Storytelling and Narrative - Fundamentals of Game Design - page 200

Design Practice QUESTIONS
1. How do the actions that you make available to the player work with the story in
your game such that the story remains credible, coherent, and dramatically
meaningful?
2. How will you design your gameplay to be sure that the player does not experience
so much randomness or repetition that it harms the dramatic tension of your story?
3. Will the story in your game be linear or nonlinear?
4. If your story is nonlinear, will the story branch or fold back? What kinds of
things will cause it to branch: challenges, choices, or both? Will you allow deferred
or cumulative influences, or will all influences be immediate?
5. If the story folds back, how many inevitable events will it have? What will they
be like?
6. How many endings will your story have? How does each ending reflect the play-
er's play and/or choices throughout the game?
7. What will be the size of your game's granularity? How and when are narrative
events interwoven with game events and player actions?
8. What mechanism will you use to advance the plot? Travel, events, time, or some
combination?
9. Can the story begin at the beginning of the game, or would the game benefit
from a prolog as well?
10. Will the game include narrative (that is, noninteractive) material? What role will
it play—an introduction, mission briefing, transitional material, a conclusion, or
character definition? Is the narrative essential for the player to understand and play
the game?
11. What form will the narrative material take? Pages in the manual? Scrolling text
in the program? Movies? Cut-scenes? Voiceover narration? Monologs by characters?
12. What actions might the player take that are story actions but not efforts to over-
come challenges? Conversations? Construction? Exploration?
13. Will the game include scripted conversations? Between the player and which
characters? For what purpose?
14. Will the story be multipart? If so, how will the plot lines be handled: as an
unlimited series, a limited series, or a serial?