Designing for Games with a Schedule
In a narrative heavy game, most often the story follows the pace of the player, and it is the character’s interactions with the player that make them interesting, designed mostly for delivering narrative in a very first person format.
But does that have to be true? It certainly has merit: games are uniquely situated to deliver powerful and engrossing first person experiences. But in the real world, we are certainly not the protagonist of other people’s stories, and others have lives just as rich as ours. So could it be interesting for a game to put the player in the backseat to the characters in the story, and to be able to really explore characters’ lives and relationships?
Several games accomplish this through the use of a schedule: non-player characters (NPCs) will have their own routines they perform, characters with whom they are friendly or antagonistic, and can be affected by the player only through some knowledge of their habits. They will have a set and static schedule that determines where they go, who they talk to, different ways of interacting with the player at different times, and usually, ways in which their schedule can be influenced by the player.
The Colonel’s Bequest
The first game I want to talk about is The Colonel’s Bequest, a murder mystery game set in an island mansion off the coast of New Orleans in the style of Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None. As this is a murder mystery, there are in fact a series of dastardly murders! It’s your job to get to the bottom of things, and being a text parser game you’re afforded quite a lot of ways to do so with over 23 verbs. There are however a few main mechanics you’ll be relying on for gathering clues and information to figure out whodunit.
Time System & Recursion: The game is partitioned into 8 acts, each having 4 major events. Act I starts at 7 p.m., and each major event will advance the clock by 15 minutes, beginning Act II at 8 p.m. when all events have been witnessed, and so on. Each Act has it’s own game state with characters residing in different rooms, conversing with different characters, having different moods, and in some cases performing a series of consecutive actions.
In order to fully explore the game, the player is given 2 mechanics for going back to past events. The first, which The Colonel’s Bequest and many games like it use, is the ability to at any time virtually without exception can save your game, or reload to any such save. This allows you to quickly put the game down and return to where you were, to recover from immediate mistakes, and to go back and re-explore earlier parts of the game. Unfortunately this recursion causes players to lose in-game progress, even though they gain knowledge of the game. As this game is meant to be played through multiple times, it also expects that players will fail to collect all the evidence. Fortunately, the game provides players with a useful way to do better on their future playthroughs, by showing the notes their character took during the game and informing them of holes in their observations.
This mechanic is great, and it makes the game far more playable. There are many different categories players may have missed points in, and many of these holes provide nudges in the right direction. Didn’t examine things closely? Try using your lens more. Failed to discover a religious artifact? Maybe it’s near the chapel. Didn’t discover characters with a gambling habit? Maybe you need to ask about them, or observe them more closely. The game doesn’t strictly say these things but rather leaves it up to the player to feel good about deducing it themselves, although some categories are more cryptic than others.
Spying: Characters are seen in major events going about their schedule: moving between rooms, talking to other characters, or even just being by themselves. However, many times they will be in a personal discussion and loathe to continue while you remain in the room. Being the questionably ethical gumshoe you are, you can spy on them unawares! In fact, the house contains a series of hidden rooms from which secrets can be learned, most of which flesh out antagonisms between characters, but some of which reveal surprising secrets.
Unfortunately, many of these secrets do not inform your gameplay. Spying will not tell you where secret areas are. It will not tell you about the hidden treasure on the island, or how to find it. They are entirely narrative, teaching you about the different characters and their relationships so you can piece together the story, and giving you points for acquiring the extra information. This can however be used in interrogation.
Interrogation: Everyone on the island has a different perspective everyone else. To one person Rudy might be a loyal brother, to another a dangerous man with a gambling addiction. You can ask each person about each of the 10 other family or staff, different parts of the estate, items in your inventory, the former owners of the estate, or even groups of other characters, in addition to telling people about what you’ve discovered. As if that weren’t enough, characters responses will change as the night goes on, and as they become friendlier or more hostile towards you. The game has a ton of dialogue, and if you know what questions to ask you can find out a good deal about the game and its world.
Interrogation has a bit more impact on gameplay than spying does. This is the only way to discover important information like who else is using the hidden passages. Other dialogue clues you in to extra objectives, in addition to serving narrative purposes like establishing motives. Understandably there is some redundancy in characters responses, which is good: being required to exhaustively ask each character about each topic each act would be combinatorically explosive. Strangely, the games points based system will reward you very little for interrogating guests. Oh well.
Analysis: So how are all these options, mechanically? Saving and loading allows players to effortlessly jump around the course of the evening provided they’ve saved responsibly, however they unpleasantly forfeit all progress except for the knowledge they as a player have gained. Being able to covertly spy on conversations to gain extra information is good, however the player can go through the entire game without discovering these passages at all (after which the notebook review will explicitly state that there are hidden passages), and spying or the way you spy is never a real choice: it is always preferable to spy covertly than to be seen. There is one instance where the player can shepherd NPCs to a spyable location, but this is underused. The ability to interrogate on any topic has a lot of potential, but pruning topics NPCs are disinterested in from the tree of possible queries could make interrogating less tedious. However it does a good job of informing the player about the world, should they ask the right questions. The exploration relies a lot on the player’s willingness to explore and retraverse the same areas of the estate in later acts, which is somewhat mitigated by player knowledge of future events: if someone’s stabbed in the back by a dagger, there’s only a few places that dagger could have come from. If a distinctive boot print shows up, the player may want to pay more attention to characters with boots, or try to find a boot with a matching insignia. Unfortunately, few of these mechanics afford the player ways to truly interact with the NPCs at times making it feel less like a game and more like a story. The biggest exception is the character you can befriend, who will give you important clues and information thereafter. On the whole the game presents some cool ideas, but often has barriers in usability.
Majora’s Mask
Probably the first thing people know about Majora’s Mask is that it’s a real time action game in the Legend of Zelda Series, making its presence in a discussion about narrative a bit odd. While the game has a lot going on outside of its largely optional schedule-based side quests, I’m going to be talking about the game and its mechanics in the context of the schedule-based NPCs and their daily lives.
For those familiar with the game, most of this analusis will be with the Kafei and Anju (K&A) quest which uses the scheduling system to its fullest.
Time System & Recursion: The hook of Majora’s Mask is simple: a villain has enchanted the moon to crash into world in 3 days, and you can travel back in time to the start of this cycle as many times as it takes to figure out how to stop it. And every time you return, the game saves. Already this is a big improvement over the recursion in The Colonel’s Bequest, as you don’t lose in game progress for returning to an earlier point in the schedule. Majora’s Mask of course is different in that you cannot complete the game without returning to the start of the cycle multiple times (even in speed runs). Additionally, the passage of time is continuous and not discreet: it does not depend on player actions and slowly progresses. The player can influence time by slowing it down(by a factor of 3 in some versions), returning its flow to normal, or immediately progressing to the next 1/6 mark of the cycle.
Since the player saves by travelling back in time and can do so at will, he or she can save at almost any point. While doing so, the player will keep all non-consumable items, allowing important progress to be saved. This does however eliminate any partial progress the player might have had in a quest, since it restarts the whole thing over.
Instead of telling the player what they missed, the game will tell the player what they have yet to accomplish, with an item called “The Bomber’s Notebook”. In it each quest has its own line, as well as what time events in that quest take place, but what those events are is only revealed upon completing them. Players can see clearly and quickly if they’ve failed to meet an objective in a particular quest and don’t have to commit to it further until they’ve gone back in time. The system allows players to plan routes around the game world to satisfy as many quests as possible in one cycle, often knowing they have to be at a certain place at a certain time. This generosity comes at the expense of opportunities for deduction on the part of the player, who is able to treat the scheduling system as more of an optimization puzzle than a mystery to be solved.
Character Interaction: While you cannot ask questions per se, you have 4 different ways to interact with characters. First, the default interaction, you receive the response the character has for that time in the cycle. Characters tend to be more focused on their everyday life early in the cycle, and scared or defeated when the moon looms large over the game world on the third day. You can also speak to characters with different masks equipped. Wearing a mask of a character’s face introduces them as a topic of conversation, and if the mask is magical you may be entirely mistaken for a different character. The last way to speak to characters is by presenting items, almost exclusively done in the K&A quest. Finally, performing certain other in-game tasks, often in the vicinity of an NPC, will change characters’ opinions of Link (the player character) and will often reward him.
Since the Legend of Zelda’s narrative is meant to be incidental to its action, the systems for interacting with NPCs is not so robust. Two advantages it has over the Colonel’s Bequest however is that characters are much more likely to respond to your in-game actions, and that characters’ timelines can be altered quite a bit more.
Analysis: While the Colonel’s Bequest was very observation based, Majora’s Mask is very quest or action based. Design decisions in the scheduling system and its quests are made that keep the player moving and rarely attempt to stump the player. Many quests require the player to simply have access to a certain area or have a certain item than to really understand where NPCs are at what times or what their motivations are. What the game does bring to the table are good mechanics for going back to the start of the schedule as well as tracking or preserving progress. The change from the player controlled time system is largely mitigated by the player’s ability to control time so much.
The Sexy Brutale
Having come out in 2017, The Sexy Brutale is a modern take on what interesting gameplay can be created through NPC schedules. Players are trapped in an exotic mansion and are tasked with saving the lives of the other guests who are each killed in their own way each day, often by the malicious staff. Coincidentally, or perhaps as a deliberate reference to Majora’s Mask, nearly every character wears a mask which can be removed from guests only by saving their lives. Each time a character is saved a new ability is granted to the player, or old abilities are enhanced.
NOTE: While I’ve yet to finish this game, I’ve played 3 of 8 or so hours of it and feel I have a good enough grasp of the mechanics. I’ll edit this post if any of my opinions change later.
EDIT: I think there’s enough to talk about that this will be another post entirely.
Unlike both previous games, in the Sexy Brutale there is very little interaction with other characters: this is because upon entering a room with any other character a threatening sequence starts wherein time stops and the player is chased by the masks of other characters until the player either exits the room or is killed. NPCs then continue with their day as though nothing happened.
Time System & Recursion: Like Majora’s Mask, it uses a time-recurring system that allows the player to return to the start of a time window at will, at which point the game will save. Similarly, the player will lose all items except the one that permits the aforementioned ability. Additionally, whenever the player encounters a clock they can do any of three things: advance to the end of the 1st third of the day, advance to the end of the 2nd third of the day, or set that location as the one at which he or she restarts the day.
As mentioned before The Sexy Brutale employs a saving and time traveling feature nearly identical to that of Majora’s Mask. Whereas each cycle in Majora’s Mask lasts for 3 in-game days that can last hours in real time, a full cycle in this game lasts mere minutes. As such there’s a much lesser penalty for mistakes since there’s only so much a player can accomplish in a few minutes’ time.
Like Majora’s Mask, The Sexy Brutale keeps a quest log of the characters you have saved and tasks you have yet to accomplish. Dissimilarly, it prompts you with a small subset of objectives and gates you from further ones. This keeps the player focused, but limits exploration.
Spying: This set of mechanics are at the core of the game, and are far more fleshed out than the simple cutscenes in the Colonel’s Bequest. Players can spy in 1 of 2 ways: by sight or by sound. When a player approaches a door or other window into a room he or she is granted a cone of vision into that room which can by slightly rotated, allowing a limited perception that is different for each portal into the room, and is privy to any conversations taking place. If the player chooses instead to simply listen at a door, he or she hears the same conversations and is informed of the exact origin of all sounds, but not who or what they originated from.
Analysis: So far, there aren’t a whole lot of ways to interact in this game, making it feel a lot more like a puzzle game than very involved with characters. Even Majora’s Mask, which was not based primarily around it’s schedule system, allowed the player to feel much more involved with characters primarily because it does not prevent face-to-face interaction with NPCs. I love the spying system the game presents, and unlike teh colonel’s bequest it can modify your access to the game world by giving you access to know areas, by learning a code combination for example. I unfortunately have not come across an instance where listening was the superior option to peeking, or where the particular door you choose to view from was a meaningful gameplay decision as NPCs tend to interact with each other and the environment far from doors. Additionally, a lot of the puzzles seem to be about acquiring the new item in the new area and racing to interact with someone before their death, rather than employing learned information like guards’ schedules or characters’ tendancies.
I’m also not a fan of the way the game gates the player so heavily. I constantly find myself wishing I had more freedom to explore the world only to be seemingly arbitrarily held back. For example, one of the upgrades the player gets is an improvement to your hearing: some conversations simply cannot be heard beforehand and it feels like this upgrading mechanic could have been taken further than it was. The exception is that the gating and pacing in the tutorial is truly fantastic. It teaches you very quickly how you can interact in the game and all the basic rules you need to know in a very timely and intuitive fashion.
Conclusion: So if I were to make a game with some of these mechanics, which ones would I use? As I’m a fan of interrogating characters to find out more about the world, I would choose a console friendly approach that still allows for significant questioning. The text-only system in the Colonel’s Bequest, while giving you great freedom, could be largely accomplished with a term-based system used in many games that allows you to select a topic to talk about. As many characters understandably have limited expertise or interest, I believe these terms could be grouped by subject in order to remove an entire category from conversation options should the NPC not care about a particular subject (for example science, sports, or religion).
I think the spying system in The Sexy Brutale, while innovative, could be taken further to offer more varied gameplay. For example, asking players to find new spying points to verify the identity of a speaker in some conversation or modifying the room beforehand to change how observation can be conducted.
I’m also interested in the discreet time system the Colonel’s Bequest uses, which makes the action very player driven. One shortcoming of the system is that the player knows there are only so many things to encounter during an hour, but this can be subverted by having, say, the first 4 of 6 possible events advance the hour, to keep the player guessing as to what’s out there. As for recurring the day, it seems good gameplay to let the player save and restart the day or cycle at will while keeping progress. I think an excellent hook for this sort of game could be having a villain that also travels through the same day, especially one that asks other NPCs different favors to introduce confounding variations in day-to-day play.
If you’ve gotten this far, thanks for reading! I think this kind of narrative structure has a lot of potential left in games, and I hope we get to see more of it. Let me know of any other examples you can think of that follow this structure, and anything interesting they do! Cheers!
