Story structure
It's a good idea to have a solid idea of what kind of game you want to make before you start writing script, creating art, or developing code. The wider Interactive Fiction (IF) community has put a lot of thought and research into categorising game styles, and I'd like to outline some of those.
The style of a game will inform how best to structure your code. Since
changing the structure of a RenPy game has some challenges after an
initial release it is worth thinking about before starting down a path.
See
Standard Patterns in Choice-Based Games
- Linear stories
- The structure of normal, linear, stories and kinetic novels.
- Branching stories
- Continuously branching structure and the problems with exponential growth.
- Gauntlet stories
- Gauntlet stories with aggressive branch pruning.
- Diamond stories
- Story structures that branch and merge.
- Map based games
- Open world stories where the player character free-roams on a map.
- Time based games
- Stories where the passage of time is critical to the game structure.
- Quest hub stories
- Stories where there's a central hub that serves as a base for quests. Also called hub and spoke.
- Filter stories
- Story structure where the player subtly selects one of several outcomes.
- IF Cruelty Scale
- The Interactive Fiction Cruelty Scale, and why to think twice about disabling Ren'Py's roll-back features.