Designing Compelling Stories for Games
We have been discussing how to create a vision and communicate it to the team and how to design game mechanics and prototype them to answer fundamental questions as soon as possible in the development process. We have learned how to distill what we call fun into an interactive experience. It is now time to look at how to take all these elements and make them part of a narrative that can take our players into a virtual world and awaken their imagination, immersing them in the kind of experience that only video games can offer.
Video games (just like books, movies, or plays) can tell stories. Stories are one of the most powerful things human beings can use to communicate. The power of the video game medium, though, lies in one extra thing other mediums rarely have: the enormous potential of interactivity. There’s more: this potential is far from being fully known, understood, and accepted at large.
Consider that literature and written...
