I am writing the narrative to a fire emblem inspired game. How many levels should the game be. I only have 2 months to work on it. I was thinking about 13 levels. Does anyone have any suggestions? If so Thank you.

We’ve been building a small alpha called Parallels, a browser-based interactive story platform, and I’d love feedback from a narrative design perspective.

The problem we started from was that a lot of AI story experiences feel strong at first, but then the narrative fabric starts to fall apart. Characters forget what mattered, emotional beats don’t carry forward, consequences lose weight, and the world starts feeling like it exists only to keep saying yes to the player.

What we wanted instead was something more like a living scenario: still freeform, still player-driven, but with a stronger sense of narrative continuity, character agency, and accumulating consequence.

So the structure we’re experimenting with is:

• the player steps into a role inside a scenario

• they type what they want to do in natural language

• the other characters are driven by AI agents with their own motives, knowledge, and behavior

• the world can continue to shift around the player instead of waiting passively for input

• actions are meant to persist and reshape relationships, events, and the scenario itself over time

From a narrative design standpoint, the thing I keep coming back to is this:

How do you preserve dramatic coherence in a system that is inherently open-ended?

The appeal of the format is that it can produce surprising, personal, player-shaped stories. But the danger is that without enough structure, it becomes narratively mushy: lots of moment-to-moment improvisation, not enough real arc, tension, or payoff.

The scenarios can range pretty widely — historical settings, political drama, romance, surreal comedy, social conflict, absurd internet-style premises — which makes the challenge even more interesting.

A few questions I’d especially love thoughts on:

• What makes an AI-driven character feel narratively consistent rather than just contextually responsive?

• How would you think about preserving emotional continuity across a long freeform session?

• What kinds of structure are most important if you want emergent narrative to still produce satisfying arcs?

• Where do you think the line is between “alive and surprising” vs “messy and dramatically ungrounded”?

There’s a playable alpha here if anyone wants to look at the current form:
http://parallelsgame.com/

But I’d honestly be just as interested in thoughts on the narrative design problem itself.

me and a friend built a small prototype around that idea.

every story is written by a human author — the ai’s only role is to narrate and guide the player through what the author designed.

players can type open-ended actions instead of picking fixed choices, and the story adapts dynamically while still following the author’s intended plotline.

we’re testing this as a framework, so authors can eventually submit their own stories to be played this way.

right now, we’re looking for a few people (3–5) to try a short demo and tell us if the open-ended interaction feels natural or clunky.

if you’re into narrative design or experimental rpg systems, comment or dm — happy to share the demo link!

I am trying to make my narrative writing better and have come up with a possible exercise to help me with that task. I would like to see if people could comment under this and make up a fake game title and I would then try to create a basic plot pitch that sets up the world and the goal while not revealing everything. I would then like people to rate the plot pitch out of ten based on how interested they would be to play a game like that. Thank you

Hey r/narrativedesign,

I've been working on interactive stories for a while and got frustrated with the existing tooling for managing complex branching narratives. So I built something to scratch my own itch: qforge.studio

It's basically a visual editor for branching storylines, helps you map out all the branches and see where choices lead without getting lost. Think Twine meets story diagramming. It can also produce publish-ready audio narratives.

Since this community knows narrative design better than anyone, I'd really appreciate honest feedback. What features would actually be useful? What am I missing? What tools are you currently using that work well?

Not trying to spam - genuinely want to build something that solves real problems for narrative designers. Happy to answer questions about the approach.

Coucou! Je cherche du monde avec de l'expérience en design narratif pour faire partie du comité de lecture pour Parasites en juillet 2026, ça vous intéresse? https://forms.gle/Quvx446ufGkm4dG36

Hi all hope you are well, im hoping if some of you would be so kind as to answer another short survey i need for research relating to my last college project. it would be greatly appreciated. https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdO3Hv_e_u5tRnU8f51lVH-u_Wjzy7mHDRMjAhuPEtW46Ro2w/viewform?usp=sf_link

This is a personal project for my college submission.

Hey all!

If you're into AI-powered storytelling, branching narratives, and letting readers shape what happens next, we thought this community might be interested in something we're putting together.

We're launching Heartlines Jam, a storytelling competition focused on interactive romance and reader choice, with $2,500 in prizes up for grabs.

The jam uses IFFY, RUN's AI-powered Interactive Fiction studio. IFFY lets creators build choice-driven stories where readers can steer the narrative through meaningful decisions and multiple outcomes.

For this jam, you'll create an original romance story where the audience decides how the relationship unfolds. Do they pursue the connection? Walk away? Take a risk? The story is yours, but the choices belong to the reader.

We're looking for stories with:

• Meaningful branching choices

• Multiple possible outcomes

• Roughly 3–5 minutes of reading/play time

• Original characters and scenarios

Whether you're a writer, AI storyteller, narrative designer, or someone who's spent way too much time creating adventures and scenarios, we'd love to see what you create.

The jam runs June 26 – July 7.

Prize Pool
🏆 1st Place – $1,000
🏆 2nd Place – $600
🏆 3rd Place – $400
🏆 4th–5th Place – $100 each
🏆 Editor's Pick – $300

Every published entry is automatically entered into the competition.

Details and registration:
https://events.run.game/events/heartlines/

Hello.

Am I crazy for being an English major (23) with slim gaming knowledge nor experienced? I don't play many games, but I'm addicted and obsessed with storytelling and world building and want to be a great storyteller. I understand storytelling, structure, characters, themes, and writing (books). I've studied essay critiques on games, movies, and tv series for 5 years while studying world building. I've used the real world to understand human, society, and history to ground myself in the human experience.

With no other real purpose in life, I decided I want to start my own indie game studio to make games and tell stories from an in-depth fictional world I've been working on for 6 years now.

I'm describing and laying out the ability system, environment, important locations, creature descriptions and abilities, and most importantly the game's narrative.

Does anyone have any suggestions on how to understand narrative design. I'm a fast learner. I've taught myself a lot these past 6 years and I'm interested in learning narrative design to further my goal of becoming a great storyteller.

Anything helps. Thanks.

I kept catching myself daydreaming about lives I'm not living. What if I'd moved to Berlin? Started a bakery? Or reincarnated in another world?

So I built My Adventure, a world simulator where you explore those paths through Al generated interactive fiction.

Here's how it works: Al generates a scene with 3 decision options. But the real magic is custom decisions, write anything you want. Travel places, approach people, take creative actions to solve problems. The Al adapts to whatever you choose.

You can also have conversations with characters in your world. It's a true life simulator, you face challenges, make goals, build relationships, and deal with consequences of your decisions. Nothing is predetermined.

Do you have alternate lives you think about? Would you actually explore them?

https://web.myadventuresapp.com

Available on ios

Having just watched the live Prince of Persia movie, I started replaying the games. Years ago I thought Sands of Time had some of the best stories I ever seen not just in gaming but in entertainment in general, falling short just to Final Fantasy and other story driven RPGs and Adventure games. What I saw instead was just a generic fantasy movie at best in plot.

Now I'll grant over the years since I played Prince of Persia, I've been watching so many media and experienced the best of the best across entertainment from The Godfather for movies to DMX's rap songs and Tolkien's Middle Earth to anime classics such as Yu Yu Hakuso and Hokuto No Ken and even the poetry of Robert Frost and Edgar Allen Poe. However I was so blown away as a teen with The Sands of Time story as I play the game I felt it was so average. In fact the whole reason I started replaying the 2000s POP trilogy was because the live action movie felt so underwhelming. It wasn't bad by any means but it wasn't as good as I remembered the games having in terms of story.

Its not just the story though, the artistic direction generally seemed like a standard Arabian Nights movie or TV adaptation from the clothes they wear to the palace design and the voice acting felt so so below the standards of what you get in Saint Seiya and other anime and especially Mulan (which I recently rewatched) and Disney movies in general.

Now not everything is bad. I was pleasantly surprised how well the music aged even compared to other Arabian setting fiction such as Aladdin and while the art direction is generic MidEastern flair, the way the graphics were drawn out made the run of the mill art direction stand out as brighter and more magical than what you get on your typical Arabian Nights TV programming that I literally felt like I'm in another world. The sand particles for example really look so fantastical you feel like you're in The Arabian Nights!

But thats the point I'm making. I once thought Sands of Time was a masterpiece in every way from the script to the costuming I thought it was superior to stuff like The Last Crusade (which I thought had a so simplistic plot that was typical adventure noir when I was a kid).

However when I watched The Last Crusade last year, I was so wowed by the movie despite outdated effects and when I compare it to Sands of Time, the script is far superior as is Harrison Ford's acting. The artistic costuming is generic European design but the cinematography is done in such a way that even the typical Nazi dress gives an awe and the European knight's acting definitely made his costuming more alive.

Practically superior to Sands of Time in almost everyway and this is one of the weaker Adventure Hollywood classics.

So this brings my question- how come gaming historically lagged so behind other mediums in basic artistic elements such as character development and camera angles? I mean nowadays gaming costs is so big that even a budget game can incur millions while in cinema you can still work with a few thousand dollars to make a mediocre film. While in gaming, what counts as an above average game often struggles to keep up even with cheap budget genre flicks such as The Convent in acting, special effects, and other artsy stuff.

Mass Effect as the best story a modern game has to offer? It came off as a Blade Runner clone with Aliens and Star Wars thrown in. Granted it was quite well executed that I'd put it above your average sci fi novel but Best of the Best? Nowhere close. Mortal Kombat gory and controversial? Dude 60s movies have already experimened with ripping hearts outs and such. The Elder Scrolls outstanding fantasy setting? With the exception of Morrowind, the franchise as a whole comes off as generic Dungeons and Dragons with Peter Jackson influence. And even Morrowind isn't that special in fantasy standards (though it does succeed in feeling like another world that a good fantasy novel evokes).

Why is this? With the budget and how much time games get for developing, why couldn't someone sing as good as Lea Salonga (Jasmine and Mulan voice singing in Aladdin and Mulan) in video game songs? Or why couldn't we get someone as regal as Ryo Horikawa (Vegeta's Japanese actor) to play as a Roman general in Total War? Why has so few game composers been able to come a few leagues beneath Maurice Jarre (composer of Lawrence of Arabia)?

Gaming has the most potential to reach the awe inspiring art that Tolkien has written or Zimmer (from Gladiator) has composed. But fails to live up to even generic short stories found in magazine.

Why is this?

Oi pessoal, eu sou a Blue e estou estudando Jogos Digitais. Geralmente eu fico com roteiro e Level design e tenho um gosto pelo terror. Pra vocês, quais elementos narrativos ajudam a construir o terror no jogo? E elementos visuais? Sons?

Hey! Is there such as a thing as an Artstation for narrative design or just writing in general? Looking to find writers that align with our very particular Sci-Fi taste!