
Develop a high concept, a one-liner describing your game's core idea to communicate the vision. Use the pitch to guide development from description to narrative scenarios, missions, and quest lines.
Explore planetary climates and seasons, water-land interactions, and how geography shapes weather. Analyze geography questions and astronomy basics like moons and constellations to flesh out worlds.
Explore how to design race cultures by detailing food rituals and traditional foods, music and instruments, death beliefs, fashion, naming systems, language, values, morals, symbols, and everyday rituals.
Explore the sounds of languages—from vowels and consonants to poetry effects—and learn to design a fictional tongue, with rules shaped by listeners’ native languages and people, places, and things.
Understand cipher characters as vessels players inhabit, with names and appearances that anchor the world. Players fill their backstory with imagination, since ciphers provide blank histories rather than fixed motives.
Balance fixed background with player customization to shape the protagonist and agency. Design branches and consequences to support diverse backgrounds and keep the narrative engaging in linear or non-linear stories.
Explore character psychology by examining the persuader, director, performer, and caregiver personalities, their described traits, strengths, weaknesses, and common myths.
Define player agency as players' belief that their choices drive story events. Honor those decisions by ensuring outcomes reflect their path and shape future plot points.
Explore how to craft a game's narrative by defining genre, villain backstory, and tone. Balance length, twists, and immersion to align with player expectations.
Explore non-linear narrative design by shaping branching quests that honor player agency, balance sandbox freedom with a coherent main plot, and distinguish critical paths from side quests.
Empower players through non-linear, branching narratives by presenting meaningful, visible choices whose consequences unfold quickly or in endgame, as illustrated by World of Warcraft's moral agency.
Explore open world narratives, story blocks, and player freedom, and learn to design a framework that supports any content order. Manage player agency with level requirements to guide progression.
Learn to craft effective dialogue in video games by timing lines with action and avoiding redundancy. Explore triggers, line banks, authenticity, and voice talent to boost immersion.
Explore how theme and tone shape dialogue, natural patter, emotion, and pace. Learn to craft unique, memorable lines that reflect setting, stress, and character voice.
Explore how MMO dialogue often relies on quest text and short prompts. Learn to enrich the story through environment design and action-based storytelling while keeping messages concise and urgent.
Analyze mission based narrative, separating text based dialogue outside gameplay from inside gameplay, with mission briefings and objectives guiding downtime between maps in Starcraft style.
Why this course is special
This course is like no other on the market. We're going to be looking at some very interesting concepts when it comes to Narrative Design.
My Guarantee
For every student that joins the course, they will be able to ask questions about their games and how to go about using their story to help develop their game. I will be available to answer any and all questions for all of my students.
The Course Structure
The course is almost all videos. It will take between 6.5 hours to complete. After you finish this course, you will have a more robust understanding of how to write for your games.
The course is structured into 8 main Sections.
Section 2: Introduction to Narrative Design
In this section, We will be taking a solid look at what is narrative design. Understanding all the fundamentals that go into writing and grasp a deep comprehension of plot theory. We will also look at game genres, player archetypes, mechanics, clarity in writing, and much more.
Section 3: Concept / Pitch
Here, we look at how to generate and cultivate ideas from their initial inception to writing out a full-blown pitch document. This section allows you to create your concept that will be pushed throughout the entire course.
Section 4: World Building
This is my favorite section because here, we will look at the intricacies of building a full-scale world from nothing. We will talk about climate, mood, setting, who inhabits it, is it fantasy, is it science fiction and much more
Section 5: Character
In this section, we flesh out our main protagonist and give them a sense of purpose in the out newly created world. This will allow us to see which of the 4 main types of character we want to create/. We when looking at Character Psychology and the 16 personality types, along with really looking at diversity in video games and how to make it more efficient
Section 6: Story
This section is dedicated to player agency, giving the player a sense of purpose throughout the entire game and respecting their choices. We take a critical look at Linear, Non-Linear and open-world games and their perspective on player agency.
Section 7: Dialogue
Here we will look at dialogue and the importance it represents in-game. How to write dialogue, the 3 main types, and incorporating cutscenes into the game.
Section 8: Bringing it all together
This section brings all previous sections together to understand the fundamentals of narrative design
Section 9: Bonus: Breaking into the industry as a Narrative Designer
In this Bonus Section, we take a look at what tools are at a Narrative Designer's disposal to break into the industry and start their careers right after finishing this course
Certification of completion when finishing this course
When you complete 100% of the videos in this course, you will be emailed a certificate of completion by Udemy so you can show it as proof of your expertise and that you have completed a certain number of hours of instruction in the course topic.