Game designer Evgeny Danilov from Playrix shared what you should pay attention to when creating a plot for a game, and how a vertical series differs from a horizontal one.
Working on the plot of the game raises a lot of questions. Is it worth building a complicated story inside a simple match-3? Is it worth abandoning the story if there are cool complex mechanisms of character evolution?
Answering them, you need to think about how the depth of the plot corresponds to the mechanics. Sometimes simple mechanics compensate for a complex plot – and vice versa.
The degree of detail of the plot depends on the audience. For example, the female audience tends to the process, not the goal. Therefore, in the game “for girls” it makes sense to create a well-developed story that was interesting to track. A story that centers around one boss victory after another is unlikely to find a response.
Dynamics, external and internal, are important for a good work. The external one concerns the player’s actions – he ran, hit, jumped. The inner one is the one that forces the player to rethink his actions. For example, he ran, hit, jumped over the moat, and the princess has not yet been saved. She’s in another castle. So, we need to move on.
The player’s inner feelings are important. The script is created for them. Changes can be of different scale and nature. The enemy looted the castle – an external change. It produces an internal change, the thought “I have to take revenge or better strengthen my castle.”
Now about the structure of the plot. To create a successful F2P game, you need to study the script of a vertical series. This is a series that has a plot axis. Changes are strung around it. For example, as in “The Big Bang Theory”.
A horizontal series is one in which something is constantly changing during the course of the plot. It is built according to the same laws as the classical text: it has a beginning, a development of action, a climax and a denouement.
In conclusion, Eugene advised to remember the universal rule: harsh functionality is always better than graphomaniac “reading matter”. The more concise the text, the better.
Other materials on the topic: