Narrative Design with AI

🔄 Quick Recall: In Lesson 4, you generated art assets and audio for your game. Now you’ll build the narrative layer — the story, characters, and dialogue that give players a reason to care about the world you’re creating.

When Your Game Needs Narrative

Not every game needs a story. Tetris doesn’t. But if your game has characters, a world, or any kind of plot, narrative design determines whether players feel emotionally invested or just going through the motions.

Narrative intensity by genre:

World Building

Your world needs enough structure to feel consistent but not so much detail that you’re writing an encyclopedia instead of making a game.

Help me build the world for my game:

Game: [your concept]
Genre: [type]
Setting: [time period, location type, technology level]
Tone: [dark, whimsical, gritty, hopeful, mysterious]

Create a world bible covering:

1. GEOGRAPHY
   - Major locations the player visits (3-5 areas)
   - How they connect (map structure)
   - Environmental storytelling opportunities in each area

2. HISTORY
   - One major event that shaped the current world
   - What the world was like before and after
   - How this history affects the player's journey

3. FACTIONS/GROUPS (if applicable)
   - 2-3 groups with conflicting goals
   - What each faction wants and why
   - How the player relates to each

4. RULES OF THE WORLD
   - What's possible and impossible (magic system, technology limits)
   - What the ordinary people of this world deal with daily
   - What makes this world different from generic fantasy/sci-fi

Keep each section to 1-2 paragraphs. I'll expand what I need later.

The iceberg principle: Build 3x more world than the player sees. Players encounter the tip of the iceberg and sense the depth beneath. They’ll find a rusted sword in a cave and wonder about its history — you should know that history, even if it’s never explicitly told.

Character Design

Characters drive emotional investment. Flat characters make players skip dialogue. Distinct characters make players care about outcomes.

Create character profiles for my game:

Game: [your concept]
Number of major characters: [X]

For each character, define:

1. IDENTITY
   - Name, age, role in the story
   - Visual description (ties to art style from Lesson 4)
   - One sentence that captures their essence

2. VOICE
   - Speaking style (formal, casual, sarcastic, poetic, terse)
   - Vocabulary level (simple, educated, slang-heavy, technical)
   - Verbal tics or patterns (never uses contractions, always asks questions, trails off mid-sentence)
   - 3 sample lines that demonstrate their unique voice

3. MOTIVATION
   - What do they want? (surface goal)
   - What do they actually need? (deeper need they may not recognize)
   - What are they afraid of?

4. FUNCTION
   - What role do they serve in gameplay? (quest giver, ally, antagonist, merchant)
   - What information or abilities do they provide the player?
   - How do they change over the course of the game?

Make each character's voice so distinct that I could identify who's speaking without seeing their name.

✅ Quick Check: Why is a character’s “speaking style” more important than their backstory for game dialogue?

Because players experience characters through what they say, not through what you know about them. A rich backstory that never surfaces in dialogue is invisible to the player. But a character who always speaks in questions, or never finishes sentences, or uses oddly formal language — that’s immediately memorable. Design the voice the player hears, then build the backstory that justifies it.

Branching Dialogue Systems

If your game includes player choices, you need a dialogue structure:

Design a branching dialogue system for this conversation:

Characters: [who's talking]
Context: [where this happens, what just occurred in the story]
Player goal: [what information or outcome the player needs from this conversation]
Tone: [tense, casual, comedic, threatening]

Create:
1. NPC opening line
2. 3 player response options:
   - Option A: [direct/aggressive approach]
   - Option B: [diplomatic/empathetic approach]
   - Option C: [curious/investigative approach]
3. NPC reactions to each option (these should differ meaningfully)
4. Follow-up branches (1 level deep)
5. Convergence point (where all paths lead back to the same narrative beat)

Tag each line with the character's emotional state in brackets.
Mark any lines that should trigger gameplay consequences (reputation changes, quest updates, item rewards).

Branching depth matters. A conversation that branches 3 times with 3 options each creates 27 unique paths — most of which players will never see. Research shows that the illusion of choice (3 options that converge after 1-2 exchanges) is often more practical than deep branching, and players feel just as much agency.

Environmental Storytelling

The best game narratives don’t just live in dialogue. They’re embedded in the world:

Create environmental storytelling elements for this game area:

Area: [location name and description]
What happened here: [the story this area tells]
Player's knowledge at this point: [what do they already know?]

Generate:
1. 3 visual details that hint at the area's history (without text)
2. 2 discoverable items/notes that reveal story fragments
3. 1 environmental puzzle that teaches story and mechanics simultaneously
4. Audio cues that reinforce the mood (ambient sounds, distant echoes)

The player should be able to piece together what happened here without any NPC explaining it.

Environmental storytelling respects the player’s intelligence. Instead of an NPC saying “There was a battle here,” the player sees scorched walls, abandoned weapons, and a child’s toy in the wreckage — and feels the story rather than being told it.

Maintaining Consistency

As your narrative grows, consistency becomes the challenge. Use a world bible as persistent context:

Workflow:

1. Create a world bible document (world, characters, timeline, rules)
2. Include it as context in every narrative-related AI prompt
3. After each writing session, update the world bible with new established facts
4. Never introduce new lore without checking it against existing lore

This is where Claude’s Projects feature or ChatGPT’s custom instructions shine — you load the world bible once and every conversation stays consistent.

Exercise: Write Your First Story Scene

1. Create a world bible using the world building prompt
2. Create 2-3 character profiles
3. Write one branching dialogue scene between the player and an NPC
4. Design one environmental storytelling moment for a key area
5. Check: Are the character voices distinct? Does the world feel internally consistent?

Key Takeaways

• Not every game needs heavy narrative — match narrative intensity to your genre and target aesthetics
• The iceberg principle: build 3x more world than the player sees; they’ll sense the depth
• Character voice (how they speak) matters more than backstory for player engagement
• Branching dialogue is powerful but expensive; the illusion of choice often works as well as deep branching
• Environmental storytelling (visual details, discoverable notes, ambient audio) respects player intelligence
• Maintain a world bible as persistent AI context to prevent narrative contradictions

Up Next: In the next lesson, you’ll balance your game, polish the game feel, and use AI for automated playtesting — the difference between a prototype and a game people actually enjoy.