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    Narrative Design for Indies: Getting Started
    Narrative Design for Indies: Getting Started
    Narrative Design for Indies: Getting Started
    Ebook103 pages1 hour

    Narrative Design for Indies: Getting Started

    By Edwin McRae

    4.5/5

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    About this ebook

    Short, sharp advice on getting story into your indie game.

    "An approachable, practical field guide for one of the trickiest and most rewarding aspects of game development, "Narrative Design for Indies" is packed with straightforward, actionable advice. Worth your time!" - Chris Bourassa, Creative Director of Darkest Dungeon.

    "This book's real strength lies in the fact that it's aimed directly at the indie developer with specific examples to bolster that." - Steve Ince, Creator of Captain Morgane and So Blonde.

    You want to create a video game? Great!
    You want to tell a story? Fantastic!
    You want to create a video game that tells a story? What? Are you insane?!

    I'm joking, kind of. You don't have to be insane to tell a good story through your Indie video game, but you do have to be out of your mind. What I mean is, you have to empty your brain of a whole bunch of stuff that Hollywood and Triple-As have told you about games and stories, and fill it up with stuff that's actually going to work on your teeny tiny budget.

    Three Act structure? That's like trying to shove a giant triangle through a tiny circle.
    Hero's Journey? Yup, that'll take you nowhere, fast.
    Authorial Authority. Now you're just winding me up!

    Whether you're an Indie developer or a narrative designer wanting to work in the Indie space, Narrative Design for Indies: Getting Started is the first in a series of books that will take you through some tried and true techniques of Indie video game storytelling. Techniques that have been developed to blow minds rather than budgets.

    Who am I? And do you know how weird it feels to write a third person description of yourself?

    Edwin McRae has been working in the Indie video game space as a narrative designer for many years and is now scrambling his seasoned brain and serving it up as an omelette of hard-earned-wisdom for your educational consumption.

    For less than a Hearthstone Welcome Bundle or a few hundred clash of Clans gems, you can find out how to use story in your Indie game to both engage and immerse your players.

    You want to create an Indie video game that tells a story?
    Cool.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherFiction Engine
    Release dateOct 24, 2017
    ISBN9781393092001
    Narrative Design for Indies: Getting Started

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      Book preview

      Narrative Design for Indies - Edwin McRae

      1

      Why is Narrative Design different for Indies?

      Money, money and…money.

      You either can’t afford to tell a AAA fidelity story or you have a different motive other than making great swags of cash, like raising awareness, making people think or generally improving the human condition.

      Regardless of your motives, I’m genuinely sorry to say that story is expensive.

      That leaves us with a bit of a conundrum, doesn’t it? How do you afford to hire an experienced narrative designer on an Indie budget? Actually, that’s an easy one. If you only need that writer for an hour or six then no problem. If you have a 200,000 word JRPG epic to produce then you’re arguably not making an Indie game.

      The question is not really how you can afford a writer. The question is really…how much do you need a writer?

      That’s what this book is about. Helping you work out what your story demands will be before you bring a writer in to make them happen. Because here’s the thing…much of my freelancing career has been spent working with Indie game developers, asking them lots of tricky questions in order to establish exactly how they are going to tell their story within the limited means they have available.

      I’m not complaining. I enjoy that sort of thing. In fact, it’s pretty awesome to be able to help someone finally express the narrative that’s been festering within for umpteen years. But it’s hard not to feel bad about getting paid to tell people things that they should already know. And most of the time they do actually know it. They just haven’t thought about it in the right way, mainly because they haven’t had the right questions to ask or haven’t been aware of the narrative tools at their disposal.

      So that’s what’s on offer here. The right questions. The right tools. The hammer and chisel with which to craft your story rather than the diamond-headed drills and high-powered laser cutters that you simply can’t afford. Well, that’s actually a tall order for a book of this modest magnitude. There are far more nifty things you can do with a hammer and chisel than we can hope to cover here. In the meantime, this little book will get you chipping away and hopefully save you a bunch of money in the process.

      Save the narrative design budget for the important bit…making your story happen. For now, and for the price of a Big Mac combo, let’s see if we can help you tell your Game Story within the means of Indie game development.

      2

      Plot vs Story

      What’s the difference?

      There’s one massive pitfall that I’ve seen many an Indie dev tumble into, and it’s wanting a story for their game but not knowing exactly what a story is. You see, every game needs a story, but not every game needs a plot. And trying to apply a plot to a game that only needs a story will land you in hot water, both mentally and financially.

      Okay, so what’s the difference between Plot and Story?

      Plot is generally defined as ‘the main events of a play, novel, film, or similar work (e.g. video game), devised and presented by the writer as an interrelated sequence’.

      Narrative is ‘a spoken or written account of connected events; a story’.

      Story is ‘an account of imaginary or real people and events told for entertainment’ and also ‘a plot or storyline’.

      Which is all very bloody confusing!

      So I’m going to lean on the wisdom of the great writer, E M Forster. To be honest, I’ve never read any of his work but I love his eloquent description of the plot/story conundrum.

      ‘The king died and then the queen died’ is a story. ‘The king died, and then queen died of grief’ is a plot. – E M Forster

      ‘The king died and then the queen died.’ Both are dramatic events but at the moment they’re seemingly unconnected. Perhaps the king slipped in the shower and the queen was asphyxiated by an overzealous corset attendant. So these are two separate events that make up a ‘story’. Stuff happens.

      If the queen dies of a broken heart because she failed to buy that non-slip bathmat she’d had her eye on for weeks then we have ‘plot’, a clear causal connection between one event and the other. King dies. Queen blames herself for her beloved’s demise and is overwhelmed with grief and guilt. She shuffles around in a tormented daze until blithely stepping in front of a runaway stagecoach.

      A causes B.

      Plot is the food and drink of film and television. The Hero’s Journey and all that malarky? It’s all plot structure, and those mediums have spent decades working out what a ‘good plot’ looks like. It’s linear and every event is linked in some way. Events cause other events until we reach some sort of concluding event, like the rebels blow up the Death Star or the beloved northern English actor gets killed for the umpteenth time, which is all very fine and dandy when your audience is happily sitting there, soaking it all in. But what happens when your audience wants to get involved? What if they want to take the plot in a totally different direction? What if they say ‘Screw the plot! I just want to gather loot, focus on my character build and kick arse in PvP!’ Yes, some players will happily set fire to your lovingly woven plot tapestry just to warm their toes.

      Enter the Gamer

      Let’s drop a gamer into E M Forster’s definition. The king dies because he was a level boss and the player killed him. The grief-stricken queen vows vengeance and sends the kingdom’s entire army against the player, including a whole bunch of mercenaries, barbarians and monster freaks she’s managed to hire from ‘places unseemly’. The player cuts a bloody path through the nefarious horde and eventually faces the queen herself as the end-of-game boss. She’s now a powerful necromancer having sold her soul to some dark god. In a climactic and epic battle, the player kills her and ends up ruling the kingdom.

      The king dies because the player killed him. The queen dies because she tried to kill the player out of grief-driven revenge. You see, the story pieces are there, the deaths of both king and queen, but it’s the player who forges the plot.

      For a fast and gritty education in how players can seriously tear up your plots in favor of stitching

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