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Game Writing for Beginners
4 tips to help you craft your story from scratch
OK, so the ‘I love you’ part is a little fast.
Still, the image above wouldn’t be a bad beginning to a story — it’s not perfect, but there’s mystery behind it.
Imagine getting a text like this from a complete stranger. You’d be curious, at the most, and annoyed, at the very least. If nothing else, it would lead to an interesting conversation.
A text like this is a beginning that has the ability to change your character’s life. That’s how you want to start out your story. You want to give your players a reason to keep playing your game, something so compelling that they feel like they can’t stop.
To do that, you need to be able to immerse them in the world of your story.
How your game starts is everything
Game writing is a relatively new field, and teaching people how to enter the industry as a writer is difficult. There are a myriad of ways people enter this industry — but most of us come from TV, comics, or film.
Game writers, often called narrative designers, are the ones behind your TV and phone screens. We’re part of a much larger, collaborative process that involves character artists, level designers, project planners, programmers, testers, and translators.
So what do you do if you decide you want to write video games? Narrative design is way too complex to cover in a single post, but in this article, we’re going to dive into the basics of game dialogue and focus on what makes a good story.
1. Concentrate on believability
Good game writing and dialogue are realistic — they take players with you into your world. Even though your characters live in a fantasy, the scenarios and situations they experience shouldn’t be.
You have to make your world real for the player, the same way a writer penning a novel would. We get sucked into video games the same way we get sucked into books — through an incredible story.
One of the mains reasons the Harry Potter franchise is so successful is because we get to see what life in the Wizarding World is like. We get to…
