STORYTELLING IN GAME JAMS

Storytelling in Game Jams
June 20, 2024
This week I was a volunteer narrative mentor for TheXPlace’s Summer Game Jam. Game jams are incredibly short-term game projects where a group of devs get together to make a game with a certain theme on a deadline. The Summer Game Jam gave about 40 dev teams one week to make their game based on the theme of "Travel." The teams were left to their own devices and imaginations to come up with their own take on Travel and submit it in a week.
From The Muppet Show
This is you, making a game in a week.
So, why put yourself through this grinder? If you are a dev just starting out, you won’t have a lot of stuff in your portfolio that’ll help you stand out. A working short game absolutely will, however.

Anything playable done by you will be a tremendous opportunity for a hiring manager to see your dev brain at work. It’ll also show that you can work with other people in tight conditions and make something playable (and hopefully good).

Furthermore, game jams can be practice for working in a studio. Everything you do in a game jam will take place during a game’s production, albeit a hell of a lot faster. Game jams give aspiring devs the chance to develop skills in compromising, problem solving, collaborating, and knowing when you have to kill your darlings for the betterment of the project.

If you are an established dev, game jams offer a break from the game you are working on. You can stretch creative muscles, veer off in odd directions, and do things you can't do in a typical AAA studio. Yes, you might work on a massive online military shooter by day, but at night in a game jam it’s all about a talking jar of peanut butter that solves pantry crimes.

A lot of the work in game jams will be design, gameplay, implementation, and testing. Adding in narrative can be a tricky business. There are many fast-moving parts that something can be cut last second that will pull apart your narrative. Narrative devs need to think strategically about the best way to add story, characters, and general context in such a short time.

When teams reached out to me for advice, this is what I told them. I hope it helps you as much has it helped them.

First and foremost: Know your scope and fit your story inside your scope.

A week is a terrifyingly short time to make a whole game. You can’t rival something Red Dead Redemption 2’s or Octopath Traveler’s vast tapestries of narrative. Instead, figure out the size of the game first.

You and your team will hash some of these out during the brainstorming phase (usually a day or less). As the narrative dev, you need to pay attention to design think about the player’s fantasy (to quote Susan O’Connor’s Masterclass) your game is selling. That’s the first step in where you’ll hang your narrative spine.

Vital questions at this stage.

1) What’s the core gameplay loop?

2) What’s the player fantasy we are selling to the player?

Do you want the player to be a mighty warrior? The best fry cook on Mars? Find love at the bottom of the sea? Be liberated from depression? Be the king of a dog island? This is where you figure out the why of the game.

3) What’s the best story that can naturally complement the gameplay loop?

This is where 1 & 2 should shake hands and out of it you start to have a narrative framework for giving context to the player.

4) What can we reasonably get done in a week? Be honest.

Do not be a superhero here. Do not overpromise. Whatever you write is going to have supported by gameplay, art, music, and more. Your team will be busy with their own tasks. Don’t add stuff to their plates.

5) What do our success and fail states in game look like? How can narrative be woven into that?

6) How much story can I add in here without bogging down the gameplay or blowing our deadline?

One more question: Does this game need dialogue at all?

There are plenty of great games that tell stories without dialogue.
Hyper Light Drifter
Little Nightmares
Journey
Rime
Inside
Untitled Goose Game
Another World

And more… all showing you can have story without dialogue.
From Fairy Godmother/Youtube
Get in, loser. We're doing storytelling.
Watch the following scene with the sound off (stop at the snow-covered house at 2:42). You get the characters, their wants, their setbacks, and how they overcome adversity to get what they want. While there are a couple great lines in the scene, it works silently. To save time - which you don’t have much of – think of using dialogue last.

Okay, you and the team have a core gameplay loop and a narrative framing device to give context. Now comes your hard work.

And if you are new to a game jam or it has a tight deadline, I recommend you keep the story light and stick to the basics, like:

1) Who are the characters?

2) What do they absolutely want?

Bowser takes Peach. Mario goes to rescue Peach and return her safely home. Buzz and Woody want to get back to Andy and not be left behind.

3) How will the world push back against that?

This can be other people, objects, the environment, obstacles, a timer. Whatever that’s in the way between the player and the goal. It should be a natural, logical extension of the game's world. You wouldn't have Pyramid Head invade Stardew Valley. Kirby's antics wouldn't fit in a Call of Duty game.

4) Does 1-3 all work together here? If yes, continue. If not, take another pass.

Example: In the original God of War games, Kratos is a demi-god hell bent on killing gods and anyone who gets in his way because he was wronged. He wants revenge in the bloodiest way possible. The gameplay and player fantasy are going to be all about violence, power, and really gory stuff. As a result, Kratos will face a series of escalating of mythological threats to overcome as he makes his way to get Zeus. Everything fits. If Kratos’s story was that he was going to culinary school instead, you now have a gameplay mismatched with story.

5) Know your scope. Build your story to fitthat space and your time limit.

6) Know where your start, middle, and end.

7) Again, if you can tell your story without dialogue, do it.

Getting Unstuck
If you are stuck fleshing out your narrative, it never hurts to fall back to narrative storytelling shortcuts.

Visualize the player winning at the end and then flip all their attributes to get an idea of where they should start. Start: weak - End: strong. Start: small - End: mighty. Start: clueless - End: clever.

Questlines build off the narrative thruline of the story. Each quest should be important at revealing more about the character, revealing more about the plot, or both.

Dialogue - Work on this after you understand the characters and what roles they play in the story. Every character should sound different. Write out sample lines for each (happy, sad, saying hello and goodbye, angry, scared). If you can remove their names but they sound identical, revise.

Every character should have a merit for every flaw. No matter what, they must change by the end. Only dead characters don't change.

And once more, don't feature creep your narrative. Streamline your story to fit in the space that you have.

That’s it. Keep your cool. Row with your team. Remember, the game is the priority. With any luck, you’ll have picked up new skills or polished old ones.

But most importantly, you made a game. You are a game maker. You got something for your portfolio and your online presence. Congratulations on running this gauntlet, and be proud of what you made in just a week.

From The Muppet Show

From Fairy Godmother/Youtube