KOTCL Dev Diaries: narrative design

Knock, knock!

Today I’d like to take a little break from KOTCL and from Midian to talk about game development in general and game design in particular. But not just game design— narrative game design.

So What Kind of Beast Is It?

Don’t change the channel—it’s going to get interesting here! A narrative game designer is the most exotic profession in the gaming industry. Sometimes even those who are directly involved in game-building (not to mention everyone else) have only a very general and quite incomplete understanding of what narrative game design actually is.

You don’t have to look far for an example: I was hired at Redboon as a scriptwriter, but it was also “assumed” that I would take on the functions of a narrative designer. The quotation marks are there because no one really understood what that meant at the time.

If Only We Knew What It Was—But We Didn’t Know What It Was

Steam post imageEverything is understood through comparison. The best way to explain what a narrative designer is, is by comparing them to a scriptwriter.

Everyone knows what a scriptwriter does. They write scripts—for games, or plays, or films. It would seem that’s all you need. But actors can’t perform from a script alone; they need a stage director. A narrative game designer is exactly that—the stage director of game development, in a nutshell.

In a Bit More Detail

In an ideal game, absolutely everything should serve the narrative, not just the text. The visuals, the sound, the gameplay—everything should be telling a story. A beautiful image can’t be beautiful just for the sake of it; an interesting event can’t be interesting just because; a punchy sound can’t be punchy for no reason.

Brief Digression

Recently I went to the theater and watched a pantomime. The actors told an amazing story without a single word. Of course, they obviously had a script written in words. But the director and actors didn’t need speech to express everything the writer wanted to say. Because they had plenty of other expressive tools at their disposal.

But back to video games. We have far more expressive tools at our disposal.

Shooters

The most important thing in a shooter is the feel of the weapon in your hands. If you can feel its weight, that’s great work by the animator. If you can feel the recoil and it noticeably affects gameplay, that’s great work by the game designer. If it booms like a real gun, that’s great work by the sound designer.

If the weapon feels like a plastic toy, it means the narrative designer didn’t do their job well. The feel of the weapon in your hands is narrative game design—because in a shooter, it’s the guns that tell the story.

Fighting Games

In fighting games, the most important thing is the feel of the hits. In a good fighter, if you land a weak punch, you should feel that it’s weak. If you get hit properly, it should feel as if sparks seem to fly from your eyes. This task isn’t solved by simply reducing the life bar; it’s narrative game design.

RPGs

In RPGs, we grind and level up to become stronger. To keep leveling up further and longer, we need to feel our progress and our superiority. Can that be conveyed through numbers?

Well, theoretically yes — if you make big numbers bold and red. But we have significantly more expressive tools than that. And that, too, is narrative game design.

Knock on the Coffin Lid

Cool events with interesting choices and outcomes are worth nothing if they don’t tell a story. They have to be narrative.

Take any event as an example. What does it tell you?

I say let’s have a look at the Mite’s Bride event. It tells you that the locals sacrifice their pretty virgin girls to some unknown chthonic creature they want to become related to. Clearly not the best place to live (though to each their own).

Or take the Healing Potion event. The goblins are such sweethearts, they’re brewing a potion to heal everyone… brewing it from human blood. What is this place?

And here are more goblins, these ones brewing a growth elixir from orc fat. Well, okay, goblins are good at making potions—I got that. But what comes next?

What comes next is that I really understand what kind of world this is, that is if the narrative game designer has done their job well.

These Are Just Examples

From these examples, one might prematurely conclude that a narrative game designer is a king and god who has the last say in everything related to development of a certain game.

If you’re Hideo Kojima, that may indeed be the case. But if you’re not Hideo Kojima, conflicts are inevitable—with the scriptwriter, the art director, the sound designer, the game designers, the testers, the players, and even your best friend’s older sister.

Let’s talk about all these conflicts and ways to resolve them next time.

See you soon, travelers.