Building a narrative portfolio
Building a portfolio is a necessary step in becoming a games writer or narrative designer. But what exactly is a portfolio and how can you use Arcweave to make it?
Games writing and narrative design are some of the most sought after jobs in the games industry but the steps to becoming either one are left largely unclear. So, we have developed a comprehensive guide to building up a narrative portfolio using Arcweave.
What is a portfolio?
A narrative portfolio showcases a variety of your best works as a writer, including but not limited to, barks of dialogue, branching narratives, character biographies, worldbuilding, cinematic scripts, lore documents, questlines, and item descriptions. Variety is the key word here.?
A portfolio can be contained within a pdf document or it can be hosted on a personal website. A pdf portfolio is usually around 10-15 pages long while an online portfolio might be a bit longer, giving a more comprehensive overview to the work you have written or contributed to. Either way, the portfolio is usually included within a job application for any writing or narrative position as a way to demonstrate ability, experience, and skill.?
Why use Arcweave?
The beauty of Arcweave is that is can be utilised for a variety of different writing samples and styles - it has capabilities for worldbuilding, character design, dialogue scripting, branching story, narrative flowchart design and even broad game development. Additionally, an Arcweave project showcases your workflow and the process through which you craft story, offering important behind-the-scenes insight about your organisation and communication skills.
Furthermore, Arcweave allows you to turn your writing into an instantly playable and shareable game which not only demonstrates your ability to implement narrative into a final playable project, but also sets you apart from a competitive crowd.
Writers with experience in game development could even go one step further and take advantage of Arcweave's integrations with Godot, Unity, Unreal Engine, and Defold. This allows users to develop their interactive story into a fully functional game using the engine of their choice (check out the text-adventure game 'Regrets' along with its Arcweave project to see this in action).
Finally, Arcweave is?used by people over at Netflix, EA, Mojang, Microsoft, Amazon, Fireside, and many more studios and developers. Learning Arcweave allows you to list it as a skill on your resume or LinkedIn, demonstrating key understanding of an industry standard software.
Step 1: Planning your project
Building a portfolio in Arcweave will be slightly different to making a regular project. Remember, this is intended to represent your best work as a writer and will be used to judge whether you are suitable for a job position.
To start, you will need to carefully think about what you want this project to demonstrate about yourself — what skills does it showcase, what genres does it explore? Also, make sure to keep your project clean, organised, and easily understandable; hiring managers do not have the time to decipher messy projects.
Lucky for you, Arcweave's user-friendly design makes organisation incredibly easy through notes, folders, and covers.
Step 2: Writing your project
Now that you're all organised, let the writing commence!
There is no single 'correct' way to write a story but there are a lot of resources out there for junior writers and students. Exploring an idea that makes you viscerally excited will always be a great place to start, as long as you don't let that passion spiral into over-ambition. Keep the project small and feasible—you can always add to it later.
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One way of approaching this is starting with a short character biography and a few sample barks of dialogue to get the ideas flowing. Then you can begin to brainstorm potential relationships, stories, or quests that stem from this initial idea. For this project, we began with a healer NPC called 'Father Tobias'—check out his short character biography below.
Other useful resources for writing in Arcweave include:
Step 3: Seeking feedback
After completing any project, the next step should always be to collect feedback from peers. This might include industry mentors, colleagues, other students, friends or family, or essentially anyone who can give your writing a second opinion and check for small things you might have missed. Depending on the complexity of your project, you might also want to have beta-testers check for bugs or errors.
While perhaps tedious, this is an absolutely essential step—leaving glaring issues in your portfolio is like leaving glaring issues in your resume. It can happen, but it does run the risk of making your work appear rushed and sloppy.
There is no need to panic, though, as Arcweave makes seeking feedback easy and straightforward. There are two ways to share your project in Arcweave, depending on whether you want to keep your project private or make it publicly accessible:
Step 4: Networking and exposure
One of the biggest benefits of using an online portfolio is that it allows you to get your name out there and start becoming a recognisable face in the industry. So, once you've finished your project, implemented feedback, and are proud of it, go ahead and share it wherever you can!
Final thoughts
Overall, breaking into the games industry in any capacity is hard, but it is especially difficult for creative roles like writing and narrative design. It requires hard work, dedication, passion, and a good bit of luck to land a position. But it is possible.
Don't be afraid to ask for support from us, the Arcweave team. You can always reach us on our discord server for advice, help, queries, or just a friendly chat.
Keep going. Keep learning. Keep creating.