4-Layers, A Narrative Design Approach

Weaving Narratives into Procedural Worlds

Examining the value, characteristics, and methods of integrating static narratives into otherwise procedurally generated environments.

Master 4 Layers of Storytelling to Make Your Art Unforgettable

You think storytelling is just for writers? Wrong. The story you craft—not just on canvas, but in your journey, your impact, and in your own mind—could make your art impossible to ignore.

WRKSHP.tools | Storytelling Canvas

Create better stories and presentations in under 45 minutes using the Storytelling Canvas

Building games that can be understood at a glance

Building games that can be understood at a glance - Zach Gage, GDC 2018

Hylics 2

A surreal RPG with a unique graphical style and droll scenario.

Wir wollen doch nur spielen | Neue Narrative

Spielen macht uns neugierig, mutig und kreativ. Viele Organisationen setzen auf Punktesysteme oder Ranglisten – und greifen damit viel zu kurz. Denn echte Spielfreude wäre so viel wertvoller als oberflächliche Gamification.

Designing Games to Learn

As I've been writing this series of newsletters on learning and video games, there's been a spectre lurking in the background. Video games and education. Edutainment.

Food, foragers, and folklore: the role of narrative in human subsistence

Narrative is a species-typical, reliably developing, complex cognitive process whose design is unlikely to have emerged by chance. Moreover, the folklore record indicates that narrative content is consistent across widely divergent cultures. I have argued elsewhere that a storyteller may use narrative to manipulate an audience's representations of the social and/or physical environment to serve his or her own fitness ends. However, my subsequent research suggests that such manipulation results from a broader selection pressure which narrative effectively alleviates: information acquisition. By substituting verbal representations for potentially costly first-hand experience, narrative enables an individual to safely and efficiently acquire information pertinent to the pursuit of fitness in local habitats. If this hypothesis is true, narrative should be rich with information useful to the pursuit of fitness. One class of information integral to the accomplishment of this task is foraging knowledge. In this paper, then, I present evidence that foraging peoples use narrative to transmit subsistence information: specifically, I demonstrate how various narrative devices (e.g., setting, description, mimicry, anthropomorphism) are used to communicate foraging knowledge.

Introduction | Layers Documentation

What is Layers?

The Brand Story Canvas — Strategic Tool for Storytelling

Craft powerful brand stories with our Brand Story Canvas. Trusted by HEC Paris, EPFL & ESSEC, it guides you through 7 steps to an engaging, authentic narrative.

Game design is simple, actually

So, let’s just walk through the whole thing, end to end. Here’s a twelve-step program for understanding game design. One: Fun There are a lot of things people call “fun.” But most of them are not u…

MATT THOMPSON

As part of my EngD project, I am creating ways for story authors to easily write narratives with multiple branches, along the lines of the Choose Your Own Adventure stories from the 1990s. Typically, this kind of story authoring is hard, as the number of material that needs to be written increases exponentially with the number of decision points.