This week was about narrative and interactive systems we had a guest lecture from Conway Sutton a freelance games writer working on the Monster Prom series.

We were intoduced to the differences between games writing and narrative design.

Things to Consider with Narrative Design

1. Structure
   • Linear, nonlinear?
2. Who is your player character?
   • How can you express your protagonist?
3. Do the narrative and other aspects of the game support each other?
   • Ludonarrative dissonance
4. What sort of story do you have the ability to tell
   • What research do you need to do
   • scope
5. How will your player experience and interact with the story?
   • Npcs
   • Dialogue
   • Player actions
   • cutscenes
   • Descriptions
     

I plan for my game to rely heavily on narrative so I greatly enjoyed this lecture and it contained very helpful points.

Our tech session this week introduced us to Ink a helpful narrative writing tool that allows you to easily create multi choice narrative games using Inks own language.

It also contains a built in Unity package to easily merge the two programs, I plan to use this to handle the branching dialogue in my games prototype

The workshop this week focused on helping us use effective storytelling. We worked in pairs to create a simple branching narrative story with the help of these worksheets.

We created a story about finding a puppet in the woods, once you pick the puppet up it starts sucking the life out of you. However once you put it down it screams like a child causing immense distress. If you hold it for too long you eventually turn into a puppet for the next unfortunate soul to find.

We laid the story out into a flowchart including multiple endings and choices for the player. Once we had this I prototyped the game in Twine.

This week has given me klot of ideas regarding my narrative and how to start strucuring it. My next steps will be to come up with a rough outline of the story then begin fleshing out the details.

Next Steps –