Over the past few weeks, I’ve come to appreciate the value of story in games from a different perspective.

I’m not writing this blog post to argue what aspect of a game is more important. Of course, gameplay is what makes a game a game, even though many game experiences don’t have gameplay at all, and even though the measurement of “fun” is still debated among critics. My games focus on visual design first, for that’s the first thing most people see in screenshots and video, and if a game doesn’t look good or unique, then really, what’s the point of making it for pubic release against a sea of millions of other games? Music is the most elemental way to create emotional ties and memories, and can make a game more accessible when designed the right way. And story gives the player context, and gives them reason to press forward, to play for just a few minutes longer.

But these are common observations from a player’s perspective. What about from a developer’s perspective?

My indie game is entering its final year of development hell. Over the past few weeks, I’ve shifted attention to focus directly on the story part: to finish writing text for opening and ending cutscenes, to finish programming the system that would trigger and control camera movements and player actions. A game of many smaller systems, it had always felt that there was some new feature I had to work on, and that I had many separate systems just waiting to be put together. The writing itself did that for me.

Writing not just placeholder text, but the actual text intended for the final game (pending minor edits later) is a relaxing artistic outlet compared to seemingly endless computer programming. And now, an RPG (whose fun was questionable up to now) actually had context when I started up the game, and it became much more interesting. For the first time, I wasn’t entirely ashamed of the game. And it was much clearer exactly how much of the game was finished, and what necessary parts of the game (to lead to specific cutscenes as I test-play it) were left remaining. If I can play from the opening cutscene to the final credits, I know that, on some level, the game is finally done.

So my argument is that story is perhaps the most important part of a game’s development. It gives both the developer and player important context to the digital adventure at hand. It’s the all-important one-sentence pitch. It gives the player a reason to play. And it gives the developer a reason to keep going: the final destination on the GPS map of development, course-correcting you whenever you divert of the trail.

But not all games really have a story, or require one. Increasingly, game genres focus on online-multiplayer, worlds-as-a-service, and systems that create emergent experiences that create unique moments you’d tell your friends about (or to stream an instance for others to see online, to convince people to “hit that like button, tap that subscribe button, and click the bell icon” to immediately know when you upload more gameplay of a car driving sideways up a hill). Those moments appear when the pieces come together in just the right away, programmed to do so as many times as possible (or in a more balanced ratio) for the sake of fun. I’d argue that the difference there is that those games rely on a smaller, simpler gameplay loop, one that could be programmed in a matter of hours, representing less than 10 seconds worth of actual input from the user, looping over and over in new scenarios and environments. There, the design of the levels and maps is the most important thing, and the game truly shouldn’t take long to develop to at least an initial state, only continuing development to add more content.

Personally, those games never seemed all that fun or interesting. Perhaps that’s just me.

As 2020 comes to a close, I realize I’ve wasted at least a month of ideal time to focus entirely on my game, and have mostly squandered that chance, a chance that will never come again. The game isn’t ready yet, and it’s still not clear when exactly it would be. In fact, I’m procrastinating further by writing this blog post here (not unrelated to the topic of the day).

The year has been a disappointment for too many reasons. I’m hopeful that 2021 will be better, both for me and you. And I’m ready to put a close on the indie game I’ve been writing about for almost 5 years. Even if released as a free, unfinished demo, I have to put this game aside to be able to start from scratch on something new (smaller and more manageable, lest I want to be in dev hell all over again). I’m aiming for March.