Create your own game story and learn from professionals about their ways to design compelling storylines. Get tips and tricks for creating emotionally-engaging worlds, stories, and characters in videogames of every genre. Professional writers provide hands-on training for newcomers to the game industry to learn how to create great game stories and land coveted jobs as game narrative designers.

Learn how to create compelling game storylines.

Four experienced narrative designers from different genres of game development have banded together to create this all-inclusive guide on what it's like to work as a writer and narrative designer in the video game industry. From concept to final testing, The Game Narrative Toolbox walks readers through what role a narrative designer plays on a development team and what the requirements are at every stage of development. Drawing on real experiences, authors Tobias Heussner, Toiya Kristen Finley, PhD, Ann Lemay, and Jennifer Brandes Hepler provide invaluable advice for writing compelling player-centered stories and effective dialogue trees to help readers make the switch from writing prose or screenplay to interactive.

Thoroughly revised, theSecond Edition includes updated content reflecting the industry’s latest developments. In addition to revised and updated chapters, this new edition features two additional chapters covering more advanced topics that are applicable to the lessons learned from the original chapters.

Accompanying every chapter are exercises that allow the reader to develop their own documentation, outlines, and game-dialogue samples for use in applying for industry jobs or developing independent projects.

Table of Contents

Chapter 01 What Is Narrative Design?

Chapter 02 The Concept

Chapter 03 Worldbuilding

Chapter 04 Characters

Chapter 05 Story

Chapter 06 Implementation and Production

Chapter 07 Dialogue

Chapter 08 Cutscenes and Cinematics

Chapter 09 Troubleshooting

Chapter 10 Visual Novels

Chapter 11 Storytelling in Open-World Games and Games-as-a-Service

Conclusion

References

The Advanced Game Narrative Toolbox continues where the Game Narrative Toolbox ended. While the later covered the basics of writing for games, the Advanced Game Narrative Toolbox will cover techniques for the intermediate and professional writer. The book will cover topics such as how to adapt a novel to a game, how to revive IPs and how to construct transmedia worlds. Each chapter will be written by a professional with exceptional experience in the field of the chapter. Key Features Learn from industry experts how to tackle today's challenges in storytelling for games. A learn by example and exercise approach, which was praised in the Game Narrative Toolbox. An in depth view on advanced storytelling techniques and topics as they are currently discussed and used in the gaming industry. Expand your knowledge in game writing as you learn and try yourself to design quests, write romances and build worlds as you would as a writer in a game studio. Improve your own stories by learning and trying the techniques used by the professionals of game writing.

The Advanced Game Narrative Toolbox continues where the Game Narrative Toolbox ended. While the later covered the basics of writing for games, the Advanced Game Narrative Toolbox will cover techniques for the intermediate and professional writer. The book will cover topics such as how to adapt a novel to a game, how to revive IPs and how to construct transmedia worlds. Each chapter will be written by a professional with exceptional experience in the field of the chapter.

Key Features

Learn from industry experts how to tackle today’s challenges in storytelling for games.

A learn by example and exercise approach, which was praised in the Game Narrative Toolbox.

An in depth view on advanced storytelling techniques and topics as they are currently discussed and used in the gaming industry.

Expand your knowledge in game writing as you learn and try yourself to design quests, write romances and build worlds as you would as a writer in a game studio.

Improve your own stories by learning and trying the techniques used by the professionals of game writing.

Table of Contents

Introduction. Planning Your Work. Diversity & Research. Romances. Cinematics. Building a Universe. Writing for Non-Digital Games (Board Games). Adapting a Digital World to a Novel. From Novel to Computer Game. Reinventing an IP. Managing the Branches. Quest Design. Writing and implementation. The Writer in the Studio (VO). Editing and Quality Control. Freelancing and Surviving. Journalism. Past the Release.