To celebrate World Storytelling Day, we sat down with Brian Mitsoda, our Narrative Lead, and talked a bit about his career, advice for aspiring narrative designers and game devs, and Mandragora itself.
All our Kickstarter backers can read a longer version of the interview over on our Kickstarter page!
Hi, Brian! Thanks for sitting down to chat with us.
When did you discover your passion for storytelling?
Creative writing assignments for English class going back to grade school. I got “published” after placing in the local paper’s scary story contest and got to read it in front of the class. I was lucky and had a lot of supportive teachers over the years that encouraged me to develop my writing skills. To be honest, I can’t really imagine being happy doing anything else.
Writing skills are of course just part of your role, but many people might not know that. Could you help explain what exactly a Narrative Designer or Narrative Lead does?
I was recently sitting around with a bunch of veteran narrative designers talking about how even within our own industry, many people have no idea what we do. It’s 2023 and the game industry doesn’t know what narrative designers do!
A lot of people will tag us as writers, but that’s a very tiny amount of what we actually spend our time doing! I write for about 10-30% of the time for most of my narrative positions. And it varies between projects and titles, but a narrative designer generally has to do most of the following:
Adaptation
The ability to take the needs of the IP or design/management vision and turn it into something coherent for a video game audience. The average movie is two hours, the average season of TV about 10 hours, and games (especially RPGs) can be more than twice that length and also have reactivity and branching storylines. Keeping the story interesting and the player actually engaged for that length of time is a lot harder than it seems. It takes a ton of planning and ultimately needs to support and enhance the design of the game while also minding the scope constraints.
Tool Design
This isn’t something that is necessarily a requirement for all narrative designers, but for almost every project I’ve done, there has been a need to create tools that reduce the amount of time that it takes to implement anything connected to the narrative. Does a character have branching dialogue with quest states? Do background characters bark reactive lines? Do enemies say anything related to their attack/flee state in combat? Does an item have descriptive text? Is there a player journal that updates as you progress a quest? Every single one of those items needs some framework for entering the text, expressing it as data, and displaying it to the player. Creation and iteration of tools and content pipelines allow you to quickly implement all forms of narrative within the game.
Scripting
The difference between a writer and a narrative designer is that most narrative designers have to do some level of basic or advanced scripting - essentially light coding - to make things happen in the game. Want a character to use an animation, walk, advance a quest flag, comment on your appearance, or do any number of things based on the player’s input or choices? That all has to be accounted for and executed for in the scripting - again, nothing to do with scripts in the Hollywood sense, but more in the language that the engine uses to make things happen within the game. And almost every project has its own unique scripting that needs to be developed and learned. It’s a much more technical job than people understand.
Budgeting/Planning
There’s a misconception that the writers of a project just produce a script and everyone just makes it. No. Never. Well, maybe not “never”, but never on anything I’ve ever made. I don’t have unlimited budgets and generally have to do the best with the resources I’ve been given. It’s the job of narrative to figure out what assets we have for any given task, plan around it, and make the best thing we can with the time/resources we have. That means that we don’t write that big cutscene until we’ve talked it through with the artists, animators, implementers, and anyone with a creative stake - this is not about doing the most imaginative scene anyone has ever seen, it’s about doing the best thing we can do with the projected time/assets given for that one cutscene of many that need to get done over the course of a packed schedule.
Writing
The fun part! However, we have to be aware of actor cost, line count, localization time, production milestones, and the needs of other departments. Nothing is free, every line costs something. Every new thing you add is just adding testing time to quality assurance. Add iteration time, implementation, revision, focus testing - by the time the game is at Beta, people [working on the game] are so sick of those lines they loved the first few times that everyone questions whether they ever loved anything and if they should have just become an accountant.
Design
This is primarily what we do. Narrative isn’t just about writing - some games don’t even have narrative expressed in words. Ultimately, you are crafting the narrative to enhance the gameplay or reinforce the mood of the game - you have to see things from the player’s point of view and craft your narrative to help the team sell the player on the experience they are trying to create. Narrative can be expressed in the sounds you hear, the mood of the music/lighting/environment, elements of the level design, the gameplay and interface - many things that you don’t even think about as a player are being used to get you to buy into the narrative intent of the game. Even something as simple as the choices players make in dialogue must have results designed to feel satisfying no matter what route they take through the game.
Narrative Leadership
Narrative Lead responsibilities involve lots of meetings, hiring for the department, asset negotiation with other departments, running writer’s rooms, reviewing the team’s work, keeping tone consistent between all narrative designers, keeping mood or story points consistent in art and other departments, revising main story based on last minute cuts, addressing publisher concerns, making sure you’re on target for VO lockdown dates, estimating schedules, setting the writing/tone style for the project, providing additional direction for actors, and any number of jobs that will have to be done given the state of the project and the needs of the other departments. Depending on the scope of the narrative, the lead can be busy or never see their family again busy.
In summary, narrative designers aren’t just sitting around having ideas and doing writing that is turned into a game - it’s a technical position requiring constant iteration and testing, frequent collaboration with other team members, and a great amount of asset management and planning. Yes, we often are writers as well, but it’s often not our primary task.
Any advice for aspiring narrative designers looking to break into the gaming industry?
Make games, preferably while collaborating with others. There are multiple engines and quest editors for other games - start using them, make something from start to finish, then do it again. It will be frustrating at first, but you’ll get better. Improve your writing skills by trying to write in different styles. Play a lot of games, figure out why you like the ones you do. Study the rhythm and performances of media that interests you. Develop your style. Identify what genres you’re drawn to. But most of all, go out in the real world and do something interesting, travel, make mistakes, live a little so you have something to write about.
Any tips for game devs on how to introduce a new world in a way that feels organic to the player?
Don’t wholesale copy something else, but feel free to mash up a bunch of influences. Figure out what you can do to make it different from other games in its genre while also appealing to fans of that genre. Focus on the characters - you can have a cliche plot, but the characters will keep people interested and keep the story relatable. Don’t “magic” or “technobabble” for a solution - try to make sure everything in the game follows rules that are established and the player understands.
Why did you decide to join the Mandragora team? What drew you to this game?
I immediately saw that there was an intense passion to make this game coming from the folks on the team. Elements of the project reminded me of the Castlevania series, which is one of my favorite game franchises. The dark fantasy aspect was more grounded in history, myth, and fairy tales than high fantasy, which also lends itself to the kinds of characters I like to write. The art was absolutely gorgeous and a lot of the work on the levels was there - the challenge of taking the strong gameplay and ideas and turning them into a thrilling horror fantasy tale was intriguing.
Note: This interview has been edited for clarity.
