: Re: How crucial is a waifu game storyline? So, with the recent craze in waifu games, I've decided to try my hand at making one. I have a semi-intricate plot with twists, and some events planned

@RJPawlick285

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Being a writing forum, you'll no doubt get a lot of answers here saying "of course story is important." You might get a more balanced point about how much story work you need on Game Development. (But this is still probably a good place to ask about how to work on the story, once you've decided how much you need and how you're going to present it.)

That said, I'll expand a bit further here anyway.

There are a lot of different motivations for playing a video game of which enjoying a good story is only one. Further, most players will have a mix of these motivations in various proportions. Components of your game such as "the story" can work for or against various groups of these motivations, and how they do so will also depend on their implementation. (E.g., whether the player is forced to read the story or whether he can easily ignore it.)

The Gamer Motivation Model developed by Quantic Foundry might help you with analyzing how much work you want to put into story versus other parts of the game and how you want to present what story you have. (I have no connection with Quantic Foundry beyond following their blog.)

Their model offers six basic motivations, each with two sub-motivations:

Action ("Boom!"): destruction; excitement.
Social ("Let's play together"): competition; community/co-op.
Mastery ("Let me think"): challenge (requiring practice); strategy (requiring planning).
Achievement ("I want more"): completion; power.
Immersion ("Once upon a time"): fantasy; story.
Creativity ("What if?"): design; discovery.

If you look at things in this light; you can ask yourself what combination of these you're aiming for in your game and how story (and the other elements) can support this. (You may find it helpful to take their survey to see which of these are emphasized in your own gaming motivational profile.) While "immersion" is obviously related directly to story, most of the others can be supported by story too, if not in as obvious a way.

For example, the "discovery" part of creativity might involve piecing together the story from various clues. One of the things I loved about Fallout 3 was reading through the messages, notes and diaries left behind in abandoned shelters to piece together what had happened there; even the junk left behind in a single room might tell a story with no words at all, if I could figure out what it was. This also might involve the "completion" part of "achievement." And telling that particular story this way, as opposed to making all players sit though cutscenes, let less story-oriented players simply enjoy the environment and get on with whatever else they were looking for.

There are of course other models too you might wish to find and look at, too.

Also remember that, as with any writing, it's normal to have large amounts of your writing work not appear in the final result. Especially for stories set in different worlds from the one we live in it's normal for authors to do extensive development and writing-up of the world's background, and even stories set firmly in the current world such as many television shows still have a large "bible" documenting much more about the characters and stories than ever goes into the scripts. It could well be the case that the story your developing is necessary to give coherence and structure to the world you're creating even if none of what you write it is ever read by the person who plays your game.

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