Our premise is simple: Don't try to use story to contradict everything else that the player sees and does.

A quick and simple rundown of the power of "player fantasy" in narrative design

I recently rediscovered this in the depths of my Google drive! Years ago, I printed this out and gave it as a Christmas present to my boss at the company that I was working at the time, who had complained about not knowing wh...

Are you human being who sometimes must describe things to other people to convince them to give you money to feed your children and/or dangerous addiction to high-end Lego castles? Are these things which you are describing computer games...

Did you know that if you take 90-year-old public domain banjo music and then chop it up and slow it down 1000% and loop it over itself a bunch of times and add a bunch of distortion filters, it becomes melancholy ambient space music? Or per...

  There's a finite amount of text space in your game. It's a terrible shame to waste any of it. Item descriptions are actually one of my favorite things to work on in game writing and narrative design. It's an incre...

 – A Tragedy of Seeing With Open Eyes – – – Also Some Rambling Advice about Narrative Delivery Systems – – – – – And Why Your Narrative Designer Should Draw Even If It's Terrible – – – Long long ago, in the before times, when phones flipped, and s...

In all its rugged splendor.This is a brilliant book, and you should buy it.I was reading Gene Wolfe's Castle of the Otter (a collection of essays and advice named after a humorous misreporting of the title of his book Citadel of Autarch), and two pie...

   Out of all my 2024 projects, this was one of the ones that I enjoyed the most.Just for fun, I decided to try narrative design in a new context. I took a break from video games and participated in a tabletop RPG adventure design contest – Ben Milto...

  Has anyone else experienced the master class in narrative design that is Fireball Island: the Curse of Vul-Kar?  This is what excellence looks like. I know it's not a videogame, but the lessons are all perfect. For those of you who aren't fa...