Structuring your story

All stories are constructed from smaller units, such as scenes or story beats. Interactive stories also often use branching, to build story paths based on player choices. A more complex approach to non-linear storytelling is to build story with storylets.

Scenes

Emily Short advises narrative desigers to start working on their interactive narrative by drafting all the scenes and events they are planning to be in it. You may think this advice would be more suitable to linear stories, but natural breaks exist in all stories. A character may appear or depart, a location may change or a perspective may shift.

A beginning, and end and a purpose

When you list your scenes, determine three elements for each.

• A clear beginning

• A clear end

• A purpose
  

Let’s take the arrival scene of The Sunbridge Tour Company. It starts with the guests arriving at the airport and it ends when they are all by the bus with their luggage. The purpose of the scene is to give the player/guide a first impression of all guests.

Determining the purpose of a scene in a narrative is crucial. A lack of purpose is one of the most common issues in narrative design - resulting in a scene that is useless for the overarching story. A designer needs to be able to answer these questions clearly for every scene they create: why is this scene in the story? Does it really add to the story, or could it be omitted without affecting the story or character development?

Scenes set the pace of the story

The pace of your story is determined by well-though through scene design. Make sure your scenes are varied - their content gives different impressions of speed. For example, an exploration scene moves more slowly than a dialogue scene. Making key scenes feel different from the ones around them, by changing the pace or how players interact, can make those scenes more powerful.

Playing in a scene sandbox

When you have described the essence of your scene in an interactive narrative, imagine it becoming a sandbox you play in - within the boundaries. Try to answer some questions. The answers in a novel will be fixed, but in an interactive narrative there may be several answers depending on where the player came from through choice.
Here are some quetions to ponder… What happened before? What is the character’s mood? What always happens in this scene? What sometimes happens in the scene? Is each character always there? Why or why not?

Let’s take our SBT arrival scene again. Each character is always there. They come in with a fixed mood and may go out with another mood influenced by player choice.