Game introduction:

"Storyteller" is a click-based puzzle casual game where players set their own stories. The gameplay involves players designing corresponding stories based on the ending requirements of the current level. It transforms players from listeners of the story into tellers of the story. Moreover, players can further optimize the story content to achieve hidden achievements in the level based on the completion of the ending requirements.

At the beginning of the game, the number of story pages is displayed to the player. The player needs to design corresponding scenes and characters within a limited number of pages, allowing them to interact in the order of the pages, thereby completing a story.

All scenes and characters in the game can be used multiple times. Characters will exhibit different behaviors in different scenes to advance the story. Meanwhile, each character in the game has their own inherent personality, prompting them to make different choices in the same scene.

However, as a "story", there must be a certain coherence and echo, so players cannot arbitrarily set scenes and characters, otherwise it will cause the story to be unsmooth. Characters in the scene will show confused expressions because they do not know why they are doing so.

This design also sets some limits for the game itself, preventing the game story from being too free, thus enhancing the playability and rationality of the game.

Game Analysis:

• Allowing players to be the orchestrators of the story

The most successful aspect of "Storyteller" is that it allows players to become the orchestrators of the story. Unlike previous storytelling games, it transforms players from listeners to narrators, arranging the story content reasonably under a fixed narrative rhythm.

There are many games on the market that use plot as a selling point, but very few games allow players to be the story writers themselves. Although "Storyteller" allows players to arrange the plot, the focus of the game is not the plot content, but to let players think about how to arrange the story to guide the plot towards the level clearing requirements. The game still focuses on gameplay innovation, rather than the plot content itself.

This encouragement for players to explore narrative arrangement and content is more innovative and playable. As mentioned earlier, the narrative rhythm of the game is fixed, the key is to let players decide the narrative order and content.

Each level in "Storyteller" is not the only solution, as long as the final level clearing conditions are met, the content of the story is entirely decided by the players. This also makes the narrative of the game itself more diversified. Players can even design some very cliche plot content according to their own quirks, making the gameplay extremely inclusive.

• The logical mechanism that runs throughout

Although the game encourages players to freely explore the possibilities of narration, it is not about letting players completely randomly combine and match, but must have a certain logicality of the story. The game does not impose too many restrictions on the content of the story, but each step in this story must be about cause and effect, and there can be no unwarranted behavior.

Moreover, each character in the game also has their own personality setting, which also makes them have different behaviors in the same scene. Players must pay attention to this part of the content when designing the story, which makes the character setting in the story more distinct and the narration more reasonable.

These contents ensure the freedom of the game story itself while giving players a certain challenge, and also make the final story more complete and coherent, ensuring the player’s gaming experience.

Although the gameplay of the game is more like placing and building, where players build scenes and place characters according to their own needs. But it is the introduction of the logical mechanism that makes the scenes and characters built by the player can be called a "story", unlike "GMOD" or "Minecraft", which allow players to unleash their imagination and creativity without restrictions.

Player Research:

• Meeting players' needs for narrative content exploration

As mentioned before, although there are many plot games on the market, and there are many fans of plot-oriented games. However, there are very few games that truly allow players to be the story writers. Just like the demand for various types of simulator games, players who like narrative-oriented games will also have a portion of players who have a certain preference for story content design and exploration.

"Storyteller" perfectly solves their pain points, using the mode of scene building and character placement to greatly reduce the difficulty of getting started with the game story design gameplay, while allowing players to experience the joy of becoming a story writer, freely designing their own favorite stories and plots, and exploring how to make the story both interesting and in line with the level clearing requirements.

• Meeting the expectations of most players for gameplay innovation and exploration

Although "Storyteller" is a game with story design as the core gameplay, its focus is on gameplay innovation rather than the plot content in the game. Looking at today's game market, most games with gameplay innovation as the core point are the fusion of different gameplay or mechanisms, in order to achieve the purpose of taking the essence and removing the dross, and truly completely innovative games are still a minority.

Most innovative game designs struggle to extract players from their existing gameplay cognition, but "Storyteller" has done this, transforming players from listeners of the story to designers, which is undoubtedly a departure from the conventional thinking of narrative games or innovative gameplay games.

Such innovative design has also been loved by a large number of independent game enthusiasts, so when the trial version DEMO of "Storyteller" was released, it attracted the attention of a large number of players who like gameplay innovation. At the same time, the trial version DEMO, with its outstanding gameplay, also received a strong player response, and was highly praised on major streaming media platforms and game platforms.

Design Analysis:

• The overly simple game mode and puzzle design significantly reduce the gameplay duration

As introduced before, the operation mode of "Storyteller" is for players to manually drag and combine scenes and characters, and then the characters in the game will behave differently in different scenes according to their inherent personalities.

So the operation that players need to do is just simple drag and drop, and because the game encourages players to try and explore the possibility of different narrative sequences and contents, the game itself does not design any trial-and-error penalty measures. Players can try out multiple combinations in a short time, and even if they get stuck, they won't take more than ten minutes to pass, after all, a combination operation can be completed in just a few seconds.

Moreover, each level in the game does not design many scenes and character elements, and the number of story pages is relatively few, which also makes the puzzles in the game itself relatively simple and difficult to extend in depth, from beginning to end it is a form of short drama.

In summary, the puzzle design itself is not deep and has low extensibility + level mechanism without any trial and error costs, allowing players to quickly and fully complete each level in the game. Although it maximizes the core experience of players in each level, the overall duration of the game is greatly reduced. Although a large number of chapters and levels are designed, the total game time required for all collections is less than 2 hours, and you can even refund after playing the game.

Most importantly, the golden gaming experience of this story exploration gameplay is when constantly trying and exploring the optimal solution of the story. So although the game itself has good playability, it does not have high repeatability. Once you find the optimal solution of this story, you don't want to play it again. And the relatively simple and low-extensibility puzzle design of the game itself also allows players to find this optimal solution in a short time, and there won't be much story content that requires players to think repeatedly.

For this issue, I think there are two lines of thought:

First, without changing the gameplay operation mechanism, add more story pages to the later stages of the game, making the game's narrative mechanism slightly more complex, rather than tending towards the form of short dramas. At the same time, it also further enhances the diversity and extensibility of each level's story, making it worth the player's repeated thinking and design.

Secondly, introduce a mechanism of mutual influence between levels. The plot designed by the player in the previous level may affect the character's personality in the later level, prompting the character to make different choices in the same scene. This further increases the variability and uncertainty of the narrative in the game, thereby extending the core gameplay of story design.

Looking at these two proposals, they essentially make the game's story mechanism more complex, rather than making changes to the operation and trial-and-error mechanisms mentioned earlier, because it is precisely the simplified operation mode of "Storyteller" and the constant trial-and-error game mechanism that are key to ensuring an excellent gaming experience within each level.

• The overly strict logical constraints significantly reduce the diversity of game narratives

This game has a more stringent logical mechanism compared to the DEMO version of the game, but overly stringent logical mechanisms greatly limit the diversity of the game level story arrangement. In the DEMO version of the game, many puzzles have more solutions, and the game's design for the rigor of the story is also relatively loose.

The relatively stringent logical constraints, coupled with the inherently straightforward puzzle design, also greatly reduces the design ideas for the game's level stories, and there is no corresponding linkage between the special characters in different levels.

The solution to this problem has actually been proposed in the above figure. The game has different special characters in different chapters. You can slightly reduce some logical constraints and allow more special characters in the levels to link up, which will have a good effect. The reason why the initial DEMO of the game achieved such an achievement to a large extent is also based on this reason.

Summary & Outlook:

• Exploration of Game Narrative Mode

Most of the games on the market today involve plot and narrative content to some extent, and most of them that involve multi-branch narratives and plots advance mainly through the mode of choosing dialogues.

The mode of influencing the story's narrative in "Storyteller" by limiting the scene and characters can be introduced. Under the mode of choosing dialogues, try to involve as much scene and character content as possible, but reduce the description of the specific content of the following events, leaving plenty of room for players' imagination. Let players guess what might happen through the characters' personalities and corresponding scenes.

The mechanism of the story writer in "Storyteller" is quite special and cannot be directly extended to heavy gameplay, as this game mode itself is an innovative way of playing.

However, the setting of being a story writer can be used. For example, in some types of Roguelike games, you can introduce a game setting similar to "Storyteller", where players act as story writers to decide the story content (general direction) of the next level. At the same time, design some background events that are fairly generic and different, so that players can to some extent customize the direction of the following story (customization does not equal choice), but cannot accurately grasp all the details of the following story. In customizing the direction of the story, they can also experience the randomness and joy brought by Roguelike.