Introduction to The Ferry: Short but Deep Webs of Causality

Summary

The Ferry is a brief but deep game of narrative exploration. The idea sprang up while I was playing Indigo Prophecy and I mentioned some of its founding observations in an earlier article on replayability. The space and time are both highly constrained. The setting is a ferry ride, probably across the English Channel or some other body of water large enough to support a ferry with the features I want to include. The player will be able to take on the roles of many of the passengers of the ship, each with their own goals and aspirations, each with their own impact on the events that unfold over the course of the trip.

Mission Statement
The idea behind this experiment is the exposure of gameplay depth through replayability. The time and space are restricted for two reasons. First, the constraints make it easier to develop the assets needed for all of the varying interactions and narrative options the player can explore through gameplay. The second reason for the constraint (in time, mostly) is to allow the player to quickly retread the story, taking different routes to see his impact on the narrative. This is further extrapolated by allowing the control of different characters throughout the course of play.

Multiple Personalities
Having the player inhabit multiple avatars that can coexist in a looping timeframe poses interesting design possibilities. The path I'd like to explore in The Ferry would have the player's actions 'baked' into the characters, so they behave as he did when the player takes on the role of a different character. If the player takes control of the Ship's Steward and walks from the bridge to the galley then to the garage, when he plays the second time as the Gilted Lover, he can watch the Steward travel to those places in that order, interacting with the world in whatever ways the player did.

Non-Linear Time
To accommodate the organization of different characters and the flow of time, there will be a track editor similar to non-linear video editing and animation packages. Each character will have its own track on the timeline. The timeline will be divided into 5 minute chunks. The player can jump to any 5 minute segment in control of any character he's unlocked thus far. As soon as he interacts with a character he previously controlled and disrupts its path from the way he controlled it that timeline will become locked from that point onward, with the color of the timeline reflecting this 'invalidated' state. The AI will take over from the point of invalidation, ideally trying to approximate the intentions of the player when he was in control (tech permitting).


Narrative Trajectories
The impact each character's storyline has on the others could be viewed sort of like the interactions in a particle collider. Each track intersects, and then multiple possibilities for each party involved scatter outward from the intersection. The more parties involved, the bigger the collision. The trick here is managing the outcomes in the pre-production phase by developing systems that are granular enough and potentially procedurally adaptive to accommodate the possibilities. That or examine the interactions and cull them based off of the ones with more fallout to manage than others.

Standard branching path through a narrative possibility space. NPCs have deterministic responses to player actions. Player's actions can have future repercussions, affecting choices as well as simply altering play. The meta bubbles here are pretty arbitrary scalewise and can represent anything from encounters to 'levels' to entire games in a series.

In the trajectory collision model, the inputs to an interaction can come from several directions since the actors involved can have player motivations. The outcomes for actors, likewise are non-deterministic since it can be up to the player to choose how to respond in the various roles involved. This could get quite hairy, even in the proposed limited scope of half an hour aboard a ship. I was working on a bubble-chamber like diagram for this, but it quickly got out of hand. Maybe that's telling me something...

First Steps
Aside from general brainstorming systems and spaces, the next step I plan to take is putting together a paper prototype. This will probably be nothing more than an RPG session in a fairly generic system (GURPS, bare d20). I'll throw in some of the roles I want to see included in the scenario, let people choose the characters, give them their 'motivation' and see what happens. The info from this will inform future decisions about just what affordances I want to give to players in this environment as well as if story ingredients are interesting and have flexible potential. I probably won't even include a map, but see what kind of environments the players expect and assume the boat will have.

Coming Next

• Verbs
  What does the player do, exactly?
• AI Considerations
  How to NPC characters react to input and alter behavior based on prior player input based on new stimuli? How can procedural behavior systems mitigate complexity?
  
• Interface
  More on the track view and how the player will be expected to navigate the space-time bubble.
• Motivations
  The character motivation system and tools for the player to decide how the character feels about others. Based on ideas from an earlier post.