| Summary: | An incremental game is a subgenre under the nascent game genre of idle games. In such a game, players repeatedly click to accumulate currency, and it eventually requires less and even no interaction as the game progresses. Existing studies and games suggest that incremental games are capable of including narrative. A formal study on how narrative design can be integrated with incremental game mechanics has not been conducted. In this thesis, I propose a mechanic-driven narrative framework and iteratively develop an incremental game based on that framework and player feedback. I test the complexity of story information the present design is able to carry out, and I assess the quality of the game narrative. As the present game adopts science fiction as the narrative theme, I investigate how players' theme predilection may relate to narrative comprehension performance and story quality perceiving. I found the present design to be efficacious in storytelling. Players' feedback suggests a highly engaging storied experience. Results demonstrate that not only a story but a good story that is rich in imagery can be actualized by applying this narrative framework. Besides, finding illustrates that narrative theme predilection can affect storysense receiving and narrative understanding. This work will be a starting point for more sophisticated incremental games and corresponding storytelling models for such games. My effort on narrative framework contributes to game designers and researchers who are interested in experimenting with their own incremental narrative game or designing a more advanced framework of incremental narrative.--Author's abstract
|
|---|
