the best way to write game story is to force the player to write it, every textwall is empty but to proceed the player must write a 500 page story. this has no effect on gameplay

It would be even better if "burn down an orphanage" was the good ending because of some crazy series of coincidences that are explained in the final cut scene and were not foreshadowed at all. So this options really saves the universe and the other option somehow leads to its destruction and the only small clue that this will happen is hidden somewhere in an optional quest. People love plot twists!

Man, I thought "Burn down the orphanage" was the good ending 🗣

Its even better to have a linear story where the entire plot can be easily derailed by the player having more common sense than the protagonist! For example, we all know that video game players are stupid and wont think to grab a clearly marked plot important bag of money that's right in front of them that's in the exact same path they need to take to save the protagonist's cat. After all, the story says that money needs to burn so that the protagonist is forced to continue with your perfect story!

To be clear, both hand crafted stories and dynamic, emergent stories can both be enjoyed, but if we are going to give the player the option to impact the story with their choices, forget the hand crafted stories.

The best way to write a video game story is to make it really meta but for absolutely no reason. Start off by scolding the player for killing enemies, but have no alternative option. And in case they really go out of their way to not kill enemies (which the game is totally not designed for - remember, we only want to bitch at the player, not give them an actual choice) don't give them any reward for it. As a matter of fact don't even change the dialogues. Oh and don't give standard enemies any character, you don't need that to feel sympathy for them.

Step one: Force your main character to enter a radioactive chamber and sacrifice themselves as the ending. Step two: Give your main character multiple companions that are immune to radiation. Step three: Eh fuck it, we already got their $60.

If you’ve ever heard of Brandon Sanderson-while he was making the book Stormlight, he tried to fill all the pages with as much info story and magic system explanations as he could. While writing it he just knew something was off, so he rewrote the rough draft and was much more satisfied by putting the story into more sections. He says the lesson there is, “Bigger is not always better.”

2:20 this shit killed me cause a stupid amount of games do this

this video could be considered a puzzle game

Imagine this guy making a collab with Terrible Writing Advice on artist collaboration

Telltale Games do feel like this sometimes. Like choices affect side characters that don’t change the outcome of destiny.

You should do an episode on difficulty. It’s really fun when the game neuters the normal mode so the “hard” mode has all the fun stuff. It’s also especially great when a game makes itself hard in a completely tedious way, and calls itself inspired by dark souls or something to cover it up.

Ah yes, when the story and the gameplay are contradicting each other, for example: The Witcher 3 (Don't get me wrong, great game, but still) - Story: "HURRY UP AND COMPLETE ALL THE MAIN QUESTS BEFORE IT'S TOO LATE AND THE WILD HUNT FINDS AND CAPTURES CIRI!" Gameplay: "Chill, you have all the time in the world. You can do side quests, explore the map, or just goof around to your heart's' content."

Not gonna lie, I also noticed the similarity with TWA. This is how I got to your channel in the first place, and I totally support developing this series. The biggest difference between HTF and TWA I see is that while TWA is usually about either lazy writing or graphomany, this series covers deliberate self-sabotage.

"It's only a game. Why put effort into the story?.....So anyway, I'm thinking of adding loads of cutscenes and audio logs"

Please note: Walls of text are acceptable in every kind of game EXCEPT text adventures. They're too wordy and you need to stand out so let's do away with all those descriptions and immersive scene-setting. Tell don't show. Your players want to play the game not imagine it.

thank you, i was just about to succeed at this one

I wonder how you're gonna deal with failing at a horror game, considering the state the genre is in currently

You forgot to give to the player some choices at one moment in the story, but only one option is clearly the correct one, and if the player select any other option he either get a gameover or after few lines of dialogues he has to choose again until he take the obvious pure hearted choice.

YOU'RE STILL DOING THESE? this makes me happy. this series is funny AND useful.. When Im ready to make the worst game ever, I'll rewatch this series.

Found 4 more tips to fail: First: Make your character incompetent during cutscenes, getting captured, knocked out etc. despite you managing to beat enemies left and right during gameplay. Or make the character have superpowers during cutscenes and you being forced to watch the character doing cool things you couldn't do during normal gameplay, maybe throwing in a quicktime event thrown in where you least expect it. Second: Make sure that there is a huge disconnect between what the player and what the character would do. For an example, make a character go on a revenge spree, then, before the revenge, switch to another person's perspective to give more insight. Then switch back to the original character and make the player decide whether the character would do what the player wants but what makes no sense for the character. Or a choice that would make sense for the character but what the player wouldn't do, given new insight. Or scratch that and take all the choice away anyway. Third: Make EVERY choice morally ambiguous or bad. Because everyone knows that in real life, there are no situations where one choice of action is clearly better than the other. Fourth: Railroad the player into doing a despicable action and then shame them for it!

These videos are sometimes confusing because of how they’re worded, but at the same time, extremely helpful!

YEAHHH. i already binged the entire series. Edit: i love that you finnaly mentioned TWA, i love that guy

That part about linear and non-linear storytelling. There’s something about that that really invoked critical thinking in me. My game is inspired heavily on Final Fantasy 3 from my childhood, but that doesn’t mean I have to design the story to be so straightforward point to point with only side quests. My story would actually be made worse by that due to what I am trying to convey. I could have a part of the story where they are fighting the bad guys in a dense forest. Using fire magic would basically instantly win the encounter but the whole forest burns down, upsetting the druid party member. That could create a whole new line just to gain back that respect within the party itself else she’d just straight up leave and never come back. One party member can regenerate from death but it causes them to transport into a random crystal to regrow on the planet, meaning the player can choose to sacrifice her for something important or not take that risk and lose out. Story critical NPCs could be killed. Story critical villains could be saved. I already have it so that a very common feature is the party splits up in order to take advantage of not drawing too much attention in public areas, I can explore that with tough choices changing based on if the party is full or split, allowing multiple ways players can engage one scenario from how they managed to get there. Could’ve been using rumors in town and immediately heading there or regrouping and taking a longer, harder path with all 4 party members. All of these I came up with thanks to this video. Wow. I’m very glad I found this channel.

As someone currently attempting to make a non-linear story for a game, I can absolutely understand why so many games give only the illusion of choice... it's hard to craft this stuff! But, of course, that's why it's good to keep things simple when you're first starting out and just in general to focus on making the choices matter that players would feel like should matter, rather than fussing over every little thing...in my opinion, anyways. I'm still learning of course. But seriously, I have so much respect for people who do non-linear games well!

Thank you for making one on making a story. This will help me become a failure in game development

I don't think having "the illusion" of your desicions mattering is always 100% a bad thing. You can have it be a thematic thing in the story and narrative, so sadly, telling people to do that isn't ALWAYS gonna make them write a bad videogame story.

I love these videos. Upping my potential for failure with each new release! I'll have to give that channel you mentioned a look, and take their advice as gospel instead of sarcasm. That way I can fail well at the story too!

Worst way to make a story is to watch game theory

It's freaking sick seeing you pop off like this! Congrats man, keep 'em coming!

The best game story is to lock it behind a paywall where players must pay per paragraph, but it's random loot, so you won't know which paragraph fits in the story where.

awesome always look out for these videos

Bonus tip for extra credit: No one likes to sit through long, unskippable cutscenes. They want to interact with the game, right? So, they’ll probably just walk away if they’re bored of the cutscene, and that’s not good. You want them to stay in their seat to pay attention, but you can’t just tell the story through gameplay, because you’re bad at game storytelling, and you desperately need the player to take in whatever drivel you want to force feed them. Thankfully, a recent invention called “forced walking sections” had been created to have your cake and eat it too! During a bit of gameplay, simply and jarringly throttle their character’s speed to a walk, making them walk to a designated point. Because they’re forced to go so slow, you can make story graphics and dialogue pop up as the player goes past them, ensuring they can’t miss or skip any exposition, no matter how innane it is. The best part is, pushing the left stick foward is the closest thing to sitting there that you can get, but the interaction required is still not zero. This means forced walking sections are everything you- I mean the player loves about unskippable cutscenes, but now with that secret ingredient of having juuuuust enough interactivity to stop them from just walking away to get something real quick, because their finite time is not important.

Just found this channel like 10 minutes ago and i already know i'll be binge watching all of these 🔥🔥🔥🔥

These videos really have sapped my will to create video games. Thanks!

you are not only helpful, you even give us links to other channels, thank you so much Artindi

Honestly this is way more helpful than serious tutorials, thanks

Great episode as usual. Really excited to find out how to fail at level design!

one of the best games that incorparates the story and gameplay together is Lobotomy corparation, with the story explaining the difficulty, the visual artstyle, the enviroment and even players restarting. it's one of the best games to play interms of writing

Love these, please do more if you have any ideas

this was a very helpful episode to me, the game i'm brainstorming rn has a story that i really love, and gameplay that i really love... but i wasn't exactly sure how to put them together in a way that feels fluid and pleasant. i would like to be less reliant on dialogue and cutscenes and lean more toward interactivity. in turn, though, i might need to slim down the story when it comes to details.

i wanted to compare this to terrible writing advice, but i now see that it has already been done.

Instructions unclear, proceeds to create lore rich game

Just found your channel and I really like this series. I’m really wanting to work on a heavily story based game and I was wondering if an entirely linear game would be a bad design, but I guess you just have to pull it off properly.

I'm a simple man. I see a "how to fail at game dev" video, I upvote.

Disco Elysium on its way to just straight up be a book where you also read books (it is one of the most engaging and incredible experiences in video games ever made and is great because of its format and it couldn't actually just be a book, because it was a book, and it was good, and no one cared, until it was a game)

- 20 mins for each cutscenes - 15 pages novel in between each missions - Gameplay have nothing to do with story - Fake choices Got it!

This man makes me feel called out for things I never thought of

Walking dead telltale is a good example of a movie with a walking sim, but it has more interactive mechanics, like choosing what to say based on the situation

shoutout to Hardspace Shipbreaker, which had a good story, delivered as unskippable cutscenes where your colleagues _phone you at home after work_ and monologue at you for minutes at a time. truly a horror game

nice vid! keep it up, baby!

Actually, I will say, 2:40 gives me a hilarious idea for a game about solving moral dilemmas but with the satirical twist that all your choices are extreme in one direction or the other. Seems like the kind of game I'd expect to have some kind of shock factor with a social statement about extremism like many of Nicky Case's games, and the length is fitting too, it very much shouts "goofy game jam idea".

you've done it again david cage!

Literally Starfield and Skyrim.

found these videos on accident and binged most of them to see this video came out 4 hours ago, real

You should totally make one of these "fail" videos on metroidvanias

The true story at the end made me go "What!" I mean... for real bro?

"A really long movie occasionally interrupted by a walking simulator" Man really gotta call out YIIK like that huh?

Holy cow a bejeweled reference

the YIIK dev took this to heart

2:52 the "else" statement may lead to partial success 'cause two's better than one, therefore, use the "if" alone.

Best way for the multiple endings to happen is make it so there is either a single choice made at the start of the game, ie you chose to steal some bread on your journey from the windowsill of a house vs asking nicely from the obviously mean neighbor who won't give it, that makes every single other options during gameplay flavor text, or you make *every* choice alter your "karma" that is unseen and unknown by the player, ie you have 51% bad and 49% good therefore you get bad ending, but 50/50 is a neutral ending, but every event has different weights that you can only figure out via data miners dumping all that online so people have to make guides based off it and now the player is doing a pre-determined set of choices that they don't always wanna do but have to for sake of a third ending that isn't satisfying in either direction, because it's neutral

You are on fire lol. Can't wait for the roast of live service

Instead of walls of text there can be endless dialogues too!

Damn, it's like Emil Pagliarulo saw this video, and didn't realize it was sarcasm!

Can you please make "How to fail making a fighting game"? I'm curious about what you come up with.

No way, Terrible Writing Advice but games?!!!

Great video, make how to fail at learning to code, idk how to code and I might actually learn

2:13 *cough* Life is Strange *cough*

Remember, your story and gameplay should be entirely disconnected. Just because your game lacks any fall damage doesn't mean your protag cant break his leg in a fall. You've heard the term "ludonarritive dissonance" before, so gamers are probably used to a little bit of extra suspension of disbelief. But also doing things in gameplay rather then cutscenes is also really cool. You played a game that did that once and, like, it was badass! You gotta put as many story moments into your gameplay as possible, people love that stuff, and for some reason most games don't do it much. So when you need a character to die, don't do it in a cutscene and leave the player to escape whatever danger kills them after. Instead, you should have the player carry this character on their back, slowing them down to really emphasize how they're trying to save this person at their own expense, before they're forced to leave them behind in order to not die themselves. Yeah, that sounds super cool! Oh, how do we force them to leave the character behind? Yeah, we'll just take one of those door puzzles where you need to push a crate onto a button, and remove the crate. Now they *have* to leave them behind no matter what. Of course the door can be opened by another button on the other side, ya know, makes sense, but we removed all the crates, so there's mo way to keep it open while rescuing the character! ...wait, we added a gun that swaps the player and another character? And the character is a straight shot from the player, so they could just swap places with the character, both keeping the door open and allowing the player to rescue the character? And we've had them do this multiple times before in previous puzzles? Better disable the gun's function for literally just this and only this one segment with no explanation. We can't let player agency get in the way of the story, the character needs to die so the story can play out exactly as we originally wrote it, they need to be sad he died! And the player needs to do it in gameplay to make it extra sad! Even if we have to literally disable basic game functions and turn the "gameplay" into basically just a worse cutscene, the story will clearly be good enough that players won't mind. I mean, it worked for CoD, right? Everyone knows about "Press F to pay respects"! Man, we are smart. (Yes this is about one specific game how could you tell)

This reminds me so much of the Kings Question remake. At one point, you're given a choice to save either: a) A pregnant woman and one of your most loyal subjects or b) a blind old goat. And yes. This choice is 100% serious and the game will guilt you for not saving the goat.

Heres an idea: - Don't explain the story or give any context to where you are and where your going. Leave it open ended so the playerbase can make up some fanfiction to feel smart. - Add an open world with no quest tracking or logs; only add NPCs that talk a little and leave it up to the player to figure it out. (NPCs should talk in some old medevil english) IMPORTANT NPCs should only say their dialogue *ONCE!* - Don't mark anything of the map. Leave it blank with some structures squiggled on and make it the same style as the terrain of the points if interest is even harder to see *Bonus points* DO NOT mark where you've been so the player will get stuck going in circles. - punish the player for minor and easily made mistakes *bonus* force the player to redo a chunk of the level when they die with all of the enemies respawned. - *DO NOT* give the player a way to beat the boss or allow the player to use strategy to exploit the weaknesses of the boss; that is what the open world is for: increaseing your power level

Even better when the player's dialogue explains everything that happened in the past at perfectly convenient intervals. Player (just woken from a 1000-year cryostasis): "Huh, that's a plant I've never seen before. It must be a highly evolved Zega-Flytrap clone that was created by High Magistrate Bruno when the War of the Corps raged on planet Oswan VI in the year 3329 A.D., 952 years ago. How interesting."

scungle

well, i got called out in like 20 seconds, fair play thanks again for the vidya

0:18 I love this like... I wouldn't call it a crossover, what would it be called though? 617 episodes?! so cool, and I think this was a good way to do it. thank you for the vids :D

I wonder if J.P. from Terrible Writing Advice has actually seen this series yet. Someone should send it to him now that this shoutout's been made.

I've played quite a few Pokemon ROM Hacks and fan games, but in the most part, when they made a new story or simply modified an exisiting story, I had found that story to actually be worse than the original games, which really isn't a high standard. I've seen stuff that contradicts confirmed canon facts, I've seen a lot of "important" events and characters that serve no purposes, and lot of other horrible stuff story-wise. Strangely enough, the best story I've seen from a Pokemon fan game actually comes from a game whose main selling point wasn't even the story. It's a simple idea: Pokemon Fire Red, but you play as a Rocket Grunt. What they've done with the story was actually very amazing, they made it happen parallel to the original Pokemon Fire Red story, but you get to see everything behind the scenes, everything is explained in a way that not only makes sense (such as why Team Rocket was at Mt. Moon), but also doesn't deny anything from the original game. And at the end, you also get some 4th wall-breaking storytelling, in the same way that Undertale does. This last point is actually what I absolutely love in video game story-telling. Explaining game mechanics in a way that makes sense within the story setting of the game is super cool, but making use of illogical yet extremely common game mechanics to make the story go meta about you as the player or other out-of-the-box concepts, I crave that kind of plot twists!

Wait you're telling me GameMill Entertainment invented time travel and took notes from this video while they were developing The Walking Dead Destinies??? HOLY SHIT

2:12 shout out to onions worldwide!

Yooo new vidz :D

Remember, right out of the gate you have to overwhelm and bore the player with your plots at the expense of the exciting game they bought. Never let the opening be comprised of quick, effective teaching through level design, or poignant and lush storytelling through environmental details and visual cues. You HAVE to frontload the game with text so that, at best, your fans will say “It gets really good hours into the experience.”

2:22 when you accidentally give a fire game idea:

Sometimes I feel like the story in a linear game assumes that I'm competent and know what I'm doing when I don't. According to the story of half life 2, I'm a new member of the resistance going off to find the nearest base and escape from the combine forces. In reality, I'm going in whatever direction the game's level design points me in without a clear idea of what we're doing, where I am, or what's going on. And I would like to know what's going on. I want to know that I'm not working for the bad guys.

The TWA reference was so in place

I never expected to see TWA here 😭😭

1 out of 10 stars I accidentally made omori

high quality content here!

I do take issue with the concept of nonlinearity still converging on the same ending vs a binary choice in non-linearity, because it has been done before well albeit in a somewhat niche setting. 999, Virtue's Last Reward, and Zero Time Dilemma (the Zero Escape trilogy) do a fantastic job of letting the player experience many different endings to inform the player (and NPCs kinda) about things that can progress other timelines to a final ultimate ending. I know it is niche, but the compromise can absolutely be done

darksouls devs taking notes

Instructions unclear, created Undertale.

Instruction unclear. Followed them exactly but made Metal Gear Solid 4

2:26 literally every roblox camping game ever

**How to fail at making an RPG memories**

0:54 to 1:18 is just explaining the current state of Five Nights at Freddys.

Ah I see… so it’s basically your average Telltale and David Cage games?💀

Some questions. - What about Telltale video games?... those are based only on cinematics that activate depending on the options you choose, so it's like a kind of interactive movie or cinematic? - And what about visual novels? - And does what was said in this video change anything if the player is previously announced that the video game will be more linear and therefore would not generate so many illusions/expectations that would be betrayed in the end? Of course, then I guess fewer people would probably be attracted.

2:19 Fire Emblem three houses in a nutshell

I don't care what anyone says. The literal 'Wall of Text' was the funniest joke in the Neverhood and yes, I read all of it AND I enjoyed it.