In yesterday's email, I did a small analysis on how the elimination of the moral dilemma in Slay the Princess manages to solve the problem of player agency.
Today, I want to focus on something I mentioned in that email: the branching in Slay the Princess feels sufficient to justify the game.
This caught my attention.
The game has no mechanics other than choosing options.
Moreover, there are people in its community asking for a printed version of the game in a Choose Your Own Adventure format.
That's why I'm interested in analyzing the numbers and its structure beyond its content, there's no big idea behind this email, beyond: mh... so with these numbers a branching game can work.
Obviously, there's much more to STP than this. But as a starting point, it's great.
Something to note: I haven't seen among the reviews a significant number of people saying that the game is too short, or that it lacks enough content.
The critiques have more to do with the writing itself than anything else. Later on, I might do a more concrete analysis on this.
The game has approximately 150,000 words and 2500 images.
This is not little, but it's also not enormous. It's a scale of writing that one person can handle. This is good news.
The same with the art, it's a lot, but it's also a scale that one person can tackle.
Why do I emphasize this: in the last three years I had many problems getting a publisher for my games because I didn't want to grow my team beyond three or four people. Here we have a game that sold over 100,000 copies made by two. 🤦.
The first chapter is always the same, the second, third, and fourth use the same loop, but there are things that change according to what you did in the previous chapter.
I didn't take the trouble to check everything myself, but between the diagrams they made on Reddit and the Fandom wiki we can more or less see the extent of the game.
In total, there seem to be 23 chapters: chapter 1, 10 chapter 2s, 10 chapter 3s, and 2 chapter 4s. (again, I didn't check this with the game)
All chapters are designed around the game's concept: to kill or not to kill the princess, which simplifies its writing quite a bit.
Obviously, the text and images of each chapter change, but it's interesting to see how having a solid concept, it's not necessary to vary mechanics or things that take a lot of time: it's enough to vary the narration and support it with images.
Sorry for this frayed email, these are many data points I gathered and my head is processing to see if there is any structure underneath that we as writers can take advantage of in our games...
Did seeing these data spark any ideas for you?
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