Welcome back, narrative adventurers! If you’ve been reading our blog, you already know why narrative design tools are a game writer’s best friend. Today, we’re going to take a closer look at why writing for games isn’t just writing — it’s more like herding cats. On a roller-coaster. Blindfolded. I could go on…
The Unpredictable Player Problem
The first and most sacred rule of game writing? The player will do something you didn’t plan for. Always. And there’s no amount of planning and testing that can account for this so you might as well put that in your “this comes with working in the games industry” column.
In traditional storytelling — like books, movies, or TV — the audience is strapped into the passenger seat. They follow the path the writer paves for them, from the inciting incident to the bittersweet ending, without taking a single detour.
Take the movie industry for example:
📽️ In a Movie:
The protagonist’s journey is linear and locked — they’ll confront the villain, overcome their flaw, and reach a resolution, whether the viewer likes it or not. The audience observes the transformation, but never alters it.
🎮 In a Game:
Players can ignore your main quest to collect mushrooms for hours. They might meet the final boss without understanding why they’re fighting. That freedom is the core difference.
✅ Our tip:
Use the nested flow in articy:draft X to map out non-linear storylines and manage the narrative branches players might encounter — so the story can flex with their choices, but never fall apart.
Don’t forget to add conditions and reactions to make sure your world reacts accordingly to the player’s choices and makes them feel like they’ve had an impact.
Your Script Isn’t Sacred
In games, the script isn’t carved in stone. It’s more like play-dough — constantly shaped, squished, and re-molded by the team around you.
That emotional plot twist you were proud of? Animation needs to bring it to life.
That witty NPC banter? Audio might cut it if the voice acting budget runs dry.
That intricate lore? Level design has to make room for it — and sometimes, there isn’t any.
So again, if we were to look at the movie industry
📽️ In a Movie:
Once the script is locked and filming begins, dialogue changes are minimal. Every scene, line, and beat is precisely timed and crafted for a controlled viewer experience.
🎮 In a Game:
Even your most important lines might be reworked to fit animation constraints or be chopped entirely if the project runs over budget. Flexibility isn’t optional — it’s survival.
✅ Our tip:
Use articy:draft as the single source of truth for your project so that you’ll find needed information quickly. That way you can make sure to pick up the story at any point and make whatever changes you need to make without breaking it. Don’t let the player casually meet Roni in a romantic garden full of flowers in bloom if previously there was an incident revealing he had pollen allergies.
Keep all your data updated in the tool to have it at hand. Use references and links so you can quickly access information and make fast iterations when you need it.
When working in a Multi User environment, track changes across different teams with collaborative features and version history — so you can adapt and iterate fast without losing narrative coherence. Auto-generated change comments will come in handy too.
Narrative Worldbuilding Isn’t Just Backstory — It’s Infrastructure
Game worlds aren’t just the setting — they are the story. Players explore them, poke holes in them, and build their own meaning from them. That means your worldbuilding has to hold up under scrutiny — not just sound cool in a lore doc. When a player enters your game world, they’re constantly reading it — not just the text, but the environment, the rules, the visuals, the tone. A crumbling cathedral implies forgotten gods. A high-tech security checkpoint suggests powerful enemies. These narrative signals build expectations, and the story must pay them off. If the world hints at something meaningful and nothing ever comes of it, the experience falls flat.
📽️ In a Movie:
Worldbuilding is mostly symbolic or thematic. The world supports the plot, often through visuals or exposition. Even richly imagined settings exist primarily to serve a scripted narrative, rarely explored in depth unless it’s relevant to the scene. It can hint at depth but rarely demands audience action. A dystopian skyline might underscore the tone, but it doesn’t need to be explored.
🎮 In a Game:
Players can go anywhere, read every signpost, or ignore your carefully placed journal entries. Worldbuilding is active, environmental, and interactive. Every object, faction, and biome needs to feel intentional and coherent. Players expect lore entry to connect to something. Game worlds create narrative tension simply by being explorable — and it’s up to you to make that exploration feel rewarding.
✅ Our tip:
Use articy:draft’s Entity and Location features to anchor your story elements across the game world and create a centralized knowledge base for your world — so designers and writers can stay consistent even across sprawling, open-ended environments. This keeps your lore, quests, and environmental storytelling coherent for the players to feel like their discoveries have real narrative weight.
From Storytelling to Story-Shaping
Perhaps the biggest shift for new game writers is understanding that your job isn’t to tell a story. It’s to build the scaffolding for one.
In a game, the player’s emotional journey isn’t delivered to them in a carefully scripted linear story. It’s also baked into the world, the mechanics, the pacing, the choices. Writing in this space means thinking less like an author and more like an architect.
-
You’ll write:
- Branching dialogue that reacts to player choices
- Story beats designed to be discovered in any order
- Lore that players can choose to engage with (or totally ignore)
📽️ In a Movie:
Every story beat happens in order, at a fixed pace. A slow reveal or a sudden twist? All precisely placed for maximum effect.
🎮 In a Game:
A player might encounter your twist before they’ve met the characters it involves. The pacing is theirs, not yours — and your writing needs to hold up at any point in their journey.
✅ Our tip:
Use Branching Dialogue, Variables and Editable Templates to create deeply reactive characters and plotlines.
Don’t forget to preview how these choices unfold in context using the Simulation Mode so you can experience them from the player’s point of view.
The Challenge is the Charm
Yes, game writing is hard. Players are unpredictable. Production constraints are real. And your beautifully crafted words might only be read by the 12% of players who don’t skip through dialogue lines.
But when your story finally clicks — when a player feels something not because you told them to, but because they lived it — there’s nothing else like it.
Until then, keep your branching dialogues organized and your plot twists flexible 😉
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