WHICH CAME FIRST: THE STORY OR THE GAMEPLAY?

My previous project began with a story, and the gameplay was built around it. The result was that the gameplay was pretty lacking, because it wasn't the focus.

For my next project, now that I actually know a lot about game design, I want to start with a gameplay idea, and build a game around that, with story as a secondary concern. However, I feel like if I focus my energy like that, then the story will end up noticably lacking. I only have so much energy and drive and time to spread around to the different aspects of game design, and if I start to focus on something, then it takes over my mindset.

So what I'm going to do is reuse the story from my previous game, with some changes to fix the major problems that arose (like the poorly-defined setting and the two pointless stock characters). I'm not sure if this is a clever solution or one that will turn people off. But it seems like the easiest way to get a good, original story into my game without actually focusing on it and without hiring a writer.

Gameplay. In all successful games in the industry, gameplay always comes first. In FPS they do gameplay first with multiplayer to make sure its fun before they make a 1st person campaign. Mario makes the levels first before the world maps.

Which came first: The Story or the Gameplay?

Gameplay


Didn't even have to read the opening post.

Gameplay definitely came first!

This varies for me. Two games I'm working on began as gameplay ideas, while another was first a story. It really depends.

Kind of a mix.

But if had to choose one, I'd choose story though, for my works. Mostly because if I get lazy I can always come back and read the story again.

It varies but most of the time I start with "theme" which probably is story. Sort of. I'll throw out a couple of examples of games I never made.

One was a slave trading game where you would be capturing slaves in Africa and then ship them over to the Americas for fun and profit. The theme came first in this case and I did have some mechanics (this was a board game and I was inspired by some "discover America" board game).

Another one is my "Ten Days of Knight" thing where I got the idea of being a lord in charge of a county during a feodal era (so still under a king), this was inspired by a Three Moves Ahead podcast where they talked about something very similar to this. I then started working on how it would work mechanically.

Then there's the opposites contest game idea I had for a WW2 setting where one side would be a nazi hunting a jew and the other would be the jew trying to hide. Then I started thinking about how to portray this in a single-player fashion.

And for the Scary Movie contest my initial impression was "Jaws fishing simulator" but I didn't really get any further than that.


So if this topic was "What came first: The Theme or the Mechanics?" then I'd go with theme.

Come to think of it I was probably wrong in the "Ten Days of Knight" example. In that one the mechanics did come first. I thought about a game where you'd play some kind of lord ruling over something but also under a king. Now this may sound exactly like... the theme. But this theme could have been anything really. It didn't have to be a medieval thing.

Another one is my real time war strategy idea. That one was built around the concept of being a guy in a tent during a battle giving out orders and then hoping that everything was going to work out. It's kind of a mechanic. Since as theme, you'd have war. But there's different kind of wars. There could be WW2 where you sit in your tent talking on the radio, giving orders that way. It could be some kind of earlier war (19th century maybe) where you sit in your tent and dispatch couriers with orders and hope they get there in time. It could even be some kind of futuristic thing where you sit in your spaceship and give your orders through something else.

You could say that in both these though theme was also first. It was "ruling as a lord" and "being a war leader". Neither of those are really stories though.

Another thing I never made was an ice hockey card game. The ice hockey came first (theme) but I also knew that it had to have a card game mechanic (because I was inspired by a football card game, and basically wanted to convert that into ice hockey terms somehow)


So you could say that when you decide to make an RPG you automatically put mechanics first ("this is going to be an RPG" implies mechanics). If you start with "This is going to be a fantasy game... let's see... hmm RPG seems like a good idea", then you could say you started with the theme.

Hmm...at first I thought about gameplay that comes first in RPGs...in the sense of old school RPGs. But now I think about it again, even old school RPGs do start with a simple story intro first before going into the gameplay elements (think FF1)

So while the RPGs of the past tend to be more gameplay-oriented than story-oriented, most of them too start with story rather than gameplay first.

post=209795
Hmm...at first I thought about gameplay that comes first in RPGs...in the sense of old school RPGs. But now I think about it again, even old school RPGs do start with a simple story intro first before going into the gameplay elements (think FF1)

So while the RPGs of the past tend to be more gameplay-oriented than story-oriented, most of them too start with story rather than gameplay first.

I'm pretty sure we're talking about which one is designed first, not which one the player sees first.