How can you level up your game narrative and storytelling skills?

1 Know your audience

The first step to creating a compelling game narrative is to know your audience. Who are your players? What are their motivations, preferences, and expectations? How do they interact with your game and its mechanics? Knowing your audience will help you tailor your story to their needs and desires, and avoid boring or frustrating them. You can use player personas, surveys, feedback, and analytics to understand your audience better.

2 Define your core loop

The core loop is the basic cycle of actions and rewards that keep your players hooked on your game. It is the foundation of your game design and your game narrative. You need to define your core loop clearly and make sure it aligns with your story goals and themes. For example, if your core loop is about exploration and discovery, your narrative should support that by providing interesting locations, secrets, and lore. If your core loop is about combat and challenge, your narrative should provide context, stakes, and consequences for your fights.

3 Use narrative devices

Narrative devices are techniques and elements that can make your storytelling more effective and engaging. Cutscenes, dialogue, narration, environmental storytelling, and choice and consequence are all common narrative devices in games. You can use these devices to create variety, tension, immersion, and agency in your game narrative. However, it is important to be mindful of how you use them. For instance, avoid interrupting gameplay with lengthy or irrelevant cutscenes, making dialogue too verbose or unnatural, relying on narration to explain everything, cluttering the environment with meaningless objects, and making choices too obvious or inconsequential.

4 Learn from the masters

If you want to hone your game narrative and storytelling skills, you should learn from the masters. Look at the games that have inspired you and examine their use of narrative devices, core loops, and audience awareness. Additionally, you can read books, watch movies, listen to podcasts, or attend workshops that teach the principles and practices of storytelling. Examples of helpful resources include The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses by Jesse Schell, Story: Substance, Structure, Style and the Principles of Screenwriting by Robert McKee, Writing for Video Games by Steve Ince, the Extra Credits YouTube channel, and The Writers' Room podcast by Pixelberry Studios.

5 Practice and iterate

Finally, the best way to level up your game narrative and storytelling skills is to practice and iterate. Write, prototype, test, and refine your game stories as much as you can. Get feedback from your peers, mentors, or players, and use it to improve your work. Don't be afraid to experiment, fail, and learn from your mistakes. Remember that game narrative and storytelling are not static or fixed, but dynamic and evolving. You can always find new ways to tell better stories in your games.

6 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?