Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
wants the player to feel empowered and majestic at a certain point in the
gameplay experience, all other disciplines—including Narrative—move to
support this directive. If Narrative believes it's important for the player to
feel alone and helpless for a specific moment in the story, the other dis-
ciplines—including Design—are in the support roles.
Since so many elements of a game are trying to make the player
feel
, it's
supremely important that at any given moment they're working together
to evoke the same emotion. They all need to be pulling in the same direc-
tion. However, the various game development disciplines are not Olympic
rowers timing their pulls to the reliable, predictable, and rhythmic calls of a
coxswain. It's not nearly that simple.
Every story and every mission will have emotional peaks and valleys. So-
metimes the intended emotion on a moment-to-moment basis is obvious
to everyone concerned—other times, perhaps not so much. A relatively
foolproof way to make sure everyone is on the same page is to actually
put
it on a page, in the form of what some developers call an
emotion
map
.
The form varies from writer to writer, but the goal is the same: lay out, in
no uncertain terms, what the main emotion is supposed to be at each key
point in storytelling and gameplay.
Here is a hypothetical emotion map using an Excel template with simple
numbers driving a line graph.
In this scenario, the player fights his way (Point 1 on the graph) into a
heavily fortified bunker alongside an NPC “buddy.” The twosome must take
