The Ultimate Guide To Writing A GREAT STORY For Your Game

If you want to make a great indie game in the age of AI, asset flipping, and friend slop, there's nothing I think that is in higher demand than a highly personal game with a rockolid story. From Max Payne to, I don't know, Life is Strange. I just love story games. And I truly feel we might be on the cusp of, I don't know, a story game renaissance. The reason is because, well, I think games are getting cheaper to make. I think a lot of studios in the last decade have steered clear of story games because, well, maybe the ROI just wasn't there. Hyperexpensive, linear, oneanddone story games, they don't pay off like they used to until now, where making story games is possible with a tiny team of one to five people like I'm doing for my game Twisted Tower, which is basically Bioshock meets Willy Wonka. And by the way, you can wishlist this game in the description. That would mean a lot to me. If it looks interesting, click the link below. should be coming out soon, maybe. We'll see. So, I wanted to give you a sort of I don't know, blueprint, one that I've painfully

learned over the course of I think 15 years, making story games. Step one, find your story hook. Okay, let's think about the greatest films and story games of all time. Let's try and distill down what their story hook is. What do those story hooks have in common? So, let's do a little exercise here and try and find what the story hook is for some of these popular story games. All right, let's start with Max Payne. The hook is bullet time, right? Well, yes, but that's not the story hook. That's the mechanical hook. The story hook is pretty simple. It's Max Payne loses his wife and child and he enters this gritty, dark, crimeridden world to avenge his family. What about Life is Strange? Well, it's set in this coastal town of Arcadia Bay. Our main character, Max, experiences some teen drama, some strange sci-fi occurrences and discovers that she can rewind time.
Whoa.
Alan Wake, a writer's wife, goes

missing, and he discovers pages of a novel he doesn't remember writing, and he's in this idealic small town of Brightitefalls. Obviously, we could go on and on with a ton of game story hooks, but I think these three give us what we need to find out about what makes a good story hook. I think what stands out immediately to me is the setting. And by the way, this is even true in films. Some of the greatest films of all time rely heavily on a rock solid setting that carries an otherwise bland story. Dare I say that The Lord of the Rings relies heavily on well the setting to carry a pretty standard story arc or even Signs, which is one of my all-time favorite films. It has a pretty predictable story, but it's sitting firmly on this rocksolid foundation of a haunting yet serene acreage of rustling corn. So, what's my point? A great story is actually a really strong setting with something strange or interesting that happens in that setting. So, let's go

ahead and practice this theory about setting and let's just make some stuff up. First, let's think about some really awesome settings. Um, I'm just going to riff here. Uh, a deep unexplored cave system in Antarctica, a beautiful beach town in the Florida Keys in the, I don't know, sleepy heat of July, a foggy abandoned mill town in the Appalachin Mountains, a 100-year-old mansion surrounded by a blizzard. Notice I'm describing elements of the setting, the heat, the weather, the vibes, the feel. Okay, so to turn this setting into a story hook, all we need to do is take that setting and then add in a really interesting problem or a situation. Let's start with the first one. An unhappy divorced lawyer wakes up in a deep, unexplored cave system in Antarctica. Oo, very mysterious. Why? Who is this guy? Why did he wake up here? Okay, what about Florida Keys? Well, maybe a dying man revisits his hometown in a beautiful beach town in the Florida Keys in the sleepy heat of

July only to find that his hometown never existed. I don't know what that means, but it's kind of weird, right? Really interesting situation. A cult of witches have flanked a foggy abandoned mill town in the Appalachin Mountains, and a minister must enter the witch's coven unnoticed to kill the mother witch. Oo haha. A caretaker finds himself trapped in a hundred-year-old mansion surrounded by a blizzard. Entities begin to appear in the dark, shadowy corners of the mansion. By the way, that's like The Shining. I'm just riffing here, but you get the idea. A great setting with something interesting going on is the perfect start for building a great story game. For me, my game Twisted Tower has a setting of basically a haunted shadowy Disney world on a stormy island off the coast of Wales. Your fianceé gets kidnapped to this place and you've got to climb the tower to find her all while killing creepy mascots. Step two, interject the right character into that world. Okay,

so now it's time to put a character into this setting. We've got a great setting and something interesting or mysterious going on. However, the interesting setting and problem you've created will likely only be engaging if your character has three things. He or she is a sympathetic character, meaning the players identify with the character. They can project themselves onto the character. They feel sorry for the character or they just understand the character. Two, they struggle uniquely in that world due to their flaw that we sympathize with. And I'll explain this in a sec. And then number three, finally, they don't fully understand this world. Now, notice I'm not explicitly saying that this is the only way to make your world interesting, but I've just found that these three things are kind of like, I don't know, cheat codes to ensure that your character really complements the world they inhabit, making the world 10 times more interesting. And by the way, if you want to tell great stories in games, obviously understanding both 2D and 3D

game art is crucial. So, I wanted to give you a chance to check out my 2D art course, which dives into everything I've learned as a Time magazine featured game artist. For the next several days, it's 25% off. Plus, you're going to get my 3D art course completely free, but only for this sale. There's just 50 seats available, and then the sale will be closing. If you enroll today, you'll not only get my 2D and 3D art courses, but hey, you'll also get my custom color templates, my brushes, and I'll also throw in my pixel art course completely free. Join hundreds of students on their game art journey and learn from an actual published indie game dev featured by Rolling Stone, Time Magazine, and PC Gamer. That sounds really cocky to say, but I don't know. It gives me some credibility. So, click the link below before the sale expires or the seats sell out. All right, so let's take a look at the main character in Signs. I think this will help clarify things for you. This is honestly a phenomenal film with a great setting and rocksolid characters that complement each other. I think it's a really good example. Our

main character is a father. His name is Graham. His family is being kind of hunted by almost demonic alien entities in this remote corn farm in Pennsylvania. So, let's pretend we're the director might Shyamalan writing this film. What are some traits about our main character that will make this alien invasion on a corn farm more interesting? Well, let's start with thinking about something that makes him sympathetic. Well, we can make him an alcoholic. We can maybe give him cancer. We can maybe give him dementia. I don't know. Those are things that make him sympathetic, right? But it's better to make your sympathetic trait also tie into the problem of that world. This is easier said than done. First of all, I feel like the goal process as a filmmaker for me is to have an idea and then spend two years executing that idea. And so as I'm in post-production on one movie, I start thinking ideas

start coming for the next movie. And they've now become a very complicated process. Before it used to be, oh, I got a good idea, I'm just going to write that. Then it became, well, I have a couple good ideas. Which one can I inject meaning into? So then that was a different level. And now there's like eight levels to my decision making. So an idea has to have all these characteristics that it can have meaning that it can have suspense that it can have emotion the humanity and that it has a global significance and that it has a universal message that people in India and Japan and Philadelphia that everybody can relate to it that I'm touching on some connection between people.
So let's think about the problem of this world in signs. Well, it's remote. It's a lonely cornfield being attacked by aliens. So, what if our character is an ex minister? Someone who no longer believes he's being watched. Someone who believes he is completely alone in the universe. Now, there are some really interesting parallels to his world. He's

alone with his family in this remote corn farm. He's lost his faith. So, he now believes that he's completely alone in the universe.
Jesus is more than luck, more than coincidence. This is a sign, evidence that there is someone up there watching out for them.
Now, let's throw in aliens that hide in the shadows and watch him. Almost like, well, God, this mysterious entity above everything that watches his every move. That is the perfect I don't know character mirroring of this setting while also making our character sympathetic. Now don't forget the third element of the cheat code. We also want to make sure that the character doesn't understand the world that he inhabits. That's this final character cheat code. In the case of signs, Graham used to understand his world. It all made sense to him. Aliens aren't real. God doesn't

exist. And his family is fully recovered from the death of their mother. They're on the up and up. and the world makes sense, right? That's how the film starts until suddenly Graham's own home no longer makes sense. The corn stalks he once planted are now laid flat. Alien legs are appearing out of nowhere. Silhouetted entities spy on his daughter at midnight. Everything in Graham's world is suddenly a mystery, and he's thrown into a tail spin. Do you see why these three things are so valuable? Doesn't Graham's character make an invasion of a cornfield so much more interesting? Now, for my game Twisted Tower, I've definitely taken cues from Emight Shyamalan. I have the protagonist Vincent arriving at a spooky haunted theme park, and he explicitly says, "What the hell is this place? This line is crucial. It completes the three-fold elements of a great character. We have a character we sympathize with. He's a poor young man whose fiance is kidnapped and he ultimately has to face his fears

and explore a haunting environment that he doesn't understand. That's the key point. Having a world that the character doesn't fully understand that we need to explore with the character helps the story in the game feel so much more interesting. Step three, let's write out a short plot summary. Okay, so we now have a character we sympathize with in an interesting setting with a unique scenario that complements that character's personality. Now, it's time to write out a plot summary in two to five paragraphs. Now, this is a short plot summary. It's very simple. I want you to just start writing. And I'm going to be honest with you, it's the hardest part of gamedev for me. Just sitting down and typing. It feels so unproductive. You're not really making your game. You're just writing on a notepad. But this is the foundation to your game's story. And again, I want you to make this as simple as possible, short and sweet. It should only include what's necessary. The character, the problem, the unique world that he or she inhabits. And it's going to be hard to

get this perfect, but I was going to say it doesn't need to be perfect. It It really does. It really does need to be perfect. If you can't get this short summary perfect, then fleshing it out into bits of dialogue and story beats and characters for your game, it's all just going to be a waste of time. This perfect short summary is it's kind of like a recipe. It must include everything that really matters for your game and it needs to exclude the stuff that doesn't matter. You want to know what's funny? For Twisted Tower, I didn't really have a perfect short summary like this for almost 3 years of development. That's because, well, sometimes the final story doesn't really come to your brain for a long time. And it's okay to just make the game and hope that the story comes to you. And I know that sounds unwise, but it's all I can say at this point. It's just how I do things. I make the game and I hope that the story appears and look, it usually does. I've compared game development and writing stories to something like an archaeological dig. You just keep

digging and digging and digging and keep working and working and working and suddenly that story will just appear. It wasn't until a couple of months ago where I finally finished this perfect short plot summary for Twisted Tower. And what's crazy is at first I couldn't resist. I'm just being completely honest with you. I could not resist asking AI to help me with the plot holes. It was kind of like the same feeling I get when I see a cigarette because I I used to smoke every once in a while and it's just that feeling, that temptation of like, I'm just going to use AI for this one thing to help me with this plot hole. So, I gave in and I asked Chat GBT to give me some ideas for these plot holes in Twisted Tower. And this is probably unsurprising to you. I was unimpressed. At this moment, I committed to avoiding AI at all costs for the story or anything art related for Twisted Tower. I started over with the story and I said, I'm just going to write this thing from scratch from my own brain AI free. And here is the final summary that I wrote. After you've written your perfect short summary, you

need to take that short summary and expand on it for a detailed summary. Now, this might take you a full week. It could take you, I don't know, 40 hours or longer just to get everything laid out with this bird's eye view of the story. For me, I just write and write and write and write. For Twisted Tower, you can see I have 20 different versions of the story iterating on top of itself. In a way, you're kind of like, I don't know, writing in faith. You definitely don't feel confident while you're writing and it never really comes out perfectly. It's all seemingly just not working until suddenly it does. And you can see for me on the 20th iteration, that's when I decided, hey, this works. You got to just get your fingers moving and start typing. Step five, write out your story elements. Now that you know the story, like the back of your hand because you've written this detailed plot summary, it's time to actually figure out the means or the method to which you're going to tell this story. Remember, this is not a film. It's a

game. So, you have to think of the costefficient ways to put this story in your game. Here's what I mean. For Twisted Tower, and honestly most games, including indie games, you can do this with four mechanisms: cutscenes, NPCs, artifacts, and audio diaries. So, for Twisted Tower, I just made sure every element in my detailed plot summary was somehow delivered to the player within these four different storytelling methods. Now, I can't show you everything because I don't want to spoil the game, but here's what it looks like. It includes character dialogue, cutscene screen plays, which honestly this is just descriptions of what's happening in cutscenes, and then artifacts like newspaper clippings that the main character reads to the player. And then finally, diary entries like old movie trailers or recordings or television clips. Now, remember, this is just all laid out in a text file. That's all I'm doing right now. And again, I have a billion iterations of these story elements. Now, once you've finalized your story elements, it's time to go ahead and just record the dialogue. Step

five, recording our dialogue. Look, in the age of AI, nothing is more valuable than not using AI. Remember, scarcity adds value. Okay? When nobody's using real voice acting anymore, it pays off to use real voice acting. Look, here's a good rule of thumb. What am I doing? when everybody's doing something, perhaps you should not do that thing. So, for me, I use voices.com and I hire real voice actors. And by the way, this can cost you $250 to $5,000 or more per voice actor. I know it's expensive, but it it's worth it if you're making a commercial game. So, once I've had all my lines written, I simply post various jobs for all of my different characters, and hundreds of voice acting submissions appear overnight. So, here's Charlotte. I didn't think you'd come.
The beautiful kidnapped fianceé in the game. Here's Vincent, our protagonist.
A letter to to mom.

Here's Mr. Twister, voiced by the incredibly talented actor Joe Rollinsson Hunt.
To all my employees up and down the tower. Please dawn your serious outfits and ensure the park is fully operational. Now, for some actors and actresses, you could simply just give them their lines, especially if they're like a small character in your game. That doesn't really matter. But for me, I like to give every actor and actress in my game quality and distinct direction. The question is, how do you do that? What I do is I'll record every single line from my game in my own voice, and I'll add music, and I'll direct and explain what is going on and what I need from each actor or actress. So, here's a video that I used to basically inform all of my actors and actresses exactly what I want the moment I hired them.
I didn't think you'd come. My heart, my lips, my body, they're yours. I made this in a couple hours and then just send it off to each cast member. I do this so I don't need to explain to every

single actor and actress exactly what I need. they could simply reference their lines in the document and then also cross reference them to the direction video that I created and then they'll try and mimic my own performance. And by the way, it does kind of pay off to know how to voice act or perform which I kind of do considering well what I'm doing right now. I'm reading a script and kind of acting. So that's kind of what I do when I'm reading my own voice acting lines and directing my actors and actresses. Now, for some bigger characters, ones that are crucial to the game, you might want to actually do a live directing session with them. And I did this with Joe Rollinsson Hunt. He's the voice actor for Mr. Twister. And Mr. Twister is this billionaire film director, psychopath, joker type character in Twisted Tower. Now, because Joe Rollinsson Hunt is currently doing an understudy with Morgan Freeman away from his home studio, he responded to me and he said, "Sadly, I'm unable to record my lines and it's going to be a couple months." So, what he suggested to

do was actually rent a studio near where he was currently working and do a remote recording session. This took a couple hours and it was so much fun.
From Jerry Giraff's soft kisses to the velvety embrace of my huggy bears. You're sure to squeal for more as you climb.
I got to hear Joe's performance and record it live just like an actual, I don't know, film director. And we did several takes, including some that were very soft and subtle and others that were extreme and wild. This allows me to pick and choose what I need after I've actually recorded with Joe. Now, this is true with directors. It's also true with, you know, directors of games. You never really know exactly what you need until it's in the game. So, that's why it's really important to get a bunch of different takes so that you can pick and choose what you might need. Look, even Stanley Kubri, who's a worldrenowned director of The Shining and also his last film, Eyes Wide Shut, he would get as many as hundred takes for some of his scenes. This drove his actors and actresses crazy. But the reason he did

this is because he never really knew what he needed until he was editing the film. So, it's good to have as many as you can get. Step six, you want to cut up your lines. Once I have the lines recorded, I'll find my favorite takes and I'll pick them and cut them up as individual audio lines. Well, I used to do this. Now I actually outsource it to my buddy Hector. It's a really painful process. So, thank you Hector for doing that work. I have like 200 voice acting lines and we'll go ahead and begin placing those into various scriptable objects in the game. Now, there's a billion ways to have your scriptable objects actually play the audio files and attach those scriptable objects to our NPCs. But if you want a really simple way to do this, you can use the dialogue system asset in the Unity asset store. It's incredible. I'm actually not using this for Twisted Tower, but I'll be honest, I wish that I was. I just haven't been able to swap it out. I am, however, using this dialogue system in my other game, Brave Boy. Step seven, it's time to incorporate your dialogue

into the game. So you have obviously NPCs that can simply speak these lines by playing the audio files and showing text on screen. You can also use that same codebase for artifacts like reading newspapers or diary entries like these video messages on TVs and Twisted Tower. But the hardest and I think most fulfilling and valuable way to integrate the voice acting lines is to animate cut scenes. Now for Twisted Tower, I spent a month working on four cutscenes. I used Icone 8 and Character Creator from Real Illusion. It's incredible software that basically helps you create characters in 3D and then animate those characters. And then I would export this footage and then edit it in Adobe Premiere. Now, I had some help with the character creator models from my buddy Bin Morrison Elliot, but I also made some character changes on my own and did a lot of clothing changes as well. So, it's kind of a team effort. Character Creator and Iclon 8 are incredible tools for animating humanoid characters. You might think you're going to just set all these

up in Blender. um and then do some weight painting and you can do that. But if you want sort of automatic IK and lip movement and eyebrow movement and eye movement and hands and fingers, if you want all that, Character Creator is such a simple and easy way to do this. ICO 8 is where you take the character you created with Character Creator and then you start to set up the cameras and the lighting and the various characters and animate those characters in a scene. You may wonder how animation works in iClone 8. Do you really need to animate everything frame by frame? Absolutely not. You can use something called Aculips, which will automatically transcode your audio files and sync the lips to the various words. You have to tweak all of this, though, because the first automated pass is always kind of uncanny. It reminds me of um Polar Express. You can also use facial puppeting systems to sort of move the eyes around and eyebrows, do entire facial transformations that come baked into iClone 8. And by the way, here's a

here's a quick tip. Uh if you want a character to look realistic and not uncanny, you want to do something with their eyes. You want their eyes to just do this. Just tweak those pupils need to move just ever, even if they're staring at something or following something. Our eyes are never fully static. So you want to do that. I learned that from David Whe. He's the creator of the first tree. The best way I could describe animating in ICON 8 is you're like combining a bunch of pre-recorded animations and scripts and you're tweaking them until they're basically unrecognizable and they look truly custom. You're not really doing anything from scratch, but it looks like you are. But honestly, that's how you should be gamedeving, especially as an indie. That said, the characters, they all have a custom look because it is custom. Bin Morrison Elliot did an incredible job creating these very unique-l lookinging characters. And the voice acting, again, it's all custom and real. So, it makes these cut scenes feel truly human and alive, despite utilizing a tool like ICO 8, which uses a bunch of templated stuff. Okay, so now we have a game with

a story, and it's all done with a strong setting, a unique scenario, a sympathetic character that compliments the world, great voice acting, and rockolid cutscenes. Look, that's about it. Obviously, there's a million ways to do this, but that's what's worked for me for three commercial releases for well, more than half of my life as a game dev. And just remember, if you want a wish list Twisted Tower, please feel free below. And by the way, if you want to tell great stories in games, obviously, understanding both 2D and 3D game art is crucial. So, I wanted to give you a chance to check out my 2D art course, which dives into everything I've learned as a Time magazine featured game artist. for the next several days. It's 25% off. Plus, you're going to get my 3D art course completely free, but only for this sale. There's just 50 seats available, and then the sale will be closing. If you enroll today, you'll not only get my 2D and 3D art courses, but hey, you'll also get my custom color templates, my brushes, and I'll also throw in my pixel art course completely free. Join hundreds of students on their game art journey and learn from an

actual published indie game dev featured by Rolling Stone, Time Magazine, and PC Gamer. That sounds really cocky to say, but I don't know. It gives me some credibility.