Duck Detective Narrative Design Dissection
I wanted to collect my thoughts on the narrative style at Happy Broccoli Games. It’s something that has been fermenting for the last few years, but never put down to paper or pixel. Since we’re wrapping up on the second Duck Detective and looking to the future, I realised it would be nice to write the unwritten rules we’ve grown so accustomed to.
The main thing I want to focus on is choices in dialogue:
Types of Dialogue Choices
Through the lens of Duck Detective there are 4 reasons why we give the player a choice in a conversation:
- Navigation
- Exposition
- Expression
- Decision
Navigation - The most basic of tools, but an effective form of UX to describe basic interactions with a person, such as buying, selling or simply leaving a conversation with a looping choice.
Exposition - Context and lore is often tricky to weave naturally into a conversation. Using dialogue options to increase the player’s understanding of the world is a useful trick. I was always impressed with how this technique is employed in the tutorial sections of Dragon Age: Origins. It quickly gets you up to speed with the state of the world and your role within it.
Expression - This is how we put the interactivity into our interactive fiction. Giving the player choices that allow them some kind of agency is “roleplay seasoning”. The choices don’t change the state of the world, but by getting a player to answer even basic yes/no questions, we feel they are encouraged to connect with the story, and have some responsibility by affecting the emotions of other characters with their selected answer.
As a side note, expressive dialogue can also be reactions to actions done by the player outside of the dialogue system. On our team, we call these callbacks but maybe there is a proper name for them. For example, in Duck Detective, there are a few instances where lines of dialogue are added (or removed) from conversations when the player has completed actions such as finding a secret area or talking to another character first. It’s a subtle thing that no player will notice on their first playthrough, but it makes the dialogue feel much more responsive.
Decision - This is what I think jumps to most people’s minds when they think of choices in interactive fiction. Branching outcomes, and true player impact - but we use this fourth tool the most sparingly. In fact, in Duck Detective, we only use it once, at the very end of the game, where you can enact judgement upon the culprits.
We borrowed this from the Frogware Sherlock games, as we believed there is a certain amount of empathy and consideration for the concept of justice a player must face with when they are forced to be the arbiter in an often less than black and white situation. And based on the Steam forums for Duck Detective, it was a controversial inclusion - so I guess it had the intended effect.
These sorts of choices are expensive to create and test. For Duck Detective, we had to limit the scope of the single decision we put into the game to only the culprits of the crime and not all suspects otherwise it would have compromised the quality of the overall game.
Frequency of Dialogue Choices
Duck Detective is a linear narrative. Superficial details about the story might change, but ultimately, two players can comfortably discuss the plot.
Most story games are linear narratives. Branching decisions are expensive. Often, if a game contains branching, then a core conceit of the game is to repeatedly play branches in order to see different outcomes or endings.
I think different rules apply for linear vs. non-linear narratives, so I am going to focus on linear narratives. But I would say, (as a note to myself as well) if you are considering making a non-linear narrative - really consider whether the same story could be told just as effectively in a linear manner.
Making a choice in a dialogue is like trying to decide what to eat for dinner. It’s surprisingly taxing. First you have to work out what you have in the fridge and parse each option. Then you have to actually decide which option to pick and weigh up its pros and cons. How long does that dish take to cook? How much washing up will I be left with afterwards?
It’s tedious having to decide what to eat for dinner every day.
And for that reason, I think frequently giving the player choices will detract from a linear experience. Giving infrequent and well-timed choices (where each choice gives a distinctly different response) is the style we opt for.
Number of options per choice
The number of options shown for a choice signals to the player a great deal of information about the given choice:
2 options is likely to be a binary decision, it’s immediately implied that the two options oppose one another.
3 options suggests there is less opposition between the options or it could be the “accept, reject, deflect” paradigm (coined by Jon Ingold)
Increasing amounts of options implies less and less impact to the given choice.
A single option is also a powerful tool. Giving the player only 1 option implies that at this moment, their agency is being taken away from them. Normally, they would have a choice in the given situation, but now - they do not. Additionally, we use 1 option (“Leave”) to imply to the player that additional options will populate a given conversation as they progress further through the story.
And arguably 0 options is the most common situation and also very different from 1 option. 0 options is when the player shouldn’t have any agency given or even implied - when the protagonist they are controlling has more autonomy over the story than the player themself.
Conclusion
That covers my brief narrative design dissection of Duck Detective, and the thought process behind how we crafted the more mechanical parts of the narrative design:
Few choices, mostly for expression - with a single, expensive, decision for the finale.
There's much more that could be said about the narrative design of the game, but I wanted to write about this one clear thought that came to mind.
Joni