogue, and if they just don't give a damn they won't click that choice to begin with.
My missions were all incredibly long and to be honest when I published my first one I pretty much figured I'd wasted a lot of my time and that no one would play it. However, in the end a fair number of people did seem to enjoy my missions, so I think there is an audience even for relatively long winded stories (or there was, I'm not completely sure anymore with the state of the player base). Based on my experience, I would say that being too wordy is not necessarily a danger, if you do it well.
This is really the hardest part of this particular development process. With a novel, you can just lay down words, here, you have to be as sparse as possible, yet still convey your entire thought as clearly as possible.
And even then, it might not work as you want. Personally, I write as similarly as I can to the authors I enjoy reading. I expect that most do the same, and herein lies the slippery slope, not everyone can read the same way you do, wants to read the same way you do, demands the same thing out of the written word that you do.
your choices then are to either write in the voice you want to write in, and let the chips fall where they may, or write in the voice that you feel will be the most palatable to the masses. In the end its entirely your choice on who you want to appreciate your missions then most.
Even in a novel every word counts. Novels are by definition more writing oriented, but I wouldn't say you can just lay down words indiscriminately. It's actually quite a challenge to convey everything that is important, while keeping the proper pacing, and avoiding getting bogged down. It's always a delicate balance between cutting what you can and cutting too much. So, I actually don't think the overall mentality of the two mediums is that different. That being said, my problem with any story is never being too brief, so this could be unique to me.
I think the major difference is that in a video game all the writing is dialogue and there is next to no descriptive writing. You also don't have direct control over the protagonist so you have to keep things generic to a certain extent, or at least leave enough room through dialogue options to satisfy everyone.
However, I don't agree with the sentiments of one of the first replies which was that "Nobody cares!". I think providing a back story and questions you can choose to ask a character creates for an immersive experience.
That was me and actually, I agree with your sentiment. But here is the thing I wanted to express as clearly as possible:
The back story you talk of here usually does not advance the story. And thats a bad thing more often than not.
To stay in the example of TWOK: Never does the movie waste any time mentioning Khans background story. We only ever get glimpses of it.
He is a bad guy, apparently with a "superior intellect", who once tried to kill Kirk and his Crew. He was marooned on this world. The world turned into a desert, Khans friends and his wife died and now he wants revenge. Thats it!
Its basicly the plot of the criminal getting out of prison, hunting the detective, who got him into prison.
Never in the movie do we get anything about Khans past on earth, where he is from, what the Eugenics Wars are, what "superior intellect" means. We are never told that he is genetically engeneered, that his wife was a crewman of Enterprise, who chose exile with Khan, what the nature of their relationship was. Never do we hear what Khans ideology is, his beliefs or worldviews, or what he actually did on earth. We dont even know who his first Lieutenant is. Is he his son?
Because none of that EXPOSITION would advanced the STORY of the movie. None of that would be needed to give the audience orientation: Who is who, who does what, why and where the heck are we anyway?
So, if in doubt, get rid of all the 'back story', cause usually its nothing else than the author indulging himself in the world he created for his own amusement. Which is fine, but if it doesnt advance the story, the mission, then those playing your mission will lose interest. They dont gain much from all the backstory.
I think the major trick is to never force more on the player than is absolutely necessary. Give them the option f getting more information, but don't force it on them. For example, if someone is from a low gravity world, you put a dialogue response that says something like "Tell me about your home world." or "Where are you from?" Then the character would respond with the relevant information. At worst if the player decides they're not interested they can skip reading and click back to the main dialogue, and if they just don't give a damn they won't click that choice to begin with.
The ability to let the player choose how much back story they want is a good path to take. In my only published mission so far I do this in a couple of ways:
I have a couple of characters with default dialogs in the first scene of my mission who will give you good plot summaries of the TOS episodes "Wink of an Eye" and "For the World is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky" -- only with their own personal spin added. Knowing these plotlines is integral to the story, but having all the detail isn't necessary to progress the plot. In fact, both of these back-story plot lines get summarized down to a couple of sentences each by one of the characters later in the mission. That character gives just the scant pertinent facts to give the plot some substance. It also makes for a nice moment for those players that did talk to the back-story characters to see one of the protagonists refer to them and their stories.
The problem with default dialogues, though, is that some people will skip them entirely, not knowing there is valuable information there, while others will engage in the dialogue not knowing that they are about to get a load of back story dumped on them. They also junk up the mini-map with optional dialogue markers. So there's a judgement call you need to make on whether to use characters with default dialogues to tell your back story or not.
Another method I used was later in the story where one of your BOFF's gives you the option to get moving or learn more about the planet you are on. Here it's much more obvious that you are getting an opportunity to run off and pew-pew or have the background of the story enriched. The thing you need to take care of here is that if a character is speaking, you don't want them to sound like a computer -- even if it's a Vulcan BOFF. They should offer opinions and insights as part of the lecture. I think this is one of the few places that "Continue" responses to a character are appropriate, but even here, they can be avoided.
Another method I've seen is having a character refer to a console or PADD and tell you there is additional information there if you want to read it. This let's you present encyclopedic information but allow your player to skip it if they aren't interested.
Similarly, you can have a story character refer to a character with a default dialogue who has the backstory. This can be done humorously, too, as in "If you REALLY want to know more about this place, talk to old Jeb over there. But, I'm warning you, once you get him started he's going to drone on and on about glob flies."
That was me and actually, I agree with your sentiment. But here is the thing I wanted to express as clearly as possible:
The back story you talk of here usually does not advance the story. And thats a bad thing more often than not.
To stay in the example of TWOK: Never does the movie waste any time mentioning Khans background story. We only ever get glimpses of it.
He is a bad guy, apparently with a "superior intellect", who once tried to kill Kirk and his Crew. He was marooned on this world. The world turned into a desert, Khans friends and his wife died and now he wants revenge. Thats it!
Its basicly the plot of the criminal getting out of prison, hunting the detective, who got him into prison.
Never in the movie do we get anything about Khans past on earth, where he is from, what the Eugenics Wars are, what "superior intellect" means. We are never told that he is genetically engeneered, that his wife was a crewman of Enterprise, who chose exile with Khan, what the nature of their relationship was. Never do we hear what Khans ideology is, his beliefs or worldviews, or what he actually did on earth. We dont even know who his first Lieutenant is. Is he his son?
Because none of that EXPOSITION would advanced the STORY of the movie. None of that would be needed to give the audience orientation: Who is who, who does what, why and where the heck are we anyway?
So, if in doubt, get rid of all the 'back story', cause usually its nothing else than the author indulging himself in the world he created for his own amusement. Which is fine, but if it doesnt advance the story, the mission, then those playing your mission will lose interest. They dont gain much from all the backstory.
I would argue this is the difference between a movie and a video game though. A video game has the potential to be interactive. With a movie you get a set plot line and set dialogue for everyone. You have to cater to the lowest common denominator.
Also, I think it depends on what you consider STO to be, or maybe what you want to make it. If you consider it to be an action game, which is probably fair considering the standard set by Cryptic's missions, then I can see the argument for keeping the plot to a minimum.
For my part I felt more like the game should have been a Mass Effect style RPG, or at least with the universe behind it, it had the potential to be one. So that is more of what I was going for.
I think the key is that not all players and not all authors are the same. I very much wish there were more Foundry missions with a lot of backstory and questions you could ask the characters because that's what I'm looking for, and hence what I ended up creating.
Anyway, I think the truth is there is no actual wrong answer here, it's just a matter of opinion and what audience you are focusing on. I do feel, however, that trying to cater to as many people as possible by keeping a lot of information optional is a very important aspect. I've at least tried to do that, but then again my missions were like 2 hours long, so I suppose it's debatable how well I succeeded.
That was me and actually, I agree with your sentiment. But here is the thing I wanted to express as clearly as possible:
The back story you talk of here usually does not advance the story. And thats a bad thing more often than not.
To stay in the example of TWOK: Never does the movie waste any time mentioning Khans background story. We only ever get glimpses of it.
He is a bad guy, apparently with a "superior intellect", who once tried to kill Kirk and his Crew. He was marooned on this world. The world turned into a desert, Khans friends and his wife died and now he wants revenge. Thats it!
Its basicly the plot of the criminal getting out of prison, hunting the detective, who got him into prison.
Never in the movie do we get anything about Khans past on earth, where he is from, what the Eugenics Wars are, what "superior intellect" means. We are never told that he is genetically engeneered, that his wife was a crewman of Enterprise, who chose exile with Khan, what the nature of their relationship was. Never do we hear what Khans ideology is, his beliefs or worldviews, or what he actually did on earth. We dont even know who his first Lieutenant is. Is he his son?
Because none of that EXPOSITION would advanced the STORY of the movie. None of that would be needed to give the audience orientation: Who is who, who does what, why and where the heck are we anyway?
So, if in doubt, get rid of all the 'back story', cause usually its nothing else than the author indulging himself in the world he created for his own amusement. Which is fine, but if it doesnt advance the story, the mission, then those playing your mission will lose interest. They dont gain much from all the backstory.
TWOK is a good example of TV show vs videogame.
I watched TWOK recently, less than a month ago, for the first time. I've seen DS9/ent/TNG, but except for a few movies and some episodes when I was a kid, never seen TOS. I know Khan and the eugenic wars, but nothing about his first meeting with Kirk, his wife, etc...
So, when I watched TWOK, Khan talked about his wife, and Kirk leaving him. At first I was confused (is there another Khan movie I missed ?), and I wanted to know more, but I understood it was probably shown in a TOS episode. I could have checked on wiki/memory alpha for informations, but it would have taken a lot of time, and I would have been overwhelmed by informations, and possibly the ending of the movie I was watching.
So, I just watched the movie and that's all. I still don't know what happened to his wife, who she was, and why he was left and not put in jail/whatever.
In a videogame, for the same situation, you have the opportunity to leave an optional padd/discussion for more informations. The relevant informations. If the player want them, he ask. Otherwise, he can continue.
Always have a fast way (I'll kill you evil guy !), and an optional "I want to know your devious plan first" way.
Anyway, I think the truth is there is no actual wrong answer here, it's just a matter of opinion and what audience you are focusing on. I do feel, however, that trying to cater to as many people as possible by keeping a lot of information optional is a very important aspect. I've at least tried to do that, but then again my missions were like 2 hours long, so I suppose it's debatable how well I succeeded.
I'd say you did a fairly good job of it, I took away a little inspiration from your mission when i started writing my own in the way that even low level officers had avalible interactions
These are the Voyages on the STO forum, the final frontier. Our continuing mission: to explore Pretentious Posts, to seek out new Overreactions and Misinformation , to boldly experience Cynicism like no man has before.......
I love to worl build. A time to search has an Ardanan cloud city which is being loaned to the Cardassians a la 20th century Hong Kong and my current project is set on a low tech Klingon farming colony. I like to keep the backstory optional for those who want to know more but I try to set up as much visually as I can. I usually dream up a world and then try to imagine a story I can tell in that world.
A TIME TO SEARCH: ENTER MY FOUNDRY MISSION at the RISA SYSTEM Parallels: my second mission for Fed aligned Romulans.
My mission turned out to be pretty wordy, so, I ended up dealing with it two different ways. One, some places I give the option of picking the short-short version and two, some places I used mission info to bold the important stuff, so that people can skim if they want to.
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
My very first Foundry Mission, Healing Old Wounds, has been completely reworked and rereleased!
(Also, a quick shout-out, please visit Starbase UGC for all your Foundry needs!)
My mission turned out to be pretty wordy, so, I ended up dealing with it two different ways. One, some places I give the option of picking the short-short version and two, some places I used mission info to bold the important stuff, so that people can skim if they want to.
I mostly give backstories and the like in optional interactions unless they apply directly to the plot. Like, for example, the dossiers on several of my OCs that I put into an optional console in "Bait and Switch". Or for another one, in Part 2 there's a Ferengi warship. If you're somebody who's, for example, only familiar with the Ferengi through DS9, you can ask the guy you're talking to about it and he gives my fanon explanation for the portrayal discrepancies*.
* Namely, that the Ferengi are like the Federation in that they're a peace-loving people with less-than-benign neighbors, so they maintain a military for self-defense. And like the Federation, they don't like to speak of themselves as a military power.
"Great War! / And I cannot take more! / Great tour! / I keep on marching on / I play the great score / There will be no encore / Great War! / The War to End All Wars"
— Sabaton, "Great War"
Comments
I think there should be an exception for "evil villain monologues" though. Or Cardassian monologues since they like to do it so much (not mutually exclusive!)
Foundry Mission Database
Check out my Foundry missions:
Standalone - The Great Escape - The Galaxy's Fair - Purity I: Of Denial - Return to Oblivion
Untitled Series - Duritanium Man - The Improbable Bulk - Commander Rihan
(Also, a quick shout-out, please visit Starbase UGC for all your Foundry needs!)
best of luck to you
However, I don't agree with the sentiments of one of the first replies which was that "Nobody cares!". I think providing a back story and questions you can choose to ask a character creates for an immersive experience.
I think the major trick is to never force more on the player than is absolutely necessary. Give them the option f getting more information, but don't force it on them. For example, if someone is from a low gravity world, you put a dialogue response that says something like "Tell me about your home world." or "Where are you from?" Then the character would respond with the relevant information. At worst if the player decides they're not interested they can skip reading and click back to the main dialogue, and if they just don't give a damn they won't click that choice to begin with.
My missions were all incredibly long and to be honest when I published my first one I pretty much figured I'd wasted a lot of my time and that no one would play it. However, in the end a fair number of people did seem to enjoy my missions, so I think there is an audience even for relatively long winded stories (or there was, I'm not completely sure anymore with the state of the player base). Based on my experience, I would say that being too wordy is not necessarily a danger, if you do it well.
Even in a novel every word counts. Novels are by definition more writing oriented, but I wouldn't say you can just lay down words indiscriminately. It's actually quite a challenge to convey everything that is important, while keeping the proper pacing, and avoiding getting bogged down. It's always a delicate balance between cutting what you can and cutting too much. So, I actually don't think the overall mentality of the two mediums is that different. That being said, my problem with any story is never being too brief, so this could be unique to me.
I think the major difference is that in a video game all the writing is dialogue and there is next to no descriptive writing. You also don't have direct control over the protagonist so you have to keep things generic to a certain extent, or at least leave enough room through dialogue options to satisfy everyone.
Click here for my Foundry tutorial on Creating A Custom Interior Map.
That was me and actually, I agree with your sentiment. But here is the thing I wanted to express as clearly as possible:
The back story you talk of here usually does not advance the story. And thats a bad thing more often than not.
To stay in the example of TWOK: Never does the movie waste any time mentioning Khans background story. We only ever get glimpses of it.
He is a bad guy, apparently with a "superior intellect", who once tried to kill Kirk and his Crew. He was marooned on this world. The world turned into a desert, Khans friends and his wife died and now he wants revenge. Thats it!
Its basicly the plot of the criminal getting out of prison, hunting the detective, who got him into prison.
Never in the movie do we get anything about Khans past on earth, where he is from, what the Eugenics Wars are, what "superior intellect" means. We are never told that he is genetically engeneered, that his wife was a crewman of Enterprise, who chose exile with Khan, what the nature of their relationship was. Never do we hear what Khans ideology is, his beliefs or worldviews, or what he actually did on earth. We dont even know who his first Lieutenant is. Is he his son?
Because none of that EXPOSITION would advanced the STORY of the movie. None of that would be needed to give the audience orientation: Who is who, who does what, why and where the heck are we anyway?
So, if in doubt, get rid of all the 'back story', cause usually its nothing else than the author indulging himself in the world he created for his own amusement. Which is fine, but if it doesnt advance the story, the mission, then those playing your mission will lose interest. They dont gain much from all the backstory.
The ability to let the player choose how much back story they want is a good path to take. In my only published mission so far I do this in a couple of ways:
I have a couple of characters with default dialogs in the first scene of my mission who will give you good plot summaries of the TOS episodes "Wink of an Eye" and "For the World is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky" -- only with their own personal spin added. Knowing these plotlines is integral to the story, but having all the detail isn't necessary to progress the plot. In fact, both of these back-story plot lines get summarized down to a couple of sentences each by one of the characters later in the mission. That character gives just the scant pertinent facts to give the plot some substance. It also makes for a nice moment for those players that did talk to the back-story characters to see one of the protagonists refer to them and their stories.
The problem with default dialogues, though, is that some people will skip them entirely, not knowing there is valuable information there, while others will engage in the dialogue not knowing that they are about to get a load of back story dumped on them. They also junk up the mini-map with optional dialogue markers. So there's a judgement call you need to make on whether to use characters with default dialogues to tell your back story or not.
Another method I used was later in the story where one of your BOFF's gives you the option to get moving or learn more about the planet you are on. Here it's much more obvious that you are getting an opportunity to run off and pew-pew or have the background of the story enriched. The thing you need to take care of here is that if a character is speaking, you don't want them to sound like a computer -- even if it's a Vulcan BOFF.
Another method I've seen is having a character refer to a console or PADD and tell you there is additional information there if you want to read it. This let's you present encyclopedic information but allow your player to skip it if they aren't interested.
Similarly, you can have a story character refer to a character with a default dialogue who has the backstory. This can be done humorously, too, as in "If you REALLY want to know more about this place, talk to old Jeb over there. But, I'm warning you, once you get him started he's going to drone on and on about glob flies."
I would argue this is the difference between a movie and a video game though. A video game has the potential to be interactive. With a movie you get a set plot line and set dialogue for everyone. You have to cater to the lowest common denominator.
Also, I think it depends on what you consider STO to be, or maybe what you want to make it. If you consider it to be an action game, which is probably fair considering the standard set by Cryptic's missions, then I can see the argument for keeping the plot to a minimum.
For my part I felt more like the game should have been a Mass Effect style RPG, or at least with the universe behind it, it had the potential to be one. So that is more of what I was going for.
I think the key is that not all players and not all authors are the same. I very much wish there were more Foundry missions with a lot of backstory and questions you could ask the characters because that's what I'm looking for, and hence what I ended up creating.
Anyway, I think the truth is there is no actual wrong answer here, it's just a matter of opinion and what audience you are focusing on. I do feel, however, that trying to cater to as many people as possible by keeping a lot of information optional is a very important aspect. I've at least tried to do that, but then again my missions were like 2 hours long, so I suppose it's debatable how well I succeeded.
Click here for my Foundry tutorial on Creating A Custom Interior Map.
I watched TWOK recently, less than a month ago, for the first time. I've seen DS9/ent/TNG, but except for a few movies and some episodes when I was a kid, never seen TOS. I know Khan and the eugenic wars, but nothing about his first meeting with Kirk, his wife, etc...
So, when I watched TWOK, Khan talked about his wife, and Kirk leaving him. At first I was confused (is there another Khan movie I missed ?), and I wanted to know more, but I understood it was probably shown in a TOS episode. I could have checked on wiki/memory alpha for informations, but it would have taken a lot of time, and I would have been overwhelmed by informations, and possibly the ending of the movie I was watching.
So, I just watched the movie and that's all. I still don't know what happened to his wife, who she was, and why he was left and not put in jail/whatever.
In a videogame, for the same situation, you have the opportunity to leave an optional padd/discussion for more informations. The relevant informations. If the player want them, he ask. Otherwise, he can continue.
Always have a fast way (I'll kill you evil guy !), and an optional "I want to know your devious plan first" way.
I'd say you did a fairly good job of it, I took away a little inspiration from your mission when i started writing my own in the way that even low level officers had avalible interactions
Parallels: my second mission for Fed aligned Romulans.
(Also, a quick shout-out, please visit Starbase UGC for all your Foundry needs!)
This is how I deal with my "Text Blasts" as well
Foundry Mission Database
Check out my Foundry missions:
Standalone - The Great Escape - The Galaxy's Fair - Purity I: Of Denial - Return to Oblivion
Untitled Series - Duritanium Man - The Improbable Bulk - Commander Rihan
* Namely, that the Ferengi are like the Federation in that they're a peace-loving people with less-than-benign neighbors, so they maintain a military for self-defense. And like the Federation, they don't like to speak of themselves as a military power.
— Sabaton, "Great War"
Check out https://unitedfederationofpla.net/s/