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From Conception to Release & Beyond

Narrative Pipelines

Ella Lowgren & Melissa Koven

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From Conception to Release & Beyond

Narrative Pipelines

Ella Lowgren & Melissa Koven

With special thanks to Alexander Swords of Forest Paths!

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Narrative Designer at Mighty Kingdom by day and a passionate indie developer by night.

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When not writing video games or making bad TikTok content she can be found creating indie titles that explore mental health issues in the hopes of fostering empathy in players.

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Dalmatian lover. (Named her Dalmatian Stripes.)

Discipline Lead – Narrative at Mighty Kingdom. She harbours a deep love for both story & data. Can be found analysing & refining pipelines around writing, designing & implementing narrative in games.

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Soon to receive a Master in Data Science from UNSW.

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Beagle lover.

Character

Bios

Ella (she/they)

Melissa (she/her)

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Wait! What do you mean by “narrative pipelines”?

PLANNING

Establishing genre, context, general mechanics, initial worldbuilding, importance of narrative to sell the experience. Determining narrative scope.

PRODUCTION*

Front-load narrative at start of prod! Asset briefing. Continuing to refine narrative docs and get into implementation reqs.

PRE-PRODUCTION

Narrative docs, inc character bios. Story beats and early writing. Storyboarding. Harmonisation of overall design with narrative.

🎉 LAUNCH

Any final bug squashing and polish leading to support the release candidate!

POST-PRODUCTION

Review fan insights. Collate feedback from the community through the comms team. Solve any embarrassing continuity bugs. Do a narrative specific post-mortem. Future deliveries: Is it a live service product? Future DLC? A sequel?

*NOTE: Various sub-stages to consider. Is there a prototype phase? Are there chunks with differing goals and team composition?

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Why we love

& believe

in narrative pipelines

  • create high-quality games
  • develop more accurate timelines
  • increase collaboration between disciplines

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#qualitygoals

  • Elevates narrative and game as a whole
  • Establishes narrative as a pillar
  • Provides meaning to the dev team

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More accurate

estimations!

  • Better understand scope & timelines

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  • Considerations:
    • Narrative projects are HUNGRY
    • Heavy dependencies on narrative ∴ they must work far ahead

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Increased

cross-disciplinary collab!

  • Betters pipelines for all disciplines
  • Gives clear direction for asset creation
  • Creates team-wide emotional investment

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Roles of a Narrative Designer

  • Worldbuilding
  • Character development
  • Planning story structure & beats
  • Writing outlines & scripts
  • Feedback on design & art�

And, in some cases:

  • Implementation of narrative
  • Cutscene creation
  • Localisation support
  • Voiceover support
  • Driving narrative tooling improvements

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High Level Considerations

  • Funding & Publishing Model
  • Original vs Existing IP
  • Stage of Development
  • Team Composition
  • Narrative Tooling

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Funding & Publishing Model?

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  • Self-published, independent
  • Co-development
  • Work-for-hire

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Self-published, indie

  • A smaller dev team may be able to iterate more efficiently without much red tape
  • No external approval processes

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Co-development

  • Collaboration and alignment required across entities
  • Likely to include external approval processes

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Work-for-hire

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  • Must factor in time to prepare supporting decks or docs for narrative decisions
  • Consider necessary check-ins
  • Likely to be rigorous approval processes (at least initially)

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Original vs Existing IP?

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  • Original products
  • Products based on existing IP / brand

ASK ELLA FOR L.D. IMAGE

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Original IP

  • Accounting for world, character & story planning
  • Competitor research
  • Development of brand identity

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Existing IP

  • Research time for team to familiarise with IP
  • Transmedia considerations
  • More rigorous approval processes

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Team Composition

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  • Who is in the narrative team?
  • Who implements the narrative in-engine?

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Team Composition�Examples of roles you might have

🍝 The weaver

  • Dev of story, world & characters
  • Combines expertise in narrative principles & story structure with game design to integrate story into game

Narrative Designer

🛠 The techie

  • Enables success of wider creative narrative team
  • Focuses on systems & tools
  • May implement dialogue or other narrative elements

Technical Narrative Designer

✨The spectacle

  • Interactive sequence or cutscene creation
  • Setting quality benchmark for storytelling in action
  • Brings life to actors, ensuring they are true to character

Cinematic Designer

✍ The word nerd

  • Dev of story, world & characters
  • Dependent on studio, but writer & narrative designer roles may be similar. Writers often spend more time copy writing and less time implementing.

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Writer

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Narrative Tools

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  • Proprietary engine
  • 3rd party narrative tools

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Proprietary narrative

engine / tools

  • Readiness for project
  • Level of documentation
  • Internal training required
  • Learning curve

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3rd Party Tools

  • One in mind?
  • Consider ease of implementation
  • Internal team training
  • Support (e.g. localisation, help desk, forums)

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Tailoring for various stages of production

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  • Bringing in narrative late…

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Not ideal!

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How to integrate narrative pipelines into production schedules

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  • Planning
  • Pre-production
  • Production
  • Release
  • Post-production

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Planning

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Pre-production

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Production

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Release

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  • Essentially, release is just the checkpoint between production & post-production, so just take some time to celebrate this victory!

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(And be on the alert for any ultra scary narrative-related bugs that snuck in!)

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Post-production

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*Probably best to start a whole new workflow for this depending on the project narrative goals

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Live Service

Example:

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Ava’s Manor

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Discipline crossover & interaction

  • Identify potential bottlenecks
  • Look out for the critical chain

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Discipline Interaction

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Who Narrative Collaborates With

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Game Design

2D Art

3D Art and Tech Art

UI/UX

Animation

Programming

QA

Production

Audio Design

Planning

Early discussions on gameplay and story.

Worldbuilding collaboration.

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Character exploration.

Understanding limitations.

Planning how to deliver writing.

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Speech bubbles, narrative bubbles, etc.

Identifying early character reqs.

Early Tooling discussions.

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Understanding needs, timing, and translation costs/implementation.

Understanding audio needs. Discussion on sound design storytelling.

Pre-production

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(in general, developing workflows with narrative + other disciplines)

Integration of story and mechanics.

Briefing of narrative assets. Work together to refine concepts, provide feedback.

Briefing of narrative assets (particles).

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Inform on character - mannerisms, personality. Refs are handy!

Readying internal tools prior to full production.

Contributing to early conversations on testing reqs, esp. for branching!

Planning for production to ensure narrative isn’t bottleneck.

Planning barks versus VO.

Production

Feedback on gameplay (e.g. levels, combat) based on character and environment.

Ongoing concept feedback.

Regular check-ins for critical narrative assets.

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Feedback process on animations to ensure they fit the character briefs.

Potential quality-of-life updates for internal tools.

QA on cutscenes. or narrative sequences (spelling, grammar, continuity).

Collaborating on timelines and streamlining the delivery process.

Sitting in on VO recording.

Post-production

Extract learnings from a design standpoint. Why systems worked well with the story? What did not?

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Liaising on additional animations, or new character animations, as needed.

Consolidating tool learnings for next narrative game.

Ongoing QA for cutscene implementation and quality.

May be customer related issues funnelled from QA.

A full breakdown of key narrative successes and failures over the project.

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Stage of Development

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Tracking & Documentation Tools

Industry Standard

  • the classic tracking tool
  • robust for pipelines (inc. importing and automation) and cross-discipline work
  • easy-to-build dashboards

All-Rounder

  • free to use
  • allows documentation and tracking
  • robust widgets
  • jack of all trades, master of none

Documentation Heavy

  • part of the Atlassian suite, hence Jira integration
  • industry standard documentation platform

Jira

Notion

Confluence

Highly Visual

  • organise ideas and projects
  • bootstrap brainstorming with many storytelling & game design templates

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Milanote

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Key Takeaways

  • One size doesn’t fit all.
  • Planning is key.
  • Iterate. Find the right balance between structure & an agile mindset.
  • Parallelise. Be on the lookout for opportunities to simultaneously perform narrative-related work.
  • Automate. Identity where parts of your pipeline are cyclical.

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Melissa Koven�Narrative Discipline Lead

melissa.koven@mightykingdom.com

@melissakoven

FOLLOW US ON SOCIAL MEDIA:�

www.mightykingdom.com

THANK YOU!

Ella Lowgren�Narrative Designer

gabriella.lowgren@mightykingdom.com

@ellalowgren