Storytelling Tools to Boost Your Indie Game’s Narrative and Gameplay

Storytelling Tension and Flow

Basics of Storytelling

  • Internal & External Motivation

  • Intrinsic & Extrinsic Motivation

  • External motivation is the desire to change something in the world outside

    • Richer, Travel
  • Internal motivation
    • Usually overcome a problem (emotional)

Plot Structure

  • The Character has their goal
  • Need a well-structured series of events through which change will happen
  • The plot controls the speed of progress of the tension arc in the experience

Start before your big event begin

  • You Don’t start your story with (you are a wizard Harry)
  • Set up the character, the situation, and the basic rules
  • This is otherwise known as ‘the tutorial mission’
  • It is important to build Empathy
  • We must want the character to overcome the challenges ahead
  • Before we reach the lake in Firewatch, we know a lot about Henry’s life (setting up his external and internal objectives)

The inciting Incident

  • Now your player knows their place in the world, we can start to set up the challenges
  • Increase the narrative or mechanical tension
  • Add an antagonist/enemies, risk, or a break in the usual situation
  • Overcoming this problem is usually the external motivation of your plot

The player avoids the problem

  • The player usually does not go straight for attacking the problem
  • They either explore, avoid, or attempt smaller battles

They make a choice to act with intention

  • After a while, the player feels they know enough of the territory to make a focused choice to act
  • Or there is no choice left but to act.
  • e.g. “I’d better use the map more”
  • They engage with the external objective of the game/story

The complexity increases

  • The basic abilities seem less effective, new enemies are added, new story elements show that things were not so simple…
  • Tetris is a masterpiece because of the complexities is in the gameplay, the complexity is changed by player’s choice. Storytelling moment.
  • (Narrative, mechanical, or both).

Example

  • In Virginia we see divisions between the protagonists, and dreams call reality into question
  • In Firewatch an extra layer of conspiracy is added
  • In Fragments of Him, Will doubts if he can sustain a relationship without hurting others.

Complexity raises the stakes

  • The first strategies and weapons are no longer enough
  • In shooters, new patterns and combinations of enemies are added
  • Enemies use better targeting, more bullets, or homing missles
  • Enemies get dangerous new abilities

Hope overcomes fear … With effort

  • The player finds new weapons or strategies to overcome the enemies (external change, e.g. power-ups or grinding)
  • They find strength they never knew they had (Internal change)
  • They character learns to unite their skills/team behind a purpose
  • It has high risks, but it’s the only hope

‘The Black Moment’

  • All the hopes of overcoming the problems are at risk
  • The final boss is killed … But this is not even the final form
  • All the knowledge, the relationships, and the strategies developed through the player/character’s experience are needed to overcome this final challenge

And then you end it as fast as possible

  • Keep the ending neat and short

Basics of Storytelling

Tha’t’s a model for most stories

  • As a player/character journey, it fits most strong experiences
  • This works on an intuitive and emotional level to feel rewarding
  • But…

Making a thriller, action, or a horror story?

  • There’s an additional bit of the structure you might want to consider adding
  • ‘The grabber’ is a burst of action or fear at the beginning that promises the future of the game before it slows down for the ‘before the inciting incident’ scene building
  • It’s a way to let the player know that there is exciting moment ahead
  • In horror stories, you also often have a final moment of fear at the end (Evil lurks)
  • But you also sometimes have this for thrillers, where the defeated organization has actually survived or the war was bigger than the one battle we’ve seen.

Scene structure

  • All scenes or levels of your game must have:
    • an objective (a target player goal or experience)
    • ‘conflict’ (something that makes the objective more difficult to reach: narrative/mechanics/both)
    • an outcome is then reached by requiring change from the player
  • They either resolve or adapt to the conflict, building to the next part of the experience

Narrative example: Aliens versus Predator

  • Objective - reset power to get the colony working
  • Conflict - the player successfully resets the power, but it blows circuits across the colony
  • Outcome - The colony is more at risk than before and the character’s life is more complex

Another example: Mechanics: God of War

  • Objective - continue killing everything
  • Conflict - enemies with shields block the usual attacks
  • Outcome - the player needs to use new attacks to progress, making the game more challenging - complexity increases for the player

Games are players’ stories

  • If your game feels flat, then thinking of your player’s experience as a story
  • Here are four debug questions to ask if a game, event, or level feels unsatisfying:
    • Is the player’s objective clear?
    • Is there escalating mechanical or narrative conflict, or is it only repetition?
    • Does the outcome meaningfully add to the mechanics, narrative, or both?
    • Over the level or the game was there change from the start to the finish, for the player, the character or both?

Conclusion

  • Good designers already intuitively use story structures to create compelling and rewarding games
  • Learning to do it consciously is a powerful way of understanding how we shape the great experiences
  • Whether your game is narrative or mechanics oriented, learning to think like a storyteller helps you make intelligent player-focused design choices

Scenes Debugging tools