Numerous people have asked, "Where do you start when creating a game's narrative?"
Great question and one which many professionals struggle with
We can't even remotely claim to have a definitive answer for this one but here's our general thoughts and how James usually goes about it
First, don't start with the story
All the time I run into young designers who've got a great story in mind that they want to build their game around
This is going to lead you into a world of hurt
Having a story already built tends to box you in a number of ways
First, it limits what your mechanics can be
You'll have all these ideas about the actions your characters should be able to take, how they should interact, and what they should be able to do
And that'll just kill you right off the bat. You'll build out these things and try to make them work but
no set of mechanics springs fully formed from the designer's head
Instead, you're going to end up with a lot of bloat that you'll try and kluge and kick and squeeze into some shape that's acceptable to your players...
...and that rarely comes together in a tight coherent way
Having your story planned from the outset will keep you from abandoning ideas entirely or cutting them down to the few that are really working
Rather than just delivering the very best mechanics, you'll deliver all sorts of things that'll drag the rest of your experience down
It's just dooming yourself to failure
No one's gonna care about your story because it's not being delivered in an engaging way
Another reason why starting with the story is bad: because doing so locks yourself into a specific set of characters and places
Maybe those characters and places won't match your art team's area of expertise?
Maybe the players won't find them engaging or interesting?
Who knows how well those characters and places will read on-screen...
...and who knows how expensive they might be the build?
Most importantly, who knows how malleable these characters and places are?
That your game's inevitably going to go through some big changes in development. Every game does
Will your story elements be able to adapt to fit those changes without breaking the entire plan?
Lastly, starting with your story locks you into an emphasis on plot and a certain amount of exposition
As a general rule I wouldn't ever say, "We're going to tell this story" before you at least have a prototype of your game up and playable
Because it's amazingly easy to put more words on paper than you're ever going to be able to deliver in play
You'll find that doing so either leads to this unwillingness to let go, which means your story is going to bog down...
...or that you're forced to cut large chunks from your story later in development...
...leaving your original idea full of holes, hastily patched sections, disjointed chunks
In fact, this is probably one of the main reasons so many game stories feel as discombobulated and disconnected as they do
And this all combines to push you toward a totally unreasonable scope
It tends to be much, much easier to write a scene than to actually be able to create all the assets required to deliver that scene in the game:
All the art, the animations, the sound, and the mechanics, both in terms of programming and design
I've seen this bloated scope that comes from starting with a story destroy more than one team
What I see many designers fail to realize is that 99% of the time, you can tell all the important parts of your story in many different settings
All the things that matter are fungible, mutable, able to take many forms
In fact, that's often how you can tell what's really at the heart of your story
By looking at the things that would work just as well with different characters, a different setting, with all of the proper nouns replaced entirely
I mean, think about Romeo and Juliet
That story would work just as well in a space empire of the distant future as in Renaissance Italy
It could be set in Rome. It could have anthropomorphic dogs
Its main characters could be named Rupert and Periwinkle
It could be a book, a game, a movie, a play a song, an opera...
I mean, that story worked with dance-fighting 1950s Greaser gangs
The same is true of any story you come up with for a game
So, how does this work in practice?
Well, let's say James is going to make a game
He would start his narrative simply by trying to understand what emotion or idea he wanted to explore with the game
Then he would work with his team to find really compelling mechanics that in some way help explore that idea or convey that emotion
Once they've got that, then he starts really asking himself:
What story did these mechanics tell? What do they mean?
What do they say inherently in and of themselves?
From there, they build out the barest bones of a traditional story...
...and try to put together a level or a few minutes of play that embodies everything they're looking for
And like any first level you build as a team, they expect to have to totally refactor or simply abandon that level in the long run...
...but it helps them to hone in on what they're looking for
It helps them to understand the story the game can tell rather than trying to impose a story from on high
And perhaps most Importantly, it helps them to understand how they're delivering their story...
...so they know the cost in terms of production for doing so, which in turn tells them exactly how much tale they can really afford to tell
So however you do it, in the end if you just start with the things that really matter:
the emotion at the core of your work, the idea you hope to explore...
...you'll be able to deliver a much better story in a game than if you'd simply started with the story first
I know it's not what a lot of people want to hear, but believe me, it'll save you from a ton of pain in the end
Good luck! We'll see you next week.