Ashes of the Net Designs: Pt2 Making Choices Matter

Ashes of the Net is a game full of choices, in fact the choices you make is sorta the whole game mechanic! Now in a game that isn't procedural and is well defined, the question is how do you make choices matter? How do you make someone feel like what they're choosing actually has an impact on the game and how do you make players feel like choices are permanent? 

Players shouldn't feel railroaded

The entire concept of the game in Ashes of the Net is a somewhat linear story, where you go through different conversations and choose what you say. Without giving players an infinite amount of versatility with something like a procedurally generated game, you are gonna force a bit of rail roading for the player. And rail-roading is boring! I don't want to play a game that only has one way to play, I want to feel like I have agency in the game, otherwise I'm more just reading a book then playing a game. So how do I give the player as much freedom as I can?

When I design how a conversation is gonna go I first lay out a basic plan of the conversation, what philosophical ideas do I want to touch, who are the characters involved, and what unique gameplay challenges could I add to the conversation to make the player really think. Then, when I actually start writing the conversation, I sorta forget about that entire outline and instead start off by just asking, "at this given point what would I wanna say?". Sometimes I think of a funny joke and I put that in, sometimes I feel like I wanna be serious, so I put that it in, sometimes I wanna go on a weird tangent, I basically stream of consciousness it and put all the options there available. You might notice that when you start a conversation you usually have a LOT of options to pick from, this is part of that process.

Once I do that I figure out the critical path, the one in my outline, as well as a failure path if the conversation has that. I start developing the critical path but EVERY step of the way I go back to the previous step and add a bunch of things that I think I'd want to say as a response, even if it doesn't make sense, even if it's just something silly, I keep adding them. Once I'm done with the critical path I then go back to these options and build on them, sometimes I create entirely new alternate paths that can occur just from random tangents that the original conversation doesn't expect, most of the time however I eventually cap the tangent to be moved back on the critical path, but I make sure to add options and steps to get there so it still feels like, even if you're being tangentially railroaded back to the critical path, that you have got to the critical path naturally. 

For any major conversation in the game (about 10 in total), there are about 200-1000 different nodes, most of the time you'll only see about 40 of them in any given conversation. So most of the conversation you'll never see, maybe most people won't see, but that's sorta the point of making choices matter. Anytime you play the game, your conversation will be unique, and it's likely no one else has seen the exact same conversation you've seen, isn't that kinda cool? You might have questions like, how do you make such large conversation work? How do you test these conversations with hundreds of paths? Etc. We'll get to that in another Ashes of the Net Designs.

Players shouldn't just restart if they made a bad choice

Ashes of the Net is a deterministic game, there's no randomness in the game at all, it's effectively a finite state machine. And because it's a finite state machine, if the player makes a wrong choice, there's absolutely nothing stopping them from going back to a previous save and making the right choice. Remember my first blog post on how I'm avoiding game overs? Well, going back to a previous save is basically a player enforced game over. I don't want that, that's bad.

So how do we avoid this? I didn't want to limit the amount of saves a player could keep because I think that's side stepping the actual problem, I want players to not WANT to go back to a save and limiting saves doesn't really solve that option. So the best way? Well there's basically three ways I've figured out how to make this work.

1. Make the failure interesting: This is a lesson I learned from Disco Elysium, which is a very similar game to Ashes of the Net. In Disco Elysium, failing a roll can actually be much more entertaining than passing it, you might accidentally get into a discussion about fascism when you actually wanted to get a location of some item. That's interesting, and yes the end result is the same, you don't get the location of the item because you failed, but you instead get a less useful but more entertaining philosophical discussion. The scenes where 999 take control of you are sorta my attempt at that, you say some nasty things and get into a stressful and uncomfortable situation, it's uncomfortable, but it's interesting, unique, and you get to put in a situation you wouldn't have otherwise seen. It's not "BOOP you made a bad choice", it's "here are some interesting, though negative, consequences of the choice you made". I think that's a lot more entertaining.

2. Don't let the player know exactly that they made a bad choice: This one might be weird, usually if the player makes a bad choice the game will want to let them know, I mean if the entire game mechanic is about making choices, letting the player know they failed seems like an essential part of the game, right? Well not exactly, ideally I think what you want to let the player know is that they're heading in the direction of failure, but not specifically what got them there. This way, they're less likely to go back to make a different choice because they don't know exactly the choice that got them into this situation, but they DO know they have to be more careful cause they know they're drifting closer to failure. I attempt this with the TRUST meter, which indicates how much the person you're talking to trusts you, as I say in the game higher trust is always good. The thing is, under the hood, trust is just an integer between 75 and -75, and every choice you make either increases or decreases that trust, but I don't show the player that. Instead, I show a player a word description of what the trust is, the other player might be "skeptical" or they might be "trusting", this gives an INDICATION of how well they're doing but doesn't tell them exactly. Each trust level has a bucket that corresponds to it, but I don't tell the player the bucket, and the buckets are decently large (though not too large to make the player feel like their choices have NO effect). This I think achieves the effect of letting the player know they're in danger without specifically showing what got them there.

3. Consequences should be delayed: The easiest way to stop a player restarting to a previous save is to make that previous save really far away, maybe losing an hour of game time before you actually notice the choice you made actually had negative consequences. Unfortunately the demo is too short to really show this, but a few examples is failing the optional conversation with Viktor as Susan blocks off being able to hack Viktor, but you don't REALIZE that until you can talk to viktor with another account. That means if the optional conversation you did before the mandatory one failed, you wouldn't realize the consequences of that action until you've already gone through the mandatory conversation. I've already been working on the third level (a completely optional level you can skip entirely if you make the right choices [see not letting players feel railroaded]) and in that level, if you fail the first conversation in the entire game, then you get this MASSIVE effect on how that level plays out. But that's an entire level away! So if you wanted to reverse it, you'd have to go all the way back to the beginning of the game. That's what makes choices matter.

So basically yeah, that's how I've tried to make choice a big part of the game.