It's not enough to just connect emotionally with the player or audience.
You need to keep that interest level rising as your story or game unfolds.
This brings up the idea of rising actions in a story,
which we're gonna analyze more thoroughly in following lectures.
Rising actions basically means the energy of your story
needs to keep increasing from the beginning through to the end.
The conflicts between the protagonist and
the antagonist forces need to develop and the tensions between them
need to keep rising until they finally resolve at the end in one big event.
The story's hero needs to run into trouble that gets worse, and worse, and
worse before finally being able to kill that dragon and rescue the princess.
We see a very tight correlation to what keeps a game interesting, and that
is in seeing a game get harder and harder to play as you work up in its levels.
With each subsequent level in Angry Birds, the pigs get harder to knock over.
Their obstacles are tougher to get around, and
they even start wearing stuff like helmets to protect themselves.
So the player of the game has got to get better at playing as they go along,
but we need balance.
So to balance out that game play,
designers also created more capable birds to introduce as you rise in the levels.
They get new functions that help get around these harder obstacles and
give the player something new to learn and master in their game play.
Much in the same way that stories present plot twists, and increase tensions,
and more increasing, dangerous situations for the hero to overcome.
We'll see these principles in studying the classic fairy tale, Sleeping Beauty,
in our next lecture.
Before we move on, let's bring up a new game for a moment, PacMan.
Is there much of a story already there in the game?
No, not overtly, no, there isn't, and that's my point.
So as an exercise for yourself, try figuring out
how to create a more interesting narrative behind PacMan as a game.
In short, it comes down to defining that emotional history.
The relationship between the protagonist, PacMan, and
the antagonists, the ghosts and their leader Pinky.
Exploit that relationship to build a story around it.
What if PacMan betrayed Pinky and stole Pinky’s girlfriend back in college?
How could that change the design of the game in your mind?
By giving a reason for the ghosts to hunt down PacMan to get revenge,
you have a new framework to play out that story, and
you bring more emotional context to it.
[SOUND] Quiz.