slay the repetition

Today I want to talk a bit about content repetition in Slay the Princess.

As the game is based on a very repetitive loop, the risk of quickly boring the player is very high.

Slay the Princess did not fall into this problem, and I believe the greatest production effort is focused on solving it.

To start, the story itself is based on the fact that each important choice one makes changes both the princess and the player.

There are 10 distinct princesses:

• The Eye of the Needle
• The Stranger
• The Beast
• The Nightmare
• The Damsel
• The Spectre
• The Tower
• The Razor
• The Witch
• The Prisoner

Each of these princesses has their own visual style as well as in the tone of the dialogue.

Additionally, at the end of each princess's story, there is a closing instance where some philosophical aspect of being is exposed.

On the other hand, each chapter also modifies the player through "the voices", of which there are also 10 (in addition to Hero which is the first one we start with):

• Voice of the Hero
• Voice of the Broken
• Voice of the Contrarian
• Voice of the Cold
• Voice of the Cheated
• Voice of the Hunted
• Voice of the Opportunist
• Voice of the Paranoid
• Voice of the Stubborn
• Voice of the Smitten
• Voice of the Skeptic

Each of these voices is a personality that comments on your choices and what the Narrator says.

Thanks to these two variations in each chapter, the feeling of repetition posed by the gameplay loop is reduced.

By limiting the options to 10, the game's creators tamed the rhizome.

They controlled the consistency, non-repetition, and novelty of content with 10 variations (both of princesses and voices) and managed to create a sufficiently large and interesting gameplay space.

The separation of novelty between the princess and the voices also generates a positive combinatorial explosion: there are chapters where the princess repeats but the voice changes, and this generates enough variety in the dialogue to not need another princess.

This is a basic tool of game design, we'll discuss it in another email.