Narrative Design Services

Let’s Tell Your Story! We provide game narrative support for mobile and AAA games, guiding you through all stages of development, from concept to worldbuilding, narrative design to the player-facing story.

How We Can Help With Your Narrative Game Design

1

Every game has a story to tell; every player wants an experience to remember. Crafting a unique narrative and building a solid story foundation for all creative disciplines to work toward will take your game to the next level. We can help you develop a narrative vision from the ground up or take a new pass on an established title.

2

A well-told video game narrative weaves into every aspect of your game design. We will help you identify every storytelling lever your game has, designing the narrative to convey your story in far more than dialogue and character alone. Our diverse game development experience across all interactive platforms will help you design the narrative keeping your players coming back for more.

3

Our experience in game design covers every conceivable position a publisher could be in. We’ve assisted indie studios in developing their first games to industry-leading AAA game studios looking for outside eyes to improve on their story. No matter where you are in the process, we have a consultant right for your needs.

We’ve partnered with MGD in a long project that needed premium design work including narrative, systems, and balancing, and also a deep understanding of how to operate a successful mobile game. The Doctors’ knowledge and skills are fundamental to the success of the game. I’m looking forward to working with them on our next projects!

Tiago Melo, CEO, Lumen Games

Our Narrative Game Design Services - How it Works

Strong narrative design for a free-to-play game can have enormous retention and engagement benefit, even for games that do not rely on narrative cut-scenes (or equivalent) to drive engagement. However, narrative design and development is generally under-resourced, started too late in the design/development process, and is often misunderstood both in terms of the amount of effort necessary to do it well, and the overall impact it has on product design.
We break down the process of Narrative Design into three major steps:

World Building

The exploration of the rules, characters, relationships, motivations, and locations in which the game takes place. This process seeks to clearly define what makes the world in which the game takes place very clear to everyone involved in making the game by addressing not only WHAT is likely to take place in this world but WHY that is the case. This process should take place as early as possible in the game development lifecycle, preferably at the Concept stage because decisions made during the process have some impact on almost all subsequent design decisions.

Narrative Integration

An ongoing discussion between Narrative Designers, Game Designers, and UX Designers to decide how the world (and events within the world) are most clearly and comprehensively communicated to players. The most elegant narrative integrations do not require a single line of text to clearly communicate the world and high level plot-points to the player by coming through in every aspect of the game from system designs to currency names to the graphic design choses in the UI. Dialog or cutscenes are then only used to fill in the details, not to establish the foundation.

Content Creation

This is the actual writing part, but it also involves ongoing involvement in other game design processes level design, content design, in-game object/kit design, and balance/progress pacing. Especially for games that hope that narrative will drive ongoing engagement and retention, the narrative remains a guiding light for what “fits” the game world and what does not.
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