With so much talk about agents and conflicts, I’ve never really addressed what the outcome of good conflicts is. To put it simply, they grow characters.

Strength is not the same as power. Power is a measure of means a character possesses, what they can use to pursue their goals. Strength comes from an inner conviction as to why those goals matter, leading the character to overcome their own limitations to achieve them.

That is the core of expressing a strong agent in a narrative. Moments when, within a conflict, the character must overcome their own self in order to achieve power (i.e. the means) needed to in turn resolve the conflict.

A lot of games use random events. Even if it’s just the simple and stock random combat encounter. But there is a lot that can be done with them and a few good reasons why you want to invest time into developing some for your narrative game. For the purpose of this article, I’ll be […]

What does it mean when a game displays modality? And what does it mean for a game to be non-modal (amodal)? What are these even referring to? These are some questions you’ve never asked, but I’m going to answer for you anyway.

To summarise, this is all about a game being divided into modes, but what is a mode in this case? We can think about it as specific states where the game functions under a particular set of rules. Some games have only one mode, other games thrive on creating as many of them as possible. A lot of games are happy with just a few.

Balance is a hard topic. Even in a PvP game, where defining balance is the easiest, the process of balancing a game can be harrowing. But what does balance mean in a PvE game? What exactly makes choices in such a game feel like they are balanced against each other? Another article on request, not necessarily based on my own game.

I’ve already spoken about this regarding combat design in PvE RPGs, but not every game is one, and it’s not always about combat, to begin with. There is a more general design space of so-called “numbers games”, where the mechanics revolve around the manipulation of numbers, of course. Such games offer a broad range of possibilities, but being so focused on mathematical (including stochastic) processes they can also be very easy to disrupt.