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Alexandre Chaves aka DevGiraffe
Game/Level Designer & Author of Games
Tetragon
Game Design Breakdown
Narrative Questions that Bring Mechanics to Life
When you have a nice game mechanic and a great level design you sure have a good game, but when you have desire of tell a story using this mechanic, than you have more than a good game, you have something to say. One of the many process of the narrative design is to ask questions for your story and mechanics trying to connect the both things, like:
"Why our main character Lucios is lost in Tetragon? What he's doing there?"
"Why Lucios have powers to manipulate the ground and make the world spin?"
These two question help us a lot to create the atmosphere of Tetragon, we search answers on movies, games and other stories trying the figure out what would be the best mood for the game.
THE MAIN POINTS OF YOUR STORY
Once we have our mood set, what kind of events Lucios will live in the story?
I believe are possible to tell stories using only gameplay, if you have a good game environment (art + music + level design) player can immerge situations creating his own interpretation of the game story. But as narrative designer you may want to lead the player for the real interpretation of your own story, and the player needs to understand things cleary and literally to get your interpretation.
Here comes the modular thing, before start Tetragon development we already knew about the important moments of our game and narrative, but what we don't knew is how much levels would take to cover all those moments. If you already read a book called STORY (McKee) you already familiar with the concept of positive to negative feeling, you never start a scene with a feeling and ends with the same feeling, so the important moments of your story are moments of change. On Tetragon we use cinematics to point those moments and create a curve of feeling by all the game flow.
With modular narrative design you prioritise the important moments of your story and create the transition content between those moments in a way that fits on the scope of your money or team. Lucios can take 6 levels to reach the castle, or 12 levels to reach the castle, the important thing is, he needs to reach the castle.
Narrative Design
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