The Plot

Trying to write the plot for the game has been fun. In many ways, it is a traditional story, a young bumpkin finding his own strength and resources on his way to becoming an adult. On the other hand, we're trying to make it interesting by keeping the plot twists from being obvious. For instance, there comes a point when someone we thought was a good guy is actually a bad guy. The important thing there, I think, is not to give any hints to the player that the person is going to turn, so that when they actually do reveal their evil nature, the player is shocked. Of course, this undermines the opportunity to build suspicion in the player. However, I think that, just as economy of characters in movies makes raising suspicion extremely difficult without giving the game away, attempting to cast characters in doubt in games inevitably makes their betrayal unsurprising.

To take the movie comparison further, I'd point to The Departed. In it, you know who is good and who is bad; tension is created by the two people trying to find one another out for most of the movie. The real twist in the plot only comes out at the end, leading to a conclusion that no one really anticipated (at least I didn't). Or in The Usual Suspects the tension for most of the movie wasn't "Who is Kaiser Soze" but a more traditional heist movie plot "How are these guys going to pull it off?" Again, the twist at the end really comes as a shock because so little had actually been done to cast Kevin Spacey's character into doubt throughout the film.

I have to admit that I haven't completed Bioshock yet, but from the spoilers I've read, it follows this pattern. The whole game goes by and you don't realize you've been conditioned to follow orders, until the very end, when the plot unfolds a layer that you never thought was there. The same for Portal, and to a lesser extent, the first KOTOR (though there were some pretty significant clues in that one). In all of these games, the levels/characters/designers play it very straight until late in the game, when the rug gets pulled out from under you. I'm hoping to emulate these games, at least in part, because I think I'll follow the plot of The Matrix more than some of the other things I've mentioned: the big reveal will come in the second act, and the rest of the story will be a much more standard hero journey kind of thing.