Tag game design

What do you mean by ‘Narrative Design’?

Fellow narrative designer (and all around great guy) Rob Morgan sometimes introduces himself in talks as ‘a narrative designer, whatever that is’, and it’s always stuck with me. I cannot help but appreciate the sentiment, having witnessed the term ‘narrative designer’ used to describe a variety of roles and jobs in talks, job descriptions, and in normal conversation with colleagues. I don’t believe any of those different uses of the term were wrong or less significant than any other, but I do think they can be distinct, sometimes covered by different people on a team or requiring different skills.

In the interest of thinking about this a bit deeper and preventing the title from meaning so many things that it functionally means very little, here are the three main kinds of narrative design I have come across. This list is almost certainly not exhaustive, but I hope it acts as a good starting point for discussion, and inspires you to examine your own thoughts on the subject.

read more

Tea-Powered Games as a Narrative Design Consultancy

This blog post is a little different – it’s about us as a company, and what we’re setting out to do in the future. Tea-Powered Games is finally opening its doors as a narrative design consultancy!

Our first game as a company (Dialogue: A Writer’s Story) experimented with new types of conversations in games. From real-time active conversations to relaxed, exploratory chats and repeatedly re-written emails, we gave players different actions for different sorts of conversations. We told a story that was important to us, about the creative process and scientific research, and put together something that exemplified the kinds of things we wanted to do at Tea-Powered Games.

It’s always been a goal of ours to work with other studios and help them tell their own stories in new and interesting ways, and we think there’s no better time to start doing so than now! We know that not every team has enough time and resources to devote to making character interactions interesting, but we also know that the story, characters and ambiance of a game, from its music to its mechanics, can be a major selling point. This is where we come in, as a two-person team specialising in writing and design, making quality storytelling and design easier and more affordable. We can be very flexible – we know what it’s like to work on a small budget, on a short time scale, so we’ll find whatever works best for your game.

We’ll keep making our own games, of course! Our second game is in the works, and we can’t wait to share more about it! However, there are many interesting stories to tell, and we want to help other people tell them through their games and gameplay.

If you are a game developer and want to know more, have a look at our consultancy page, or send us a message via twitter (@teapoweredteam) or email (team@teapoweredgames.co.uk) and we’ll have a chat about your game. Whether you want a short script, more in-depth design work to integrate your story, or you’re not sure what you might need, let us know!

read more

Conversation, Games, and You!

Here at Tea-Powered Games we talk about dialogue quite often, but what is it that good dialogue could add to your game?

In the case where you use dialogue to add new kinds of play to your game, it gives players a change of pace, a new mechanic to play with, or different kinds of goals. If you tie dialogue to your game’s current mechanics, fans of those mechanics will get to interact with them more, and experience more interesting variations. More importantly, entirely new stories and games become possible when you start thinking about conversation as a part of the game rather than just more words on screen.

It sounds great, doesn’t it? Unfortunately, figuring out what kind of dialogue your game needs is not very straightforward.

read more

Success and Failure in Games: The Dialogue Approach

In response to our Accessibility post, we received a comment about the lack of failure in Dialogue, and how that affected the game. This is something we thought about while designing Dialogue, and it seemed important enough to share these thoughts. The comment is found in the Accessibility post, but here is the part we’re responding to.

read more