When players reach chapter ends of branching stories. There are 3 sections:

• Playstyles
• Performance Variables
• Key Decisions (this)

Why are Key Decisions important?

• Signal to the player when they have made impactful choice.
• Drive replay through indicating to players what they may have missed.

Key Decisions

Certain choices will drastically affect the story by:

• Creating large branches
• Making a decision that will come back later in an effective way
• Shifting variables dramatically

In these instances, we can add a line of code to mark the decision as “key,” allowing us to display it to the player at a later time, and compare their choice against the community’s.

• Key decisions are hidden if the player doesn’t come across one of the options.These are not variables. You cannot refer to them later. However, you can always give a variable alongside a key decision and use that to refer to the decision later.

To learn more about how to design great key decisions, check the choice guide here!

Initialize Key Decisions

• Each key decision question needs to have a UniqueID (e.g. FATE_MARCUS)
• Each answer needs to have a unique id that starts with the question followed by a space then a unique id for the answer.
• The answer ids only need to be unique across their own question, not to the whole header (you can have FATE_MARCUSY and KILLED_WHO Y)

| Paths | FATE_MARCUS               | What did you do to Marcus?
|       | FATE_MARCUS.killed_marcus | You killed Marcus
|       | FATE_MARCUS.spared_marcus | You spared Marcus