If you haven't played my most recent project, Closure, I strongly recommend that you go play it. This is the 2nd article I'm writing about the game, and it is on the subject of story and art games.
Now, the last console game I really played was Braid last august. It was great and changed the way I looked at games as a medium, and I wanted to create a game that manages to have a really interesting, well developed story and fun gameplay that can stand out on its own, but also provides a metaphor for overarching storyline ("art game" for lack of a better term). Luckily for me, like a week after I was done playing Braid, Edmund McMillen approached me and we began working on Aether. It was fun to work on a game that has meaning to it, and that combined with the influence of Braid sorta stuck me in the mood to make another "art game", of my design this time.
In the beginning of the development of Closure, I had planned to have a large focus on its story, and a lot of text and hidden text all over the place to tell it. I had notes written down for exactly what I would tell the player, what would be left open to interpretation, what the literal level of the story is and what the metaphorical layer of the story is. There was a lot of planning here, and a lot going on in my head about what it could become.
Yet, as the game developed itself, the gameplay aspect of it was emerging to be much more compelling than I originally thought it would be. The graphics and the loneliness of the game really began to set a very interesting mood, one a very fragile mood that could have easily been broken by the wrong text or content. Also, I stopped trying to make the level design fit the story, because I didn't want to impose unnecessary limitations on my designs.
Then it came time for me to write dialog for the game. The levels were done, and they were in the process of being decorated with environment stuff. As I tried to write dialog, I realized that I just can't do that. A couple of the dialog lines fit with the mood and the story and remain mysterious, but the vast majority were bad in one way or another. I scrapped it all, and write 10 short lines (in addition to tutorial stuff) to hide in the levels (and there they remain). They play out, if you read them all at once, like a very short conversation. Each line stands out on its own, while remaining part of the short conversation. This scattered text fit the game a lot better than a lot of cheesy text, and I think in the end, keeping the text to a minimum worked a lot better in this game than trying to go with my original plans.
The main story is still there, just told in a much different way, one that doesn't kill the mysterious, creepy mood that emerged during development. I've seen my fair share of games that try too hard to be "arty" that they lose track of the fact that they could have been a great game if they focused on the mechanic instead of the story. As you realize how interesting the gameplay mechanic is, the focus needs to shift from telling a compelling story to making a compelling game.
P.S. Thanks for the monthly 2nd Newgrounds!
Kevin
Congrats on the game being very successful.
:D