Over the last couple of days, I’ve been tweaking Chapter One of Fetch The Engines, addressing the comments arising from the first round of playtesting. Some of the changes I made were simple ones – fixing mistakes, or tidying up clumsy wording. But a few were more subtle, and go to the heart of good StoryNexus design.
In this post, I’ll outline the most valuable lessons I’ve learned while tweaking Chapter One. If you’re developing your own world in StoryNexus, perhaps you’ll find something of use here.
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It’s hard to drive a plot through Sometimes cards
Fundamentally, Fetch The Engines is a game about preparing for the unexpected; training for an emergency which you know will one day come. So I decided early on that I’d use Always cards for the grindy bits, pounding the streets and building your skills; meanwhile, the plot would nudge forward less predictably, driven by Sometimes cards.
I like that approach as a gameplay mechanic. It reflects both the reliable and random aspects of life, and it means that Always and Sometimes cards have equally important roles. Doing it this way also helped with pacing… but I’ll talk more about pacing in a future blog post.
What went wrong? Well, Chapter One is essentially a scavenger hunt; plot advancement happens when you come across “Insights”. Most of the Insights are hidden on Sometimes cards, and I’d worked out that on average, the cards would come up often enough to make the Insights easy to find. But I’d forgotten to allow for a frustration that all Fallen London players will know: the way that the particular card you want to draw never seems to come out of the deck.
Most of my playtesters said, when prompted, that they’d spent time flipping cards looking for a specific one – and a lot of them said it had reduced their enjoyment of the game. Since Chapter One is meant to be a gentle introduction for newcomers, such frustration is a significant problem. More subtly than that, flipping and playing cards also drives up the players’ qualities – which meant that some of them would be in for a boringly easy ride at the start of Chapter Two.
How did I fix it? By making certain cards dependent on each other, so that gaining the Insight from card X unlocks a new (and only tenuously related) card Y. That means the initial deck is smaller, so the crucial plot-advancement cards come up more reliably. I also trimmed down the number of branches on the relevant cards, forcing the player to find the Insight before they tried anything else; hiding an Insight in one of three branches made sense on paper, but only if the card actually does come up three times.
Interestingly, although the game now plays quite differently from my original intention, I like the mechanics much more. So it’s turned out well, but it was really fiddly to organise. In future chapters, I think I’ll let the stolid Always cards bear most of the weight of the plot.
Skill is more satisfying than luck
In my survey at the end of the chapter, I also asked playtesters about any cards they’d found particularly annoying. Looking at their responses, I noticed an interesting pattern: the ones they complained about always tested luck, rather than skill.
Luck features quite heavily in Chapter One of Fetch The Engines, mainly for a pacing reason which I’ll cover in a future post. But difficult luck challenges really annoyed the playtesters. Difficult skill challenges didn’t draw anywhere near as much complaint – even if they were practically impossible the first few times they appeared.
I’m speculating now, but perhaps players respond better to weaknesses in their character than they do to the caprice of fate. After all, if you fail a difficult skill test, you can work on building qualities to make it easier the next time; if you fail a difficult luck test, there’s no such thought to comfort you.
How did I fix it? In most cases, I just made the luck tests easier, but in a couple of places I converted them to skill tests instead. (There’s one card which is particularly interesting, because it had a difficult luck test but was also a red herring; I’ve retained its fishy nature but made it a skill test instead. Will it still be as unpopular? I suspect it won’t, but time will tell.)
It’s important to tell players when to stop
A different thing now.
Alongside the Insights, a parallel part of Chapter One is structured as what FBG call a “grandfather clock”. You increase one quality, called “Catching The Commissioner’s Eye”, until it reaches 5; and that unlocks the chance to increase another quality, “The Commissioner Knows You”. Once “Catching The Commissioner’s Eye” has reached 5, there’s no point in increasing it any further, because it’ll reset to zero as soon as “The Commissioner Knows You” ticks up.
To my astonishment, some playtesters raised the “Eye” to as much as 10 or 12. Why? Because they’d been so focussed on doing that, they’d missed the new options they’d unlocked – even when the options appeared right at the top of the very same card.
Happily, this one’s easy to fix. By using the “If <=” option in the storylet tool, I’ve made sure the “Eye” never goes above a target value. Instead, you see a message that the quality “hasn’t increased because it’s already more than 4”, which is a pretty clear signal that it’s time to look elsewhere.
Connected things get complicated in unexpected ways
This one shouldn’t really be a surprise, at least to anyone with any background in computing. But I still got caught out, so perhaps it’s worth a reminder.
I mentioned in a previous blog post that the most buggy part of Chapter One was the point where two storylines merged. That was irritating, but at least there was a purpose to it; there’s a real narrative reason why the threads come together at that stage.
In contrast, the second buggiest thing had no purpose to it at all. At various moments in the chapter, your character can end up “In the News”; when that happens, you can go home and read a story in a newspaper. The key fact here is that there are unrelated plot developments – which can happen in any order – but which all feed into a single “newspaper” card.
It sounds like this would be simple enough, but I made it complicated in one crucial way. For various reasons, I only wanted a single story to appear in the newspaper at any one time, so I locked out options which would put you “In the News” if you were “In the News” already. And straight away, I had a nightmare: cards became unplayable and got stuck in your hand, players got confused when they couldn’t select a particular branch, and some people never saw a card they needed to advance, because it was blocked by a story they’d forgotten to read in the newspaper.
The mistake? Letting the storylines interact with each other, in a way which wasn’t governed by the plot. If the complexity had been plot-driven – so that being “In the News” the first time caused a character development, which in turn led to being “In the News” again – then it would all have fallen out quite naturally. It’s the fact the mechanic spanned independent storylines which made it so trouble-prone.
For the record, I fixed this one almost accidentally, by making an unrelated change which happened to have the effect of preventing more than one of the storylines happening at the same time.
Cleverness is costlier than you think
Finally, and on the same theme, I’ve learned a painful lesson about the cost of being that little bit too clever.
Towards the end of Chapter One, there’s a moment where you’ve found all six Insights, and you need to write them down. At that point, in an attack of elegance, I decided it would be nice to clean the Insights out of your inventory – because they’ve now fulfilled their function in the game, and they’re really just taking up space.
That was a big mistake. At first it worked fine, because of the precise way the game was structured. But then I started to tweak things… and slowly but surely, it got more and more complicated to maintain. For example, as I’ve mentioned above, I started to lock out some cards until you’d collected an Insight; clearing that Insight out of your inventory suddenly locked the card again.
My real error, though, was to fail to notice this was happening and to try to fix the issues one by one. By the time I realised I was chasing my tail, I’d wasted several hours on fiddly fixes – all in order to give a single storylet an utterly unnecessary cherry on top.
The moral? Being clever now has a cost later. To be honest, I doubt I’ll be able to resist trying to be clever – but at least I hope now I’ll notice the costs, before they spiral out of control.
Do you have a StoryNexus world? Do you have lessons you learned from playtesting? Why not share them – either in the comments here, or over on the Failbetter Forums. We’re all learning together.
