I'm an university lecturer, and we decided to have this Ludum Dare as a first project for our students. Hello if anyone ;) Meanwhile i decided to participate myself with some mechanics i was flirting in my mind with for a while.

I had two goals : 1. To resolve the Narative Paradox for this particular interactive novella 2. The text needs to be mostly generated by the user actions and reduce the authoring as much as possible.

Narative Paradox

“pre-authored plot structure conflicts with the freedom of action and interaction characteristics of the medium of real-time interactive graphical environment” (Aylett & Louchart, 2007)

First i created this finite state machine for the game flaw: The second step i chose the node where the content can be automatically generated. The third step was to hide some choices until the personaje will have enough "experience" to see them.

I chose to use two skills for this :
* Combat Experience * Empathy

And finally, i used a AI text generator to do the heavy lifting on authoring. I spend less than 7 hours to finalise the project, and even if it's a POC, i'm quite satisfied with the results You can try and tell me what i can change more in order to achieve a better fit for my goals.

Thank you for your attention.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/51/second-chance