I spent most of today working on the conclusion to Act II: the showdown battle with the Saxons. If Arthur wins this battle, he’ll go into Act III in a strong position. If he loses this battle, then his position in Act III will be weak. This in itself is bad design; the end of the game is largely determined in this battle in Act II. I must downplay the importance of this battle.
But there’s another problem. I built this lovely option tree for the action in the battle:
Golly gee, isn’t that a nice tree? But there are two blunders in this design. First, the decisions are based on military considerations, not interpersonal considerations. I’m making this a damn war-game!!!! For the purposes of this storyworld, the decisions must be based on interpersonal considerations, not tactical ones. Second, there’s no way for the player to apply tactical knowledge to assess the situation. Insufficient information is provided to the player to make informed tactical decisions. This is classic text-adventure puzzle crap. How could I be so stupid? In my own defense, I’ll point out that I wrote this up nearly a year ago, when I was still laying down the basic design.
I have to throw away this tree and reduce it to the standard linear format. I can probably re-use some of this material in, say, two linear battles, but it remains imperative that Arthur’s decisions should be fundamentally interpersonal. There are only two possibilities here:
Pure linear
In this structure, the battle will be fought the same way every time, but characters will in some way object to Arthur’s intentions, and he must overrule them, but he has a choice as to the tone with which he overrules them. This is rather flimsy.
Tree
In this structure, characters will make suggestions to deviate from Arthur’s intentions, and Arthur must decide whether to accept or reject their suggestions. If done without foldback, this will require an eight-ply (one ply for each character) binary-branching tree with 256 nodes. Sorry, I don’t have time for that. But if I use foldback, then the results of any decision don’t affect the final results of the battle. This makes the decisions meaningless for the battle. Of course, the real issue is how the characters feel about Arthur’s leadership. So why do I even worry about the outcome of the battle? It doesn’t matter! This suggests that I should use the linear architecture.