A handful of less usual inspirations to read… — Someone asked me a week or so ago what books I might recommend to read about Narrative Design. There are some widely-recommended ND books out there which most folk will of heard of — things like The Game Narrative Toolbox series by some lovely people, or Evan Skolnick’s Video Game…

Keeping your lines in line… — When I start at a studio, I almost always find myself building or rebuilding a pipeline for game dialogue. I wanted to write down here some things I’ve learned about that, my reasoning behind it, and where it bridges the gap between other pieces of gamedev. …

TL;DR — a simple Storylet implementation for Ink in Unity. You can find the code here. You know what Storylets are, right? Rearrangeable chunks of story that a player can encounter in any order — the sort of setup you find in Fallen London, King of Dragon Pass, Wildermyth, Reigns…

I’ve recently been developing an external library in C++ for a hobby project, and I ran into an annoying (and known!) problem. The Problem When Unity starts, it loads the external library, and calls into it when it needs to run a function inside the library. Which is fine! Unfortunately if you’re…

Or: “How do you get the rest of your team to understand the cool character you made up?” — TL;DR — using a simple character card works for me. People don’t read. This Is Known. Did you write 130 pages on the amazing character Jack Ransome, protagonist of the latest Ultimate Shooter game? No one on your team will read it. No one will know about his cyberlegs or…

I’ve been thinking a bit about how we (at Crooked House) might structure another larp, based on some bits and pieces we’ve been thinking about and discussing for a while. And this is what I’ve come to so far as a platform that might work for a variety of concepts…

I wrote an article over here for Resolution Games giving an overview of the things a Narrative Department cares about and can help with. Also includes some bonus thoughts on narrative design for VR and AR. What does a Narrative Department do? - Resolution Games "You write the story, right?" Well, sort of. The idea of a narrative department is still surprisingly new in the games…www.resolutiongames.com

Or: What does that pesky Narrative Designer title actually mean? — I’ve seen many attempts over the years to answer the question “What is a Narrative Designer?” in the game industry. The answers are fuzzy, and vary from studio to studio and person to person. …

Flashback to a time where I hastily invented a bunch of label names for rooms in a haunted mansion. The rooms were for specific characters, I was rushing to get placards printing, and it was an event set at Christmas — so I just named the rooms after spices. The Cinnamon Room, Saffron, Ginger etc. I was annoyed at myself because I’d no time to think more deeply about the names. I really like thematic connections and hiding clues and I didn’t have a chance to do that.