Anatomy of Gamebook Flow

Greetings yet again, and welcome to the Greek Winter blog! Today I'll be talking a bit about gamebook anatomy and design. The archetypal design of a basic dungeon crawl adventure is fairly straightforward: Opening text -> First room -> Choice of directions -> Next room. But when you start adding elements such as companion characters who can die or turn on you depending on your actions, large branching pathways that eventually merge, and conflicts that can be taken on in multiple ways, you need a way to keep what the player has been up to straight in the game. Referencing an event that the player never experienced is, in my opinion, one of a gamebook's greatest possible sins. How do you keep everything straight when you're weaving a web as complicated as this (click to see full-size):

Complete working map of Book 1: Westward Dystopia

Remembering what has happened:

There are several ways to avoid bad references, the first and most common of which is keeping the text intentionally vague. This works well in dungeon crawlers such as Fighting Fantasy which are often more of a puzzle and fighting game. If you want the reader to engage in the world and its occupants on a meaningful level, however, vague description can only get you so far.

The two most popular ways to govern these references are functionally identical: Keywords and asking the player a question before the choice. Did you kill the evil vizier? If Yes, turn to page 65, if not, turn to 102. Do you have Keyword Slain? If yes, turn to page 65... Keywords are used in several popular gamebook series such as Dave Morris and Jamie Thompson's Fabled Lands as well as the Critical If series, including the venerable classic Heart of Ice from which I drew a great deal of inspiration when designing my own gamebooks.

Westward Dystopia was written using the question and answer branching style rather than the keyword method. Due to this, I often found it difficult to expect the player to keep track of numerous actions they may have taken over several sessions of reading. I kept interactions fairly simple as well as their consequences. Did you kill this character? Did you side with the mutants? Simple things that are easy for the player to remember even if they put the book down for a few weeks between sessions. This kept things flowing nicely, and worked in a book featuring a lone wanderer. But how could I get that to work in a book with more complex human interactions?

In my second gamebook, Spire Ablaze, I decided to implement a keyword system. This allowed the addition of companion characters whose opinions of you can change depending on your actions. One companion character had as many as five keywords governing his reactions to the player and the player's reactions to him. This allows an attempt at realistic character interactions in a gamebook without delving into the realms of infinitely splitting paths and redundant text. In the main entries, you can keep it vague, and then continue with a branching path depending on the relevant keywords. It's not all that dissimilar to the question method I used in Westward, but it allows the player to write down a key word and not necessarily need to remember every bit of minutia that they may have experienced in the game before this point. Not all of Spire's companion characters change their opinions of you all that much over time, but for the ones that do, two in particular, this method is a godsend to the design and writing process.

Designing the Flow:

When I sit down and design a gamebook, one of the most important elements is the flow of the narrative. Is it completely open-ended like a Choose Your Own Adventure book where each play through may be completely different where characters and even the location change completely from play to play? Or is the story more carefully defined and regulated? You don't want to box the player in too much, destroying the illusion of freedom, but you also can only give so much free reign. Personally, I like to find a happy medium between the two extremes. As you can see in the above chart, players in Westward Dystopia start at the top and travel generally downward as they go. Near the beginning the player is presented with three major areas to visit. They can be taken in any order. The choices to the left and right return to the hub when they are finished, ultimately allowing the player to take the inevitable route down the middle when they choose to. Even this middle route features several of its own branches before reaching the choke point.

Choke points are inevitable in any gamebook with a singular narrative structure. Sooner or later the player will NEED to be presented with a certain bit of text, and all points must converge in order to deliver it. These choke points are crucial. They need to deliver important information or bring the player to a certain place, all while being vague enough to encompass the player's experiences, no matter which paths have been previously chosen. You need to leave the specifics for later when things start branching out again.

The bottom half of Westward encompasses a somewhat free-form jaunt through an area occupied by enemies. When mapping this section out in my graphing software I differentiated the nodes using color to keep track of which paragraphs go with which at a glance. This was very useful when designing the flow of what would otherwise be a very chaotic area. Inevitably, the player is drawn to the upper right of the second half and travels down the right edge to the final areas in green. At the end, the choices that you have made should have some weight. Branching paths are often locked to you depending on what you did earlier in the game. Who did you help? Who did you kill or ally with? Your choices will bring you to one of six major endings.

Next entry I'll be discussing design choices related to combat systems, character stats, as well as the dice or no dice controversy. Fans of my material know that I'm fond of the dice as a combat mechanism, but there are convincing cases for not using them such as the aforementioned Critical If books as well as newer series such as Marc Wilson's Dangerous Worlds. See you then!