ABSTRACT
Writing outlines can help to organize quests before converting them into flowchart form. Breaking a narrative down into its constituent quests is one part of the larger process of converting a narrative into a game, referred to by Matthew Weise as “procedural adaptation.” In order to move through the initiatory spaces of the quests, players must overcome trials, and quests can be classified in part by the challenges that they provide and the initiations that result from overcoming these obstacles. The success of quest design will depend largely on the tools available for scripting and their integration with other design tools. The key to keeping gameplay interesting in quests is to correlate scripted events with the player’s successful, unsuccessful, and partially successful completion of tasks. Combining portals and puzzles can make the relationship between configurative and interpretive play explicit.
