Feeding the player backstory

[palistov]

Hey modders, custom story creators, critics, pessimists, players and lurkers!

I'm in the process of trying to design a custom story. At the moment I'm in the earliest of early stages, simply writing the game down on paper, fiddling around with level aesthetics, and drawing up level design layouts.

This story is tale which many people probably know from their childhood, but cast in an Amnesia universe. My problem is trying to prevent (or remedy) players entering the story with the paradigm that it is a direct translation from the original tale into the Amnesia story.

There is quite a bit of background story the player needs to absorb before they can fully understand their situation. Since this story has absolutely nothing to do with memory problems, I'm faced with the task of somehow feeding them story without making it seem like some historian was wandering the scenes and planting random pages of historical text around for the player to conveniently find.

I've considered several ways of doing this

1) Player encounters "Journal nodes". They approach the journal and interact with it, and the player character "writes down and records" their thoughts, conveniently providing the player with information that the player isn't aware of but the player's character would obviously be aware of.


2) Player starts with a whole journal filled with historical text and story tidbits. The player can flip through the pages at will and learn about the story.

Cons:
- Player has no incentive to read the content


3) "Playing the Past" -- the story happens in past-tense. Everything is a flashback; it has already happened and the player character is reliving the events of the story.

Cons:
- Player could feel detached from the story and the character.
- Probably would require voice acting. Want to keep this story as low-key and easy as possible


That's about as much as my brainstorming sessions have yielded. Any help or suggestions is greatly appreciated. Story is a very important part of this mod so I want to make sure I'm doing it right!