Building a Paper Prototype For Your Narrative Design

Рет қаралды 96,617

Күн бұрын

This 2014 GDC session from Disney's Jamie Antonisse explains how to use a paper prototype to build out a compelling narrative structure, test your game as an interactive story, and improve the final player experience before a single line of code is written.
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Пікірлер: 44

@ScratchRocket 7 жыл бұрын

This is great. I hadn't considered prototyping the entire game experience this way. Great. Have the sandbox to prototype the core mechanics, and a story prototype like this where all those mechanics are just abstracted and condensed to make sure all the pieces fit together into a coherent experience.

@kennethglenn3613 7 жыл бұрын

This style of prototyping is fun. The rapid firing of ideas can indeed create a world players can enjoy. But it doesn't stop there. Because to fully give them an experience they'll remember or grow fond of is to expand upon those ideas and flesh them out into something people will understand and accept. Narratives in games are easy if you just want to make something that gets you paid. But to those who wish to build a world people can immerse themselves into for years means you won't be following every detail given here. When you land an idea and it's one you enjoy, take the time to build it. Put in that love and care it needs to become something truly wonderful. Writing is an art. Creation is a gift. You as a dreamer have these things. It's true, not every idea will get the reaction you want from people. But to maximize the effect it has means you have to decide what it is and how it is presented. Have confidence in what you write and use your common sense. Trust in your own opinions of what you made before anyone else. Only make changes when majority of the people you tell it about find disagreement in underlined ideas. Most importantly. Do not scrap it. Archive what you make because a failure is only a failure when you toss it away. Sometimes a step back and a new prospective can save something old and make it into a flame so warm. People will flock to it in the cold. Stay creative both young and old creators. Stay passionate. For we are the ones who give people the worlds they can escape too from everyday life.

@methodtomadnessstudios2632 6 жыл бұрын

Kenneth Glenn thank you. I needed to hear this.

@vama89 7 жыл бұрын

Cool. I knew there was gameplay prototyping but never thought to prototype my narrative. Looking forward to trying this out. Thanks.

@voldlifilm 7 жыл бұрын

This was really interesting, I wish it hadn't gotten so rushed near the end.

@jessicalee333 5 жыл бұрын

He spent a looooong time defining basic concepts, at least the first 8 minutes.

@DX795Q Жыл бұрын

The guy should've narrative prototyped his GDC talk lol

@StepBackHistory Жыл бұрын

I really wanted to see what these narrative prototypes actually are. Like is it a D&D module or a choose your own adventure?

@sub-jec-tiv 7 ай бұрын

Yes, that’s the one area i felt a little shaky on, wish he had had more time. I think what he’s saying is that it depends entirely on the type of game. You have to exercise some lateral thinking, to decide on a physical form that can roughly approximate the kinds of experiences, emotions, etc that you want the player of the eventual game to experience. In other words, for example: if you’re making an RPG, think about what the most important experiences are. If that’s exploration, find a physical way to make exploration happen for the participant (could be a map drawn on hex paper), and run as a D&D-type TTRPG. If it’s mostly about character dialogue, as in a game like Oxenfree, maybe choosing between cards with dialogue can do a lot of the heavy lifting of the physical "gameplay." The creative aspect of having to decide on a physical form for your game ideas should also help you understand and then clarify your own priorities, goals and interests. And that’s even before you run it with anybody, just in the mockup phase. Brilliant ideas really, very cool talk.

@shivlan 5 жыл бұрын

This was such an informative and entertaining presentation, thanks a LOT!

@influencer20XX 4 жыл бұрын

This is EXACTLY what I was looking for!!!

@bibleboardgames5199 2 жыл бұрын

Thanks for the thoughts! I start with paper too. If it isn't fun to play on paper, you can adjust quickly there.

@chillworksdev4145 5 жыл бұрын

Incredibly useful thank you!

@igz 7 жыл бұрын

This is gold.

@waffleocalypse 2 жыл бұрын

Helpful talk. I'm working on a prototype for a narrative-based game and this helped me rule out what's out of scope for the prototype. I realized that I'm spending too much time trying to work too many things into the first pass. I wish there was a concrete example of this style of prototype provided with the talk though.

@sub-jec-tiv 7 ай бұрын

Yeah i wish he’d have done a case study. Unfortunately he only had 30 min.

@sub-jec-tiv 7 ай бұрын

This was super helpful in general regarding concepting. Wish he’d had more time to go into greater detail.

@enjoful 5 ай бұрын

Use someone that loves you, and leverage their patience 😂

@ApexPredator1000 5 жыл бұрын

This was a great talk and a very interesting method to plan out games. I fear it's not a one-size-fits-all however if you're looking to make something in the vein of a 50+ hour JRPG type of game. Maybe you could, but the creativity needed to make the board game compact enough to make that practical; would be better used in the game development itself. Would love to see some case stories on this nonetheless.

@Brainstrain 2 жыл бұрын

Prototype the first section. Then the next. If there’s a boring section you need to cut it

@AndrewFullerton 8 ай бұрын

@@Brainstrain I feel like the automatic shared assumption that JRPGs are so tedious that even going through a simplified version of the narrative would be an untenable burden is a pretty good indicator that this kind of testing would help.

@sub-jec-tiv 7 ай бұрын

I was thinking about the issue of doing a dialogue heavy game experience, and i thought rather than paper, for the actual dialogue parts you could call up very simple dialogue trees in Twine, that you’ve written specifically just to kick the tires on what kinds of choices players will want. So you could, for example, run a TTRPG with a map and a player marker, then when the marker gets to the point of convo with NPC, you switch to laptop to run a couple of important dialogue moments. You are just using the laptop as a highly efficient stack of index cards that you yourself don’t have to sort constantly.

@angusmcmillain Жыл бұрын

10:45 I'm feeling both.

@DragONheart27X 7 жыл бұрын

Would this still apply to me and my team? We've already had a playable slice, with the mechanics, the art. The mechanic of the game however does not reflect the theme we chose, and we are told to replace it with something that is more inline with the mechanic chosen, so it will show on the gameplay. As far as deadline though 2 weeks, as of this writing 2 weeks before we have a theme and narrative that ties into how the art and gameplay looks.

@Czer4u4ever 6 жыл бұрын

DragONheart27X Is your game out yet

@damiangonzalez_esp 4 жыл бұрын

what about now? :D

@seekerxiii 2 жыл бұрын

How'd everything go? I hope well!

@dipsherlock 11 ай бұрын

talks with highly specific titles like these are usually disappointing to me, because even after watching the entire talk i still don’t fully understand what all of this has to do with narrative design. these are all great pointers for general prototyping, but when a title is this specific i expect most of the talk to be practical advice about that topic, rather than abstract and broad.

@michealwestfall8544 2 жыл бұрын

So, turning board games into videogames.

@Manx123 6 жыл бұрын

There are so many games, even narrative-driven ones, I can think of where the most rigorous and comprehensive paper prototype would give almost no idea of what playing the final game would be like that seriously call into question the usefulness of this approach.

@waffleocalypse 2 жыл бұрын

Really? It would give "almost no idea" of what playing the final game would be like? What games are those?

@Manx123 2 жыл бұрын

@@waffleocalypse idk, Doom? I don't remember what games I had in mind.

@waffleocalypse 2 жыл бұрын

@@Manx123 You can definitely make a paper prototype for Doom that gives you an idea of what playing the game is like. The point of prototyping is to answer specific questions upfront quickly and cheaply. In this type of prototype you’re trying to (1) understand how the narrative relates to the player (2) find out if the narrative makes sense with other ideas that make up the game (3) find out if these ideas fit together into a compelling experience. You don’t need a high fidelity digital prototype to answer those questions, and answering those questions this way quickly gives you valuable information about what the game will be like. That being said, if you're not trying to answer questions about the narrative of your game, yeah, you should probably go with another approach.

@Manx123 2 жыл бұрын

@@waffleocalypse Alright. That's a fair answer. I don't remember the content of the video well, so I can't say exactly what I meant by this, but my original comment doesn't hold up without qualification.

@ekki1993 2 жыл бұрын

@@Manx123 Doom isn't a good example because most of its core appeal isn't narrative. It's a game that feels awesome to play and prototyping for awesome requires an entirely different approach. If anything, this approach not working could mean the game you're thinking of isn't actually narrative-driven, or at least that you don't find it appealing because of its narrative.