Narrative Design

The Craft of Writing for Games

Michael Breault

• Publisher: CRC Press
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9780429575358
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Programming Games
• Index: Computer Science

Narrative designers and game designers are critical to the development of digital and analog games. This book provides a detailed look at the work writers and designers perform every day on game development projects. It includes practical advice on how to break into the game industry as a writer or game designer. Readers can use the templates and detailed instructions provided here to create lively portfolios that will help open the door to jobs in the game industry.

Key features of this book:

• An intimate look at the workings of AAA game development from someone who has spent decades embedded on teams at well-known companies.

• An insider's look at the game industry, including advice on breaking into the industry.

• Detailed instructions for creating a portfolio to demonstrate narrative design and game design skills to prospective employers.

• Lessons and exercises to help students develop narrative design and game design skills.

• A how-to guide for college instructors teaching classes in narrative design and game design. Detailed assignments and syllabi are included.

Author Bio:

Michael Breault is a 35-year industry veteran who has contributed his writing and game design skills to over 130 published games. He currently teaches narrative design and game design courses at Webster University in St. Louis. The courses he creates and teaches are based on the tasks narrative designers and game designers undertake every day while developing games. These classes provide his students with a real-world view of the work they will be doing as writers and designers in the game industry.

CHAPTER1

What Is Narrative Design?

Writer versus Narrative Designer

A narrative designer is a writer embedded in a game development team. The word “embedded” is critical. A contractor who has been hired for a month or two to work remotely at the end of a project to polish the dialogue is not really a narrative designer. They are a script doctor called in at the end to dot the i’s and cross the t’s. A narrative designer is integral to the team and project, from the first concept to publication. A narrative designer has tremendous influence on the game’s story and how it meshes with gameplay to deliver the intended player experience. To do this work properly, you need to be there with the rest of the team from start to finish.

Think of a narrative designer as a writer who also does game design and whose work intersects with that done by everyone else on the game dev team. Or think of a narrative designer as a designer who writes. At times in this book, I may use “writer” and “narrative designer” interchangeably, mostly for variety’s sake.

It’s all just terminology anyway. Different companies refer to the position by a variety of names. My official titles have varied among narrative designer, writer, game writer, designer, game designer, story designer, senior narrative designer, senior game designer, lead narrative designer, and more. There’s no standard way to refer to this position, just as there’s no standard set of tasks that fall within this person’s bailiwick. It all depends on the company you’re working for, the team and project you’re on, and the needs of all three.

Unlike a writer who creates a novel or a movie script, a narrative designer needs to wear a multitude of hats (as do many other game developers). Thinking of yourself as a designer who writes helps you realize that a lot of your work is game design with an overlay of writing tasks. Many times, especially in smaller companies and smaller teams, the narrative designer is just whoever on the team writes best. That person might be primarily a game designer, sound designer, programmer, animator, artist, creative director (CD), etc., but on top of those duties they take on the writing tasks of a narrative designer.

Also unlike writers in other media, narrative designers are creating interactive experiences in which players are active participants. The linearity of story that exists in other media goes out the window (or it should) when you add player agency into your story. That requires a more flexible approach to the story-creation process.

As a narrative designer, you’ll do a lot of document writing during the pre-production stage of a game’s development. The writing you do at this stage will be a reference for the team throughout development and will help determine both the game’s tone and structure. During production, not only will you be writing dialogue and in-game text, you’ll often find yourself doing scripting and other design-oriented tasks. And you’ll be interacting with virtually every member of the team, as the game’s story affects every aspect of the game; it informs every decision and every action taken by the team.

We’ll talk about developers and design teams later in this book, including the many ways narrative designers interact with the other members of the team. But for now, let’s look at what the narrative designer does on their own.

Narrative Design

If narrative design is what narrative designers do for a living, what does that entail? A lot of things, as it turns out.

We can sort a narrative designer’s tasks into three buckets:

Writing

All the writing that goes into a game falls squarely on the narrative designer’s shoulders. This encompasses not only all the dialogue and text the player might see in the game, but also all the story elements that go into the development of the game. These often serve simply to inform various members of the team as they create art, animation, gameplay, world design, and so on.

Oftentimes the narrative designer is assigned (or volunteers for!) many of the pre-production writing tasks necessary to create a solid design foundation for the implementation stage, when the game is actually created. These tasks include the concept document, game design document, level or zone design documents, scripts for presentations to upper-level management, and any other writing the team needs during pre-production.

Once production begins, the narrative designer begins writing character dialogue, text for notes and books placed in the game, and other writing-related tasks. Often, scripters and game designers place first-draft versions of dialogue lines into the game, ensuring that they convey gameplay-related content at appropriate times. It’s the narrative designer’s job to find and edit all those lines, making sure they fit the tone of the game and the character speaking.

On many projects, a game development team will have a single narrative designer but a dozen or more others (scripters, game designers, level designers) adding dialogue and story-related content into every area of the game. Ideally, the narrative designer can track all the lines that have been added to the game (or modified) by others, and serves as the final set of eyes on every bit of writing that goes in. As the project nears a deadline, the team often adds content at a furious pace, and the narrative designer has to dash from one part of the script to another to put out all the fires.

Writing cinematic scripts is another of the narrative designer’s responsibilities. These mini-movies are scattered throughout most games, at the start, end, and at various turning points in the plot. Game development teams use cinematics to convey story, events, or information that is difficult or impossible to present during gameplay. They can be mini-movies, like the cinematic of the player’s plane crashing at the start of Bioshock, or semi-interactive set pieces, like the elevator ride into the underwater city of Rapture a few minutes later—both have narration that establishes the themes of the game, written by narrative designers. (More on cinematic scripts in the narrative design assignments in Appendix C.)

Games change dramatically during production. The opening level of the first Red Faction game was thrown out and completely redone with only three weeks left until the game’s release. During production of the second Red Faction game, an entire level (1/13th of the game) was deleted with only a couple of months to go, as we realized we didn’t have time to finish it. Cinematic scripts can change dramatically as well. The first drafts of a game’s cinematic scripts are often created during pre-production and later rewritten to accommodate changes to the story and gameplay. Sometimes just an outline of the anticipated content of a cinematic is written up during pre-production, with the full version created once the game’s story and design fall into place.

As the game solidifies during production, and the story and gameplay information cinematics need to convey to the player become better known, more complete versions of cinematic scripts can be written. These are reviewed by the creative director and the leads of other disciplines within the development team. That feedback spurs further refinement of the scripts.

Once the cinematic scripts are approved by the CD and leads, a concept artist creates storyboards to block out the action within each cinematic. These are reviewed and revised until leads are satisfied with them. Then the cinematic team goes to work creating the first prototype of the cinematic, with the narrative designer contributing feedback and rewrites as needed. The team continues to refine the cinematics in subsequent passes until they are approved by all concerned.

If a game has spoken dialogue, the narrative designer faces a few more challenges. A voice recording script must be created near the end of production. This means gathering the thousands or tens of thousands of dialogue lines into scripts organized by character. The lines of each character—no matter where they appear in the game—should be grouped into a single document or spreadsheet. These documents provide context to help the voice actor with their lines—voice actors often have to imagine their character’s situation without access to the game itself. Each cinematic in the game also needs its own voice recording scripts (one for each voice actor) with each character’s lines highlighted.

Once the voice recording scripts are finalized, the narrative designer is off to a recording studio to help guide the voice recording sessions, usually alongside a voice director and an audio technician. The technician handles the mechanical process of recording and saving multiple takes of each line, and the voice director listens for speech issues. The narrative designer’s part is to guide the voice actors’ delivery and determine which take of a line to use in the game, as no one knows the emotional and gameplay context of the game’s dialogue like the narrative designer.

When the recording sessions are over, the team’s sound designers work to get the approved lines into the game. The narrative designer then needs to play the game, listen to the voice lines, and call out any that are playing incorrectly or have other problems.

There are often pickup sessions built into the audio schedule, much like “reshoots” for studio films. These occur weeks later, to re-record any bad lines or account for places where the game has changed, making the original line irrelevant. As few voice actors as possible are called back to the studio to record new or revised lines. These sessions are expensive but are almost always necessary to ensure top-quality dialogue for a game.

Designing

Much of a narrative designer’s work falls within the realm of game design. During pre-production, when the foundation for development is being laid, the narrative designer is often tasked with writing the game design document, creating the initial versions of level or zone design docs, and breaking down the story into specific events, settings, and situations the player will encounter in the game. These design tasks are so closely intertwined with the game’s story that the narrative designer is usually the team member best suited to writing these documents.

Once production starts, narrative designers find themselves taking on scripting tasks related to the game’s story. These include getting characters into the game and scripting their interactions with each other and the player, writing notes and brief texts for the player to find and read in-game, and implementing dialogue to help convey the game’s story to the player. Most game development teams have a squad of designers dedicated to scripting, so the narrative designer usually tackles scripting work that involves dialogue and characters with whom the player can interact.

Interacting and Collaborating

Everyone on a game development team interacts with everyone else on that team. This interpersonal collaboration is how game development gets done. Since the game’s story affects every other aspect of its development, narrative designers end up interacting with most members of the team on a daily basis. They talk with game designers about how the story, characters, and events will be implemented into the game. They talk with character artists about the characters created from the descriptions the narrative designer wrote. They discuss the game’s soundscape with the team’s sound designers. They si...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Author
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 ◾ What Is Narrative Design?
• Chapter 2 ◾ What Is Game Design?
• Chapter 3 ◾ Story in Games
• Chapter 4 ◾ Game Development as a Craft
• Chapter 5 ◾ The Idea Is Everything…and Nothing
• Chapter 6 ◾ The Player’s the Thing
• Chapter 7 ◾ The Team’s the Thing, Too
• Chapter 8 ◾ Game Genres and Their Players
• Chapter 9 ◾ The Game Development Process
• Chapter 10 ◾ Writing and Design for Analog Games
• Chapter 11 ◾ Writing Advice
• Chapter 12 ◾ Teaching Narrative Design and Game Design
• Chapter 13 ◾ Career Opportunities in the Game Industry
• Appendix A: Publications List
• Appendix B: Class Syllabi
• Appendix C: Course Assignments (Instructions and Templates)
• Index