What one game developer thinks aspiring narrative designers need to know

So you want to get into narrative design. You’ve played some Mass Effect, twiddled around in Twine, and are getting ready for the narrative summit at GDC this year. But what next? 

Well if you’re looking for something to watch while getting ready for this year’s conference, you might want to listen to the words of Richard Rouse III, a longtime game designer and narrative designer who joined us on the Gamasutra Twitch channel today in advance of his upcoming GDC panel.

While chatting with us about his upcoming game The Church in the Darkness (which we took for a spin) Rouse gave some general advice about rubbing elbows with fellow narrative designers at GDC, but also pointed out that young designers should be able to present their ability to work with existing game design tools—because it will affect the kind of stories they put out.

“If you have a framework of how your conversation works that’s already implemented, you should write things that go into those slots, and not things that don’t,” Rouse explained to us. “There is a back-and-forth between what is the tech of whatever it is we’re presenting, and how I can fit that in in the most efficient way possible.” 

Be sure to watch our full conversation with Rouse up above, and subscribe to the Gamasutra Twitch channel for more developer interviews, editor roundtables, and gameplay commentary. 

Gamasutra and GDC are sibling organizations under parent UBM Americas