Which One is the Spy

Submitted to RPGGO's Official team by War Hog, the original AI game creator of "Which One is the Spy"

Foreword

Hello everyone, this is War Hog! I'm a military fan and this story was actually conceived long before I started working on it. I'll put a link to my game here, so feel free to give it a try: https://game.rpggo.ai/#/game?gameId=d7a4dd4d-89e6-4862-866c-4f470a14d988

Thank you for entering the Creator Log of my very first AI game Who is the Damned Kraut.

Yes, it's a WW2 story. I'm a military fan myself, and this story was actually conceived long before I started working on it.

My game has just been published. You can find it on RPGGO homepage, feel free to give it a try if you are interested:

I hope you could enjoy my very first work, and it is also highly welcomed to give me any comments, your opinion means a lot to me!Okay, no further ado, let's get started!

How to Create Your Reality Based Game

Part 1: About Worldview

Normally, I'll recommend you to start with Game section. This is also the official recommended process for creation. But if you want to build a history-based game, I'll suggest you to start with the Worldview part.

Main issues: Although the Worldview section is the easiest part, but in a way this section is also the most important part for a realistic story, because we live in this world and any illogicality will be easily seen.

It's easy to write realistic setting stories because all the information you need about the historical background, time, place, characters, events, etc. can be easily obtained from Wikipedia or other websites.

This story is based on a historical event-the Battle of the Ardennes Forest-took place in December 1944 in Belgium. In this battle, a German counterattack inflicted heavy casualties on the US Army, but it ended with the Allied Forces' victory.

In the lead-up to the battle, in order to disrupt the deployment of the American forces, Germany selected spies skilled in spoken English to infiltrate the US Army and conduct sabotage activities using captured American weapons and uniforms. The story of Who is the Damned Kraut was conceived based on this historical context.

Worldview and World Genre：

In this section you need to limit your main stage to a certain scope of time and place in the briefest language possible, and let the system know what tone to open the game with.
If you have any special designs like what you want NPCs to do or know, you can add them to the Other World Knowledge Details section.

Thank you all for being patient enough to read this far, and that concludes my first part.

I'll write about my creative steps and details separated into 3 parts in the hopes that it will help other creators of historical and realistic stories.

See you in the second post!

Part 2: About the Game

Welcome back!

In the previous post we covered how to build the worldview of a game. Now, let's take a glance at how to design the main body of the game.

If you see your game as a newborn baby, then worldview will be the bones and the game body is the flesh and blood. The worldview serves as a framework that needs to support the game, while the game needs to be bound by the worldview and not be able to jump out of that framework itself.Only when the two complement each other can they constitute a living being.

The Game Name and Game Intro sections do not affect the system's generation process in any way and can be edited at will. Not much to say here.

The Prologue and Ending sections don't affect the logic of the system either, but, they are very important for a story-oriented game, where you not only need to fill in information that is useful to the player, but you also need to lead the player into the world of your game. My game as an example, I mimicked the tone of a soldier's Mission Briefing, and the player's playthrough is part of that Briefing.

As for the Goal & Condition section, I suggest that you design it very specifically, like you or your Assistant says a specific word or sentence.My design in the game is: In order to achieve the goal, Harrison must say [Understood, sir!] Because only when the player says the correct answer to Harrison, the Assistant, will he return the appropriate statement, and it ends the game.

The Lore part is also very important, your NPCs should be the only source of information for the player. In order to enrich the flow of the game you need to give each character their own function, that is, specific people need to say specific things.

In my game, in order to expose our spies as soon as possible, I had each NPC reveal different information to the player, such as the spy uses metric units instead of imperial; one of the NPCs saw the spy wearing enemy boots; the spy knows some information that is classified to the US forces, etc. All these logical tracks need to be done with the part of Lore. In the process of writing lores, I suggest you to use simple statements as much as possible to reduce the understanding cost of the system.

You also need to write the timeline for each character in Lore. The timeline may not be directly connected to the game threads, but a logical timeline will, on the one hand, make your story juicier, and on the other hand, won't allow the NPCs to freestyle something that doesn't exist.

That's it for the part about the game, thanks for your attention and I hope my experience can help!

We'll see you in the next post!

Part 3: About Character

Welcome back!

This is the final chapter in the How to Create Your Reality Based Game series, in which I'll show you how I set up the Character details.

Once you've finished setting up Worldview and Game parts, the game will be ready to go, but in order to lead the players deep into your story, you'll need some "guides", also known as your NPCs.

Theoretically, you can add an infinite number of NPCs to your game, but I won't recommend adding more than 5 of them.

I added 6 NPCs to my game, and it took me around 10 hours of setup and subsequent debugging to get their dialog logic working without obvious problems.

After filling out personal information such as this character's Name, Pronouns, Personality, etc., you can just copy the character's timeline into the Recent Ongoing of This Character section and add some more detailed information in Personal Secret / Flaw.

Note that if, like me, you need to hide some information from a character in the game, you'd better not write it out in this section. Sometimes the system "forgets" that the information is a secret and will reveal it directly to the player.

Final Part: Testing

When the full processes above are completed, congratulations, you've finished your creation(?)

No, wait a minute! You haven't tested it yet? Then I suggest you don't PUBLISH your game yet.

You can start by treating yourself as a pure new player and seeing what kind of reactions you get from your NPCs, and whether they have played their roles as you designed them?

If not, go back and see what went wrong with your design.Were your commands too complicated?

Or was your wording confusing?

Even if your NPCs pass your own test, don't forget to send your friends a sneak peek of your game after it has just been published. After all, who knows what your friends might do to your NPCs?

If your NPCs can't respond to your friends' whims, remember to tell them what to do (if you can).