Semester(s) Offered: Spring
Credits: 4
Course Call Number: GAMES-GT 123
Prerequisite(s): None
Taught By: Clara Fernández-Vara
The creation of new storytelling strategies for digital games is one of the key issues in current game development. Narrative games build bridges between dramatic writing for theatre, film and game design, opening avenues for new types of writing for digital media. Narrative Game Studio is a hands-on course that focuses on story-driven single-player games, providing the opportunity to do interdisciplinary work. This course introduces students to the design and development of narrative games, including conceptualization, foundational narrative design strategies, and writing. Students will learn how to use tools to develop narrative games; they will work individually at first and then in teams. The course uses the interactive fiction as a gateway to the general strategies used to incorporate narrative in games.
Upon completion of this course, the student will learn how to:
1) Develop short narrative games using pre-existing development tools.
2) Identify the narrative strategies used in video games and critique their design.
3) Conceptualize and document the story of a game to facilitate teamwork.
4) Create narrative environments that players can interact with, including the design of characters and their behaviors.
5) Write interactive dialogue and dynamic text, as well as object and environment descriptions.
6) Create game challenges in the form of narrative choices and puzzles.
7) Scope a narrative game in an environment with limited resources in order to be able to iterate.