Choose your own adventure?

[Rastan]

So I had an idea that I wanted to attempt to implement and I was just looking for people's feedback/opinions/suggestions.

I was thinking for the PVE side of my game I would present the storyline "choose your own adventure" style. The available quests would be level based and then move through a story based on choices. A lot of paths would lead to failure at some point unless a player was lucky. Then each quest branch would take a certain amount of stamina points.(which is my PVE currency) Then I thought I would have some stories be more important than others ending with "boss" encounters and the like with better loot than is generally found.

I kinda think this would be an interesting way to present the storyline. Also, as a side effect a way to offer up better loot without guaranteeing everyone an easy shot at it because the important lines would get long and expensive and just generally have a higher chance to fail towards the end.


I've got some of it coded already and it keeps the wife entertained so far lol. I am still in brainstorming mode as to exactly how I want to control it as far as difficulty and loot or if I want to go another way with it. I am kind of fond of luck having just a little to do with some things. So it would be hard, though not impossible, to talk me out of that aspect of it. Luck just sorta fits the theme of the entire game.

Also, If it makes a difference I plan to appeal to the Facebook crowd. I think I'm going to eventually integrate my game into their system as an app and see how that goes.

What do you all think?

[Jackolantern]

You would need to have a way to be sure players don't use the back and forward buttons in their browser to cheat the choose their own adventure format. It would not be that hard, though, since you could store what page they are on in the database, and on each page check to make sure the player is where they are supposed to be. Or store all the page info in the database in the adventures, and dynamically load them into the page with PHP. Combine that with checking the page like in the previous method (because players would still cheat with back and forward buttons). Either way would work well I think.

[Rastan]

Yeah I have been looking at options to stop that from happening. It would kind of suck to have a player cash out on a final boss they had the stats for or a good leg of the quest that gave more exp. I have been pushing the information through post using a link and some script for not showing a submit button but just letting the link activate it and just changing the values to catch. I'm not sure atm that that's the way to go but it has been working so far kinda like I want. I'll def have to try to implement something to catch said cheating tho.

[Callan S.]

I think it' sounds alot more fun than games where you just fight monsters over and over without advancing in any sort of story/adding any meat to the statistical activity (legends of zork has that problem).

I was thinking of doing that myself, but opted for just one path precisely because of the effort involved in the no cheating stuff. Not that I think it's impossible, just for someone starting off like me I decided to leave it till latter.

If I were doing it, I'd probably do something like the database entries lead to each other. Like they all have id's, and an entry has a space for describing the choices, then several entries for it's multiple choice of where you go next. Each one lists the ID of the next database entry to go to. Can't go backwards that way, only onwards through the choices.

Anyway, I'd play it! Though I'd play more to try and successfully navigate through the story/adventure than to collect loot.

[Rastan]

Interesting ideas I'll let ya know how it goes for the securing. I have yet to try to secure a page from both refreshing and back and forth. I think it would be funny to have them auto fail a back movement where going back would just lead them to a messy end and throw them out of the string. . I think actually affecting the character by killing it(taking health to 0) might prove to harsh for accidental clicks but forcing it to kick them out of the line I think is justified. I was kinda thinking I might be able to accomplish this with Randids and DB checks.

[Callan S.]

I think you just need an value in the players database entry, saying where he is. Like "currentlocation" then an id of where that is in the databse.

Like if you had a gameworld database
room1, id 1
room2, id 2
room3, id 3

Your PHP script would just look at the players databse entry to find the id of the room he's in, then show that. It wouldn't matter if they hit back or even closed the session, they'll come back right to where the database left them.