ABSTRACT
Characters are a great place to start developing our game ideas. After creating the characters, or even while creating them, we will often begin developing some ideas for game mechanics. Game mechanics are what the player can do, which we will be looking at in the chapter on game mechanics, Chapter 8. For this chapter, however, we are not going to look at what the player can do, but why the player is doing it or anything for that matter. Story is the reason why things are happening within a game. Our stories may be grand and epic sweeping tales spanning galaxies or they may be straightforward tales. In either case, many of the core elements of the story will be extremely similar. Our story can provide guidance for the rest of the development of the game; that guidance will include game mechanics as well as the design of the levels and environments for the game. By the end of this chapter, we will have laid a solid foundation for our Sancho Panza project by adding a story providing a reason for the characters to be where they are, doing whatever it is that they will be
doing, as well as the essentials of what will occur during game play. This foundation is ultimately what we will build our game on.
