Chapter 86 - Story for Interactive Fiction
Many tabletop game designers think that they are very simple, therefore not requiring any new player introductions as most of the players would have played it before in real life.
But this view was incredibly wrong.
There are many local variations in rulesets for tabletop games. For example, mahjong from different areas may have different rules for ‘pongs’,’gongs’ or winning. If an international mahjong player wanted to try out blood mahjong, it would be very difficult for the player to find out the rules for himself without the help of new player introductions.
There was also another group of players who rarely have the chance of playing tabletop games, would even fail at playing Dou Dizhu, and despite that they still want to improve their skills. It wouldn’t cost them much to play these tabletop games once in a while, and would also hope they can get some newbie tips when they play.
Tecent Tabletop from the previous world had done this very well. As long as a new player knew some of the rules when they start playing, the new player guides would allow them to continue playing, receiving awards on the way as they finish quests.
Chen Mo had already managed to recreate a card game such as I Am MT, so numerical simulation such as these were comparatively peanuts.
The second was the tournament mode.
“And evidently you haven’t paid attention to this point in your writing process. You didn’t consider what this would do to the pacing of the story.”
“Second, the story feels about the same no matter the start, the middle or the end, when it should be constantly ramping up, especially when they are trying to escape, that part was especially stale. Maybe you could add some more shocking elements, perhaps…shapeshifting aliens.
“And there’s one more thing, the content isn’t rich enough. You need to double the amount of choices to more than one hundred and twenty. You should increase the number of endings too, and ninety percent of it should be failures, forcing the players to be more careful. The players must make the right choice every step of the way to reach the best ending.”
Listening intently, Zheng Hongxi nodded, “Yep, I understand. I’ll make some changes.”