narrative-design
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WildStar Wednesday talks about the game's narrative design
Unless you were at PAX Prime last year, about all you've seen of WildStar in action has been the game's cinematic trailer. While it didn't give much of an idea of how the game played, said video certainly had a lot of style. According to the latest WildStar Wednesday community blog post, that style was a big part of the game's narrative design, which is seen as one of the main points of development -- making a game that feels large, engrossing, and epic. As lead designer Chad Moore explains it, the narrative design team is responsible for outlining the world of Nexus, which was in part created to serve as a perfect locus for a variety of different adventures. While this design team isn't particularly concerned with mechanics, it is concerned with ensuring that every part of the game has the same degree of personality as the first cinematic trailer. If you're one of the many people anticipating the game heavily, take a look behind the scenes to see how it produces its feel.
Unleash your imagination in an organized way with Nevigo's game-narrative tool
Crafting a complex, logical and engaging story is difficult enough on a linear level, but building an entire world of diverging options, storylines, conversations and endings in a video game is an especially trying process. As artists ourselves, we sympathize with the plight of video-game writers and encourage them to find a process that works with their individual creativity, such as articy:draft, the "first" professional narrative-design program from Nevigo. The above video demonstrates how articy:draft's use of "flow fragments" and a visual writing template can help eliminate plot holes, logical flaws and dead ends in convoluted stories. "Game writers can now craft non-linear plots easily," Nevigo CEO Kai Rosenkranz (Heads!) said. "The era of post-its on walls is finally over." Whoa -- we were with you until the sticky note thing, buddy. We happen to like our walls covered in incomprehensible post-it notes; it adds a sense of psychotic drama to the office and makes us look like we're doing important, semi-permanent things in vague, scribbled descriptions, such as, "take the left fork and the right spoon," "CAROLINE" and "Yes, but we need it in Hunter Green." Call us purists, but we'll keep our sticky notes, thanks. Now if only we could find the minutes from that meeting on the importance of organization, we'll be set.
Blackstar and the importance of narrative design
This year's ION Game Conference hosted a great cross-section of the finest minds in gaming, both industry veterans and up-and-coming developers. Among the latter was Spacetime Studios' Brandon Reinhart, Lead Designer for Blackstar, an MMO that's currently on our Droolworthy List.In Brandon's talk, entitled "Narrative Design for MMOs: Using Storytelling to Craft and Convey Vision", he applied the old maxim "Show, don't tell" to his own lecture and explained not only how to craft engaging narratives in a game, but also why doing so is important. Using his two laws of visionary design, three tools for promoting narrative design, and the Great Law of Conveying Vision, the designer didn't just make his thoughts plain, but also made us even more eager to see what Blackstar will eventually turn out to be.
