Narrative Design

Full-Stack Narrative Design

You’ve heard of Full Stack Coders, those mystical beings who can do everything on a project, from the front-end user-facing UX to the back-end architecture? In practice it tends to mean someone who's a subject expert in stuff your project needs but you’ve never had to do yourself. Someone who can do and oversee the whole process, from ideation and pitching through to teambuilding, hiring, mentoring, editing, writing, tool creation, implementation and localisation. 

Well, I'm a Full-Stack Narrative Designer. I have over 20 years experience in every stage and type of narrative content and pipeline. From the Pre-Production phase foundational work (creating new IPs and adapting established IPs, creating a coherent compelling brand, worldbuilding, teambuilding and mentoring, scheduling, defining and building tools and workflows, creating documentation and creative briefs for every discipline and partner, lore, styleguides, cinematics, storyboarding, aligning the setting, tone and gameplay systems, the Verbs, Nouns, Adjectives, Adverbs and Conjunctions of the player experience) through to writing, casting, directing, editing, localisation and implementation of text, audio and cinematic assets.

It’s not about writing. Or rather, it's not just about writing. It's about managing the meaning of your game's content and systems. All of it. Not just the cinematics, not just the interactions, not just the explicit narrative, not even the passive environmental narrative, it’s deliberately authoring the combination of all the player's interactions with your game, from first mention of the title to first glimpse of the logo.

If you're lucky, you've had most of this already done for you. Maybe the genre you're working in is making these decisions for you. Maybe you lucked into a particularly compelling key concept art or game-in-a-frame image. Maybe you hit the sweet spot of gameplay really early. Maybe you have a perfect alignment and integration of setting, tone, gameplay, signifiers and affordances. But if not, those are all conscious decisions that need to be made, or your game risks being incoherent.