How Story Impacts Game Mechanics: Character

Hi there, Gamers and Game Makers!

In this week's blog, we're going to take a quick look at how our games story impacts on the games mechanics. For this post, I'll use the player character as the example.

Now depending on the type of story you want to tell, you might have a very defined player character who is very much a key figure to the story you want to tell and their back story and even appearance play a huge role in telling that story. For example the type of story we want to tell can impact the decision to make a game first person or third person.

Why is that important? Well take Dead Space for example. The main character, Isaac Clarke is not just an observer to a story that's being told but his own past and relationship to the characters involved in the story make building a bond between Isaac and the player key to the game. This is why having the game in third person is a good game mechanic choice because it allows us to see how he's feeling in situations and makes us feel like we're helping him through this story and not so much like it's our story. The player feels more like someone on the outside looking in helping.

Now, if you have a story you want to tell that you want to have affect the person playing more directly, then first person provides a better method of immersion for the player. Using first person allows you to make the player feel more like this is happening to them rather than to a character they are watching. Using a game of my own, The System. The games story doesn't involve the players past or relations to other characters to be told. Therefore, the player is more of a blank canvas that you leave for the player to fill in some of the gaps and as a result makes the sense of immersion all the grater. by doing this and using first person as a game mechanic, we can tell a story in a more impactful way to the player that wouldn't have been possible had they been playing in third person watching another character.

While there's more layers involved in this, i hope that this gives you a basic understanding of how story can impact the game mechanic decisions for our player characters and what each decision means for the story and game as a whole. I hope to talk more about the other areas of game mechanics that are impacted by story in future posts.

As always if you want to ask a question or get in touch, please do using the comments below or just shoot me an email.

Until next time!