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Love overcomes obstacles
Generally, romantic love is a relationship that involves at least 2 different party. So, a premise for a narrative with romantic love theme should consist of at least 2 party, and its direction should revolve around the challenges resulted from romantic love. For example, the love of a man and a lady is greatly tested when the girl’s family marries her to a rich handsome guy.
In a game, mood is capable of guiding the player experience through the arrangement of words or audio-visual narrative elements. Therefore, to have a consistent narrative experience, mood needs to be tailored to match with the theme. For Example, instead of ‘For the lover, the door to her house seems like a Megalodon mouth with countless sharp teeth’, it will suit better with ‘For the lover, the door to her house seems like a court waiting for them to be convicted and sentenced to death.’. In both cases, we know what behind the door symbolizes bad event to the lover, but the second one carries the mood that suits the love theme better.
Structure forms the skeleton of both narrative progression and gameplay objectives for the entire game. Having a theme, a narrative structure has a fluid flow and able to deliver a message/story well. For example, the game narrative structure can be a man meets a lady, they then fight against skeleton army, fall in love, defeat the skeleton king, and save the world. With ‘Love overcomes obstacles’ theme, the core of structure will focus on the relationship development instead of fight or save the world. This means that fight or save the world will be a tool in helping the characters’ relationship develops but not the relationship helps them in fights and save the world.
In game context, scene provides a platform for players to think, feel, and understand the narrative and its world. Theme should be taken into account while creating a scene so players will have some understandings or expectation about the narrative direction. For example, ‘Love overcomes obstacles’ is a theme that involves a relationship and its hardship. Imagine a game scene: a corpse lying in the pool of blood and holding a dating picture between the boyfriend and another female character. This scene creates conflict to the relationship (obstacle) and challenges the relationship (love).
Dialogue helps both player and characters to learn, understand, feel, and response. With a love theme, the dialogue of a character may focus more on the love relationship. For example, in a conversation about study abroad, the characters in the dialogue will have intention/motivation mainly related to their relationship development but not the event itself. A simple dialogue example will be: “ (intention: give up study abroad)I would give up the opportunity if you want me to (motivation : love). It is always about you, not Tom.”
Love overcomes obstacles
A cyborg has to build relationships to power himself and save the world from heartless aliens.
In 2020, the world is invaded by heartless aliens. The survivors gather and live together. They build a wall around their city, which is the last place on earth that has not yet dominated by heartless aliens. Human discovers an energy that can gather from relationship and emotion. They use the energy to build weapons and armour and hope that one day, they can defeat heartless aliens and reclaim their home.
A man is saved from a heartless alien’s assault through a surgery which turns him into a cyborg. He has lost his memory about his friends and family.
A cyborg that forgot what is emotions/relationships, has to gain/get them in order to survive. Different from heartless alien, he can feel emotion but does not understand it. In addition, cyborg has to save the unfamiliar world (he feels no emotion/memory about his world) from heartless aliens (a species somewhat similar to him as he has no emotion/relationship at the beginning).
Player has to control the cyborg to mingle around the human society and build relationships with NPCs. The level of relationship will increase cyborg stats and unlock new skills.