Branching Narrative in Tavern Talk

This week we talk about the branching narrative in Tavern Talk. 

In our visual novel, we work with player choices that can influence the flow of the story. When the story is influenced by a choice, we call this a branch. However, creating an actual new story branch when one choice is made would quickly end in exponential growth in story branches. Here is an example of how that would look like:

This is not sustainable for the game or the devs, so there are a few tips and tricks that we use to avoid writing infinite branches while still giving you the feel that your choices matter. We make use of something that is called the "Foldback-Tree" and "Global Variables". The Foldback Tree is a method where some choices lead to the same story branch.

But since this can quickly make the player feel like their choices don't matter we made use of variables. With variables, the dialogue remembers what choices were made. When these choices become relevant, our narrative tool checks which choice has been made until now and what variant of the dialogue to display to match the choice. 

We will show you this on a very simple example, but this is also applied on a much larger scale as well (for example what drink you mix and what outcomes you get on the quests.) In this example, you will get the chance to choose what you want to call Caerlin (either Caerlin, Caer, or Lin):

So, whenever the innkeeper now refers to Caerlin, the system checks which of these 3 variables is set to "true" and knows whether to let the Innkeeper call her "Caerlin", "Lin" or "Caer." This helps us to tell a dynamic story while containing the word count, but also enhances the replayability because people might be curious what happens if they go down a completely different path the next time they play.