Managing the story of non-linear interactive story game

Abstract

This thesis is about non-linear interactive story games. The idea of non-linear games originated from a book genre called choose your own adventure. These books let the reader choose the way the story would go with multiple options within the books.

Non-linear games change every time they are played. Interactive games are a type of non-linear game that gives the player choices to move the story toward different directions. The player’s actions determine the direction of the plot.

In this final year project, an interactive story game called “Road trip” was created. It is a simple example to demonstrate how an interactive story game controller works. It also has certain traits of open world games, which allows the player to explore freely around the area.

The game was created with Unity and the logic of the game used the tree-diagram as a base. Along with object-oriented programming, the controller of the game uses triggers as their base for the game logic. The triggers are invisible 3D-objects that detect the player and trigger the codes attached to it. These codes contained, for example, the choices that the player would come across while playing.

As a result of this study, a controller that could easily manage the story of an interactive game was created. The controller could also be used to create a game that has both interactive story and open world aspects.