Moon Hunters - Lessons On Procedural Storytelling

Moon Hunter's Lead Designer Tanya Short shares three lessons on procedural storytelling with us, in this article on Gamasutra.

The game is a co-operative RPG that tasks players with finding out what happened to the moon, which has gone missing. Against the backdrop of fantasy version of ancient Mesopotamia, players explore a world in which environment is randomized, but so are the story beats and characters they encounter along the way. Across short play sessions, players retell the same myth with different characters the way that a storyteller might continually recast Pandora, The Monkey King, or other ancient heroes. It's a tradition dating back across many cultures, including Polynesian storytelling and classical myth making.

In searching for an opportunity to have players experience “the multiple truths of storytelling,” Short hit upon 3 fundamental lessons for investing players in a randomized quest.

1) Break away from duality

To start, Short explains that nailing the “multiple playthroughs, multiple stories” tone for Moon Hunters depended on successfully introducing what it means for a story to have different retellings. To her, those carrying versions ultimately represent a wide variety of possible truths, with each tale's telling having a different moral or point depending on the context of when it was told....