Design

Here are some of our published articles about narrative design for videogames.

• Job Functions in Game Narrative: What are all the roles in a game narrative department?
• What does a Narrative Department do? What is the point of a videogames narrative department and what are its main areas of responsibility.
• Communicating Characters: How do you effectively get across the characters in your story to the rest of the team?
• Authoring With Intent: Showing your working to the rest of your team.
• Writing a game script is not a project step: An explanation of the writing process for production purposes.
• Storytelling in VR: An article on design and writing considerations for VR experiences.
•  Crossing the Threshold – Revisited: a followup to the LARP threshold article about how to get the player into a game experience.
• A Quick Look at Worldbuilding: A brief snippet on the layers of worldbuilding for a large-scale multiplayer game.

Here are some of our published articles about design for larp and immersive events.

• The Layer Cake of Experience: A design tool and technique for experiential moments.
• Wing and a Prayer – Stress and Structure: Ian’s design blog on creating and using stress to affect player’s emotions in the WW2 WAAF larp / simulation Wing and a Prayer.
• All for One – Design: The design of our Three Musketeers event All for One.
• What is Cinedrama? The play style for Dick Britton and the Voice of the Seraph and All for One.
• The Tag System: The system we use for collaborative character generation at Crooked House.
• Mind the Gap: Ian discusses leaving gaps for the player in interactive media. Features information on God Rest Ye Merry.
• Crossing the Threshold: An article on easing the players into your game to put them in a particular mood when play starts. Features work on God Rest Ye Merry.
• Moment-based Design: The technique we primarily use for our larp design.
• Writing Backwards – Stunt to Story: A design-first technique to steer players into particular actions. Features work on God Rest Ye Merry.
• God Rest Ye Merry: Lots of behind-the-scenes info on our 1950s Christmas ghost story.
• Sharing is Caring: An article on a mature approach to roleplaying.

Articles and utilities we’ve created for practical game development:

• Fountain Movie Script Parser: A library for reading the Fountain movie script language. Also see Movie Scripts in Ren’py, a tool developed using this library.
• Storylet Framework: A multi-language storylet framework, allowing simple selection of a generic storylet structure.
• A Multi-language Expression Parser: Written to allow simple conditional queries to be specified in your content files and executed at runtime.
• A Dialogue Pipeline: a quick exploration of a necessary component of storytelling in videogames which every studio needs, and which most don’t have good solutions to.
• Ink Testing Tool: a useful tool for automated testing Ink stories.
• Ink Localisation Tool: A tool to make localising Ink stories easier.
• An Ink/Javascript Storylet Testbed: A simple framework for trying out Storylet systems in the browser.
• An Ink/Unity Storylet Framework: A simple framework for developing Storylet systems using Ink in Unity.
• Rapidly Developing C++ Libraries for Unity: A useful decoupling of C++ to be able to develop libraries live alongside a running instance of Unity.