Making Good Choices: Choice Design for Narrative Games

When writers first approach branching narratives, such as in interactive fiction, visual novels, and RPGs, one of the most intimidating things can be figuring out where to put choices and what kind of choices to include.

This workshop is an introduction to choice design that will walk attendees through different moments they might want to put choices in a game, how to provide players interesting or useful choices, and how to cut branches down when they become too big or too numerous.

Come prepared with an idea for a story in an identifiable genre (ie. 'romcom', 'military sci-fi', 'horror-mystery'), and together we'll spend an hour figuring out where and how to include choices in your concept. Practical examples, as well as examples from popular choice-driven narrative games, will be shown and discussed for inspiration.

This event is brought to you by the New Zealand Centre of Digital Excellence (CODE) and Otago Polytechnic as part of the Festival of Interactive Narrative & Storytelling.

Mads Mackenzie

Mads Mackenzie is an award-winning visual novel developer (Inverness Nights (2017), Catacomb Prince (2019)) who's been making games about making choices for over 5 years. Originally from Ōtautahi/Christchurch, they now reside in Naarm/Melbourne in Australia.

They have recently founded the studio Fine Feathered Fiends, where they are working with a team of wicked creatures to make horror-romance visual novel Drăculești (TBD). Keep an eye out for it! (And then give them that eye. They need it for their experiments.)