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March 20 - June 8, 2019
The players have to invest emotionally in the journey you’ve laid out for them.
a game is defined as “an experience created by rules.”
a story is a journey of emotion. If that’s true, and we feel it is, then it’s useful to think of a game as a journey of action.
not all games are equally story-driven. Generally, story matters more in representational (more realistic) games than in presentational (more abstract) games.
Conflict can come from the environment, from other characters in the story, or it can be internal conflict such as guilt or self-doubt.
A quick word about villains: they think they’re actually the good guys in the story.
Storytelling in games is more often a task of world building rather that plot writing.
There is an inherent conflict between storyteller and audience when you give the audience some control over the narrative.
plot is character revealed by action.
ACT ONE—Introductions and Establishing a Pre-Existing Conflict
ACT TWO—A Turn or Reversal Which Deeply Worsens the Main Conflict
ACT THREE—A Major Turning Point. A Twist. A Surprise that Makes Things Worse.
ACT FOUR—The Spiral
ACT FIVE—Climax/Resolution
The sequence approach is another popular method of structuring your story. This takes the three acts and divides them into eight sequences, with each carrying a mini-objective that pushes toward the main objective.
Parallel Narrative A video game might have a parallel narrative. If all protagonists (players) are after the same goal, then they are on the same path and the story can move forward with each of them.
A branching narrative is a line of dramatic action that begins with the same problem but might end in any of a number of resolutions. Think of this as: beginning. middle. many endings.
interactive fiction (IF)
We designed it as a pyramid and call it the Pyra-Grid, because games start small and then go big.
which is more important, plot or character? It is both.
Plot is there so the character can change.
EXPRESS THE QUEST IN ONE LINE
REVERSE ENGINEER A GAME STORY
In one sentence, write down the main action of the story of Your Game, as you did in the first exercise. Now expand that one sentence to one paragraph: Make sure you have a beginning, middle, and end using a very linear narrative. Finally, let’s rework it. Take the same scenario and, using hyperlinks (in Word, Pages, or Google Docs), create a branching narrative with different paths and varying outcomes.
tabula rasa
A good story should result in the main character undergoing some sort of emotional transformation, or character arc.
In most stories, the plot is a vehicle that drives the protagonist to change.
Good dramatic writing is done backwards. To develop a strong emotional impact, the writer needs to know—in any story, for any platform—what the ending is!
If you want to write a great video game, create a character that goes on a journey of change. The journey of action should influence and affect the journey of emotion.
You want your protagonist to have the most emotional distance to cover over the course of the story. Your main character’s arc should be long.
So let’s start by examining character. Who am I when playing this game? Why am I here? What do I want? What do I need? One side of the Pyra-Grid.
You want to create characters that have the largest emotional distance to travel in the story.
Your job is to get your character into tense situations. And lots of them.
If you want characters to be more “realistic,” make them screw up. Give them fears and prejudices. Make them flawed.
One of the best places to begin developing a flawed character is to develop an internal conflict. Internal conflict comes from an emotional dilemma that results in the opposition of want and need. What a character wants and what a character needs should be at war with each other.
External conflict is everything that is placed in the character’s path as he or she attempts to achieve their goals.
The trick is to create an internal conflict for your hero(ine).
and you choose to go into the post-Apocalyptic
If you can reduce your game to a primal emotion, then the player can relate on a visceral level. Primal emotions are feelings we experience in our guts: the love of family, the longing for safety, the will to survive, the urge for revenge, the temptation to hate.
Motivation is not just an actor’s word. It needs to be the writer’s word as well. Always ask yourself why?
Your game story is working if players, rather than clicking through the cut scenes to get to the gameplay, sometimes find themselves rushing through the gameplay to learn what happens next?
The essence of fun is … surprise!
It is the challenge, the difficult-ness, the uncertainty of outcome, that makes gameplay fun.
You should think about gameplay mechanics as active verbs.
We approach level design from a narrative design approach. Let’s figure out what drives the story forward and then figure out what goes on inside the levels.
What is the level? And then what happens inside the level?
Levels are like chapters in a book, episodes in a television show, or scenes in a movie.
A level is a contained environment where the player/protagonist must achieve a goal, or a series of goals, in order to continue with the story or game and advance to the next level.
Levels, quests, and missions should all be fractal—self-similar—in structure. Your main story has a beginning, middle, and an end, and so should each level, quest, and mission.
