[azile0]

Right now I am in between writing projects. I just finished a novella for Asimov magazine (I'll know in a few weeks if it's been accepted) and was looking to turn my attention inward, to Freespace. I'm no FREDer, but I was wondering what the medium for creating a story (not shmup) oriented mission/short campaign was? I've already got a plot ready, but what would be necessary to deliver it? I know people don't want to stare at a briefing or information update screen for too long, and combat must be thrown into missions to keep it interesting, which makes dialog harder.

I've played the big mods like Transcend and Homesick, which tell amazing stories. I know I can't manage something as epic as that on my own, but I was just wondering how I can tell and effective story within the Freespace engine. I recall Wing Commander Saga having a few dialog blocks that were a great read, but I'm less than clueless on how to work that in FRED. My experience with it has been setting up capital ship duels to see who can blow each other up faster.

Hell, I'd even be happy to accept help with the FREDing if someone thinks this idea has merit but doesn't want to leave it to my unrefined skillset.

[MatthTheGeek]

There are stuff to help long narratives. The fiction viewer is one, especially with an easily-readable font. Setting up your long in-mission dialogs to be skippable is another.

Transcend, Homesick and Sync are indeed good examples of strongly story-oriented campaigns to look at, but many other more gameplay-oriented mods manage to tell a lot of story blended into gameplay. BP, Vassago's Dirge and Procyon Insurgency come to mind.

Many people don't mind the Sync/Transcend way of telling a story without putting too much effort into gameplay. Some people can't deal with it though.

[Aginor]

1. There are some people who will skip all the story and then complain they don't understand something.
2. There are some people who say "keep the damn story out of the game, if I want a story I'll go read a book".
3. There are some people who say "Story plz!" but since they can't read you have to do all the stuff in the missions, with voice acting for everything.
4. There are people who love story and won't care whether it is written or not. Some of those won't even care if it isn't skippable.
5. And there will be some people who don't care about it at all.

You won't satisfy all of them, so here's what I am doing with my story:
1. I tell all of the story that is not directly linked to a mission in the fiction viewer and in a PDF document like I would do it in a novel. The PDF may also contain stuff that happens in the mission. Of course it is vastly spoileriffic so I'll release it separately.
2. The rough story is told in the command briefings and debriefings so people who don't want to read the story still get the important parts.
3. There is not much in-mission chatter. Personally I love it but it is a lot of work and a lot of people don't like it, especially if you can't skip it, because if you die or replay the mission to get some bonus goal done you might not want to hear it again.

Advantages:
- Not much voice acting required, which also means less space required for the mod/campaign
- not many ingame messages to build
- faster gameplay
- better for replaying

Disadvantages:
- People will still complain
- People will still not get parts of the story
- People will skip the story and then complain that your campaign is short because you don't force them to look at the whole thing.


Wing Commander Saga Prologue was criticized for the fiction viewer entries which I found a good read.
So when the main campaign was released there was one single fiction viewer entry after the intro, and most story was told in the command briefings and briefings and debriefings and also ingame. People started complaining about that as well. Too much text in the briefings, too long, ingame not skippable etc. etc.
I love storytelling, it is one of the things I love most in the Wing Commander series, but I can understand some points. If a mission is very long (and some of Saga's missions are EPIC 30min+ monsters) and some minutes of that are story that cannot be skipped you feel a bit like in console games without saving points.

[MatthTheGeek]

Keep in mind though that nearly everyone here played Transcend and Sync, and they still tend to end up at the top of recommended campaigns despite their flaws.

[Aginor]

Yeah, but you are only talking about the HLP community, I assume. People here have a certain standard.
Most people out there don't seem to like that style too much nowadays .
So I guess it's a matter of the target audience.

[MatthTheGeek]

Well, HLP is the Freespace community, more or less, along with some other forums like GameWarden.

[Legate Damar]

Having a good story is very important, I would offer to help you with FREDding if I wasn't busy with another project at the moment. In my opinion a good Freespace campaign story (since you humans do not appreciate the repetitive epic for some reason) should have many plot twists. My campaign, for example, is going to have a huge plot twist.

[MatthTheGeek]

Could you please stop randomly hijacking other threads with random information about your yet-unreleased hypothetical campaign ?

[Spoon]

Wing Commander Saga Prologue was criticized for the fiction viewer entries which I found a good read.
So when the main campaign was released there was one single fiction viewer entry after the intro, and most story was told in the command briefings and briefings and debriefings and also ingame. People started complaining about that as well. Too much text in the briefings, too long, ingame not skippable etc. etc.

And they were bloody well valid complaints. Having over 5 minutes (that's the complete mission length of some fs2 retail missions!) minutes of unskippable talking (or flying toward a carrier group that you cannot save) followed by hard and loooong missions (easily over 15-20 minutes) was just bad bad design no matter what way you look at it. Had the saga team just build in a skip point for each mission so you could get right back into the action, 90% of the complaints about it would have been null and void. (or hell, not disabling time compression would have been nice too.)
You might not be able to please everyone but you can please the majority of players by providing options. PC gamers like having options.

[Legate Damar]

Could you please stop randomly hijacking other threads with random information about your yet-unreleased hypothetical campaign ?

I released a demo. Besides, my point was to give my view on storytelling in campaigns. Aginor already talked about what he was doing with his story earlier in this very thread.

[Droid803]

We get it Legate Damar, the world revolves around you and your campaign. 

[Dragon]

I also used to do that, back in the day. One year from now, he'll most likely look back at it and laugh. Telling people that there would be a plot twist seem a bit silly though, as a plot without twists is a rather boring one (unless you play the tropes right, that is, and surprise the players by not doing a plot twist).

Regarding "novel-like" missions, I think unless they're "breathers" without any action (you can find examples in BP), the dialogue should be skippable. Also, Fiction Viewer is a good thing to use, but including an equivalent to an entire chapter of a novel could put people off, too. In general, show, don't tell. WCS, among it's many flaws, tried to tell too much. BP is an example of the right balance between talk and action.

[Legate Damar]

I only saw fiction viewer used in two campaigns

[The E]

That's because writing fiction is hard.

[bigchunk1]

One huge mistake I see a lot of campaigns make is they think they can disguise a book with a campaign. In FRED there are a lot of opportunities to enter text, briefings, debriefings, messages, command briefings etc. So, in the place of actually making a game they plop the player down in the mission space and throw a bunch of text at them. If you're trying to AVOID actually making a game and just trying to get by on a well written story alone you might as well just skip FRED all together and just write short stories in the freespace universe.

Now if you want to make a campaign, I suggest you use the medium to its fullest. Rather than using text to TELL players what is going on, you can SHOW it to them by having them interact with the game. As a basic example, Freespace2 didn't tell us the Sathanas was big and menacing, it brought the ship in the middle of a mission to annihilate friendly warships. You could SEE for yourself how destructive the Sathanas is. As a better example, Freespace2 showed you how desperate the cappella situation was by having you try to defend vulnerable refugee transports against relentless shivan attack. The impossibility of saving every single ship soon became obvious and the player realized there WILL be heavy casualties. Eventually you had to run from the entire mess all together.

These devices are ways you can deliver the meaning of your story to the player, and if done properly are a much more powerful use of the game medium. If you still want to make a freespace campaign and make a good one, I highly advise you learn FRED. Learn what it can do and how creative you can be with your options. It's not as impossible as you might think to learn. It is a design tool. It is meant to enable people who do not have a lot of technical experience to make missions. 

The other major creative tool you have at your disposal is modding. If you would like to learn about modding, forgive me while I plug my tutorial videos:
http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php?topic=81024.0 
 

[Spoon]

One huge mistake I see a lot of campaigns make is they think they can disguise a book with a campaign.

Can you name a few examples?

[Dragon]

WCS would be a good one (it might've been much better received as a licensed novel). With Sync, Transcend and BP this trend can be seen, but they don't fit the "mistake" part.

[Droid803]

Well, I donno, it kind of does fall into the "mistake" part of Sync/Transcend, in the fact that there's obviously little to no thought put into whether the mission is actually...fun. You could get rid of all the combat in most of the missions and the campaign wouldn't be any worse for it... In fact it might be better, if you don't have to fight off 2-3 random wings of fighters every jump, etc. We'll call it "Transcend Syndrome", where, in the attempt to tell a great story, the gameplay aspect is forgotten, and player interaction is token, thrown in just because there needs to be something for the player to do, which has little to no relevance to the story or anything else.

At this point, I'm rather opposed to the idea of a "novel-esque" mission, unless you have a very good reason of having one. (And if you're wondering if you do have a very good reason, you do not.) There certainly should not be many of them...otherwise you're losing sight of what it means to be a game.

Gameplay and storytelling are intrinsically opposed. One depends on giving player agency to encourage interaction, and the other depends on limiting it to direct the narrative... You should aim to strike a balance, and err on the side of less story more gameplay, IMO, unless you're sure your story is good enough, or you can pull it off. (and even then, you should still consider if your story would or would not be better off in written medium).

[Dragon]

In general, novel-esque missions should be limited to one or two cases in the entire campaign. Elaborate, whole mission cutscenes could also work, with the added bonus of being very simple to make skippable (just end the mission on a keypress). If you're going to have a no-gameplay mission, you could as well make it interesting to watch.

[azile0]

I was planning on molding them together, and the first rule of writing a good story is show vs. tell. To test the waters, I'm simply working on a single mission. A self-contained story that I hope won't self destruct. Ah well, no point talking about it. Just going to go get it done.