Pulling the thread of quest rules

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 The spring months were not merciful on me - struggling with health issues, I could barely focus on any non-critical priorities.

Despite that, I found courage and energy to visit a workshop about quest making from narrative perspective led by John Ryan. Now when some time passed, I suspect workshop had a narrative designer's trick to it that turned me from a passive listener into an active participant without me even noticing. But that could be its own bednight story - about missing relatives and lava crabs.

This time I want to focus on theory that John presented to us, and my thoughts about it.

Main rules of a good quest are following:

  • After quest player should know something new

  • Reward for quest should be compared to complexity of challenge

  • Quest should have a valid explanation of why only player can do the task

  • Quest shouldn’t break the rules of main story line

These guidelines felt so natural and obvious to me that it made me look for the reasons why. I started to think - what if we already have quests developing in software engineering and it is every new feature?

  • It should not contradict core domain.

  • It should bring new knowledge (new functionality).

  • It is normally also not logical or not possible to be done with any other hero/domain.

  • Its implementation effort should correlate with functionality.

May it be a bit more boring than creating a line that involves lava crabs, it still follows same set of system rules.

So if i try to marry those 2 worlds, a good feature should: have a proper ROI compared to risk, enable something new, have a justification on selected path and not break existing functionality.

Im still trying to think of it even on broader spectrum, and I suspect systems thinking already formalizes this across disciplines, but I haven't got that deep yet. So.. To be continued?.. 

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