Narrative Design for Indies: Getting Started

Short, sharp advice on getting story into your indie game.

"An approachable, practical field guide for one of the trickiest and most rewarding aspects of game development, "Narrative Design for Indies" is packed with straightforward, actionable advice. Worth your time!" - Chris Bourassa, Creative Director of Darkest Dungeon.

"This book's real strength lies in the fact that it's aimed directly at the indie developer with specific examples to bolster that." - Steve Ince, Creator of Captain Morgane and So Blonde.

You want to create a video game? Great!
You want to tell a story? Fantastic!
You want to create a video game that tells a story? What? Are you insane?!
I’m joking, kind of. You don’t have to be insane to tell a good story through your Indie video game, but you do have to be out of your mind. What I mean is, you have to empty your brain of a whole bunch of stuff that Hollywood and Triple-As have told you about games and stories, and fill it up with stuff that’s actually going to work on your teeny tiny budget.

Three Act structure? That’s like trying to shove a giant triangle through a tiny circle.
Hero’s Journey? Yup, that’ll take you nowhere, fast.
Authorial Authority. Now you’re just winding me up!

Whether you’re an Indie developer or a narrative designer wanting to work in the Indie space, Narrative Design for Indies: Getting Started is the first in a series of books that will take you through some tried and true techniques of Indie video game storytelling. Techniques that have been developed to blow minds rather than budgets.

Who am I? And do you know how weird it feels to write a third person description of yourself?

Edwin McRae has been working in the Indie video game space as a narrative designer for many years and is now scrambling his seasoned brain and serving it up as an omelette of hard-earned-wisdom for your educational consumption.

For less than a Hearthstone Welcome Bundle or a few hundred clash of Clans gems, you can find out how to use story in your Indie game to both engage and immerse your players.

You want to create an Indie video game that tells a story?
Cool.

"An approachable, practical field guide for one of the trickiest and most rewarding aspects of game development, "Narrative Design for Indies" is packed with straightforward, actionable advice. Worth your time!" - Chris Bourassa, Creative Director of Darkest Dungeon.

"This book's real strength lies in the fact that it's aimed directly at the indie developer with specific examples to bolster that." - Steve Ince, Creator of the Broken Sword Series.

"Edwin is an incredibly talented writer and a great teacher. While it may not be his "seminal work" (a much more grandiose volume is to follow I hope!) this book is a fantastic little nugget of narrative design goodness. It's a sharp, biting piece of work that delivers on what it promises and makes a point to toss out all the storytelling trash you learned in your "community creative writing class," in favor of techniques and concepts that actually work when it comes to telling immersive and interactive fiction. Highly recommended for its depth of knowledge and easy going approach." - N Jones

"This book is a great collection of some potential narrative devices you can use to improve experiences in your games. It's by no means a complete narrative design bible, it's not a deep dive into fundamental wisdom writing for video games nor does it hold your hand through pre-production of narrative. What it does though is offer to broaden your perspective on narrative design on a budget, on a budget; and gives you tools to tackle some design challenges when it comes to telling stories with games. If you're an indie and you're everything but a writer, this will put some markers on your map of things you should know when approaching story-inclusive design." - nomand