The Friendly and Honest Guide to Writing a Videogame Story

Welcome back to the Friendly and Honest Guide to Designing Videogames. It’s been a while since our last edition, so we wanted to ask how you were doing. You doing alright? How’ve things been since the break up with Amanda? We know it was rough and she said a lot of stuff about us and her that may or may not be true.

But at least now you have more time to design videogames! And that’s much better than love. Trust us.

Today we’re going to tell you how to create a setting and story for your videogame. Stories are important in videogames because what else are you going to put on the back of the box? That you press “X” to open chests? Good luck with that, nerd.

Stories establish why your character is punching ninjas in the face. Is your character a former ninja who dislikes current ninjas? Or maybe ninjas keep cutting your character off in line at Quiznos. Those are just two of dozens of good reasons to punch ninjas in the face. But your game’s story makes your character’s ninja face-punch unique.

The following rules will help you develop the most immersive, fun videogame world possible. Before you know it, your players will be invested in a setting that is only limited by your imagination and deadline.

And always remember the number 1 rule of any and all videogame development: when in doubt, steal something from the movie “Alien.”

I’m sorry I called you a nerd.

Remember that movie, “Cool World,” where Brad Pitt had sex with a cartoon character? Besides being the exact moment I had puberty, the movie’s also notable for having the greatest name of a fictional universe ever: Cool World. It’s a world that’s cool. Done. Viewers knew what would happen in that setting: cool things. And who likes cool things? Everyone.*

(*”Cool World” was a total box office failure, ruining the careers of many of its producers.)

A good videogame setting needs a good name. Something memorable that helps players further understand the world they’re playing in. For example, StarCraft takes place in the mystical realm known as “outer space” and Resident Evil 5 takes place in the fictional African country of “Racism.”

If you’re having some trouble coming up with a good name for your setting, we’ve created some royalty-free names that you can use:

History is totally like Earth’s backstory. It’s a long, beautiful tale of mankind overcoming its own flaws to rise up and develop art, culture, and science. From the creation of the simple congregated Babylonian city of Ur to the rise of the vast metropolitan sprawl that is Des Moines, Earth’s history is like a game of Civilization, but slightly longer.

You don’t have time for that. You need a history of your world, and you need it fast!

That took us a grand total of ten minutes to make, half of which was just finding that freaky pixel font that looks like it came from Nintendo. But in that five minutes of writing and five minutes of fonting, we created a back story that will trick the player into thinking we actual care about this universe we were contractually bound to flesh out.

As a videogame designer, you already know a thing or two about not wanting to leave the house. Getting out of your snuggie to get groceries is hard enough. But imagine if instead of groceries you had to get the Gauntlet of Power, a “power glove” that rests in the dreaded Weeping Cliffs. Also, this is medieval times, so there’s no eBay: You literally have to leave your house to get it, like a savage.

Giving players a convincing reason for their characters to leave their homes is not easy. You want your players to believe in the story, but videogame players never go outside their houses. Thus a plot where a character willingly walks into daylight seems strange and frightening to many gamers.

But therein lies the trick. If you burn down the character’s home, they have to leave. It’s as easy as that. It doesn’t really matter why. Have the villain say something like, “It is your destiny” or “Because of who your father was” or “Oh, snap! Was that your house? This is going to become a thing with you, isn’t it?” Your player will think s/he’s getting sweet, nasty revenge on the villain and you will have supplied a decent reason for a videogame player to consider walking into natural light.

Videogame players spend dozens of hours working through each game. From battling monsters to exploring dungeons to waiting for Otacon to shut the hell up, players put up with a lot of challenges in games. Therefore it’s very important to give them a sense of payoff for all their work. You want them to feel their actions have really affected the videogame world and moved the plot forward.

That’s why all the best videogame stories feature a twist in which all that effort actually helped the villain. Whether it’s giving Liquid Snake the exact nuclear launch codes he wanted or helping Tom Nook fund an even larger rip-off market, helping the villain makes players feel like playing all those hours was really, really worth it.

Gamers are not at all disappointed when they find out the Elemental Crystals they spent dozens of hours collecting actually raised the evil they were trying to stop. In fact, it teaches them an important lesson: The harder you work in life, the worse things are going to get for you.

That’s something we could all do well to remember.

Like any good story, your videogame should have multiple endings. That way your game rewards only the best players and the cheaters for their efforts. People who only casually enjoy videogames shouldn’t get to know that Diana escaped Horror Asylum with her daughter. Why should they? They only buy videogames once every few months.

Multiple endings help make your game more marketable by implying gamers can play your games more than once. They never will — but they like knowing they can. When gamers finish your game and feel disappointed, they get to think there was actually something better in it for them if they’d only known what they were doing. It doesn’t even matter if all your endings suck — gamers will think there had to be at least one good one.

Think about how much better movies would be if they had multiple endings:

The more endings you create, the more satisfying an experience it is for a player who just invested forty hours into the game. Nothing feels better than finding out you could have been married in the endgame cinematic if only you’d brushed the King’s horse twenty hours ago. It makes total sense to the story and it lets players know that the videogame story is specially tailored to their failures.

Gotta run, Amanda’s calling. See you in the next edition of Friendly and Honest Guide. Thanks for coming! - Gamespy

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