Hello drinkers, today starts a new match of Trago! And for keep your interest about the game, I decided to make this post, telling you why my decision of invest my time to create a narrative game, and why you should spend you time playing it.

Before I start, I would like to confess, write about my game is a very hard task to me. First because english is not my native language, second because I am so into my development proccess, I couldn’t really understand what’s the most interesting points to you guys knowing about my game. But I will do my best!

Why narrative?

I don’t judge narrative as a necessary element inside games, games like: Smash Hit, Super Hexagon, Bit Trip, are empty of any narrative context, totally focused on the mechanic, but still being amazing experiences.

In my personal opinion, all games should be focused on the mechanics, most part of narrative games with great artstyle found themselves sustained by lazy mechanics, with a linear story and repetitive puzzles. In these games the developers commonly justify their games as being “focus on narrative”, creating a false impression that narrative is the opposite of mechanics.

I spent a lot of time until discover I don’t need follow any rule to create my games, it’s everything on me, my own rules to express situations that I want to immerse my players. And that’s why narrative, I use narrative as a tool to create characters and situations that creates metaphors of my own personal life experience, not only my, but experiences of friends and people that cross my life of some way. Only narrative can create a strong connection with the player.

What about mechanics (and choices)?

I am not great fan of classic interactive fiction, but I am not a great reader as well, I am very visual person, I like action, I like to interact. Interact is not only about explicit choices, “I should go there? Yes? …or No?”, interact is about live a moment, it’s about lose, it’s about learn and change. A lot of important choices on our lifes are taken without an explicit decision, you just feel and goes, is not a boolean.

Of course choices are an important part of the interactive experiences, but is not all, and it’s not obvious. Every mechanics has choices, even those without any narrative context, in Tetris you still have to choose the position of the piece “T” even if that doesn’t mean nothing in a narrative context. Why we keep basing our narrative choices in explicit options? If we have great mechanics, full of choices, why not connect these choices with our narrative?

These questions encouraged me to turn Trago in a better experience. On the next post I will try explain my solutions to these questions inside Trago, and how the narrative works inside the game! See you soon, (: