Narrative Design - A Deeper Look
What is Narrative Design in a nutshell?
Narrative Design is where the ‘rubber meets the road’ so to speak. It’s the meshing of the written word with the mechanics and systems of the game. It’s where extrapolation happens and Narrative Designers work with other parts of the team to bring the vision to life in various ways such as how the player will encounter and interact with parts of the story and the NPCs living in the game world.
What if I don’t have examples?
Writing for games takes a plethora of skills and studios often want to see what you can do up front before ever even speaking with you.
This can be easier said than done these days (especially in the current state of the game industry and the rampant layoffs and short term work).
If you are like me and have had the misfortune of working on great projects that either never saw the light of day due to cancellations, or are no longer available due to studio closures so you can’t direct people to them and NDAs often prevent whatever work you did from being sharable.
So, it’s more important than ever to start building up some personal project examples that can demonstrate your knowledge and skills. Time constraints from looking for new work, family time and life distractions aside, try to find an hour or so a day that you can carve out to focus on brushing up your skills and building a few pieces of example work in an editor.
These days I recommend UE5 to anyone that asks, as it is easy to work with, freely available and powerful as heck.
Here are a couple of the great UE5 Narrative Blueprints Tutorial Videos I enjoyed while brushing up on skills recently:
Check out this video, which covers ‘Goto Location’ (triggers), ‘Pick Up Item’ and ‘Kill NPC’ (tasks), ‘Player Died’ failure state (on death events), and the dreaded ‘Follow NPC’ style quest over on D3kryption’s YouTube channel.
He’s got a great channel and covers a bunch of other stuff that is of interest for Narrative Design, such as timed dialogue.
Or this video over on reubs’ YouTube channel, which covers most of the basics of UE5 Narrative Blueprints for setting up dialogue, quests, and cinematic dialogue. He also covers the dialogue variables that were introduced in the 2.5 update. I recommend starting with this one as it takes a bit more of a new user approach and he goes a little slower so as to allow you to digest the content of the video a bit better.
So, here is a nice little list that should provide a framework of some of the more commonly looked for examples of work that you can start building up a portfolio to showcase:
Text Dialogue
This comes in a bunch of forms and it’s good to have examples of as many as possible to pull from. Here’s a few of the more common ones you’ll find yourself writing to start with
Quests
You will write tons of these, so it’s good to know the format/s.
I highly recommend checking out Kelly Bender’s post on this topic. Give his LinkedIn page a follow too while you are there as he is a font of narrative knowledge.
NPC chatter (interactable & background)
Shopkeeper interactions
Character Bios
A concise description of the character/s, a brief bit of background story and potentially any links to other characters.
VO scripts (aka Dialogue Barks)
Environmental VO lines
Player character encounters a nifty landmark and makes an offhand comment about it.
Combat lines
Variety is the spice of life when it comes to action voice lines. Nothing rips a player out of the gameplay experience faster than the same voice line being shouted in the middle of a heated battle a few dozen times.
Character event lines (hurt, humorous, etc.)
As tempting as it is to use the old as mud insert string of curse words here lines, try to be more creative with these and keep them in theme with the project vision & setting.
It’s also good to include any potential notes to other parts of the team that may be helpful, such as when these should be triggered, what expression should be animated etc.
Cinematic script/s
While not necessarily a Narrative Design focus primarily (often handled by other writers), it is good to know and be able to give input.
For the most part, cinematic scripts are very similar to screenplays. If you are working for a AAA studio that utilizes a bunch of proprietary tools, chances are quest scripts will also follow screenplay format.
What tools do you recommend?
- Unreal Engine 5
- Google Docs
- Google Sheets
- ArticyDraft
- Canva
What else should I know?
I know I mentioned a post by Kelly Bender previously in this article, but I feel this is another extremely valuable post of his regarding what should or should not be included in a script.
There are a ton of different ways to approach Narrative Design, but there are few worth learning that will keep you focused and on target, so make sure you find a style that not only works well for you, but is desired by studios.
Remember, Narrative is so much more than just words/text. Check out my other article on this topic here: Thoughts on Narrative Design | IP Building | Game Writing
I hope you enjoyed this article and that it provided you with some useful information, or at the very least, made you think of someone that could benefit from it (do pass it along if so).
Cheers,
Rob
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