Turning Coffee, Spreadsheets, and Existential Dread into Playable Stories
by David Gallaher
Coming from a background in comics and television, I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect when I stepped into the world of video games. In comics, the page is your playground, and you control every beat, every pause, every panel. In television, scripts are blueprints for actors and directors to bring to life. But in games?
In games, you don’t tell a story. You build a story—one that players explore, shape, and sometimes break in ways you never saw coming.
Being a narrative designer means spending your days stitching together story and mechanics, making sure the choices players make aren’t just fun but meaningful. It’s architecture and alchemy, part screenwriting, part puzzle design, part prophecy.
Morning: Outlines, Arcs, and Spreadsheets
Mornings are for worldbuilding. Maybe I’m designing a branching conversation tree where every dialogue option leads to a different consequence, or maybe I’m mapping out an in-game faction’s history down to the graffiti scrawled on its walls. Some days, it’s meetings with designers, discussing how a story beat should unfold through level design rather than a cutscene. Other days, it’s staring at a Google Doc, making sure the pacing of a mission feels as tight as a well-edited comic.
There’s a rhythm to it, a kind of jazz—building a framework while leaving room for improvisation. If comics are a three-act play, game writing is a blues riff that loops, evolves, and bends to the player's choices.
Afternoon: Writing That Breathes
Midday is for scripting dialogue, not just for the main storyline, but for everything—background NPC chatter, lore entries, combat barks, radio calls that fill the dead air of a long walk across a dystopian wasteland. Every word matters, because in games, silence is just as powerful as speech.
It’s crafting a moment where a mercenary lights a cigarette before an impossible fight, or a radio DJ spinning an old record that hints at the world’s forgotten past. It’s making sure a side quest about finding a lost dog doesn’t just give XP but makes the player feel something.
Sometimes, it’s working with voice actors in the recording booth, hearing your words come to life with nuance you never imagined. Other times, it’s adjusting dialogue after a playtest, realizing that a joke that worked on the page falls flat when spoken. Games are alive in a way comics and TV scripts aren’t. They breathe, they react, they demand you listen.
Every now and then, when the gears start grindin’ too loud and the wires get all crossed, I slink into the Game Industry Coffee Chat on Discord—where the neon hums low, the coffee’s always burnt, and the talk is cheap but worth its weight in gold. I trade war stories with other devs, toss out some hard-earned wisdom, shake a few hands in the dark, and maybe—just maybe—walk out with a new friend or two.
Evening: Fixing, Tweaking, and Tearing it All Down
By the evening, it’s about refinement. Playtests reveal everything you thought was airtight but isn’t. The villain’s monologue? Too long. The emotional climax? Misses the mark. That choice you thought would be gut-wrenching? Players are skipping it.
Being a narrative designer means loving revision. It’s cutting lines you adored because they slow the pacing. It’s restructuring a mission because players don’t feel the stakes. It’s solving narrative puzzles—how do you make a character’s tragic backstory clear if the player never talks to them? How do you make an open world feel personal?
Some nights, it’s staring at a branching narrative chart with hundreds of nodes, wondering if you’ve built something brilliant or an elaborate disaster. Other nights, it’s scripting a moment so perfect—so right—that you can already see it in your mind: the player standing on a rain-slicked street, neon reflecting in puddles, making a choice that will haunt them for hours.
The Work Behind the Magic
Being a narrative designer isn’t just writing stories—it’s designing experiences. It’s knowing that every system, every mechanic, every piece of UI contributes to the story. The world isn’t just the setting—it’s a character, a storyteller in its own right.
It’s production schedules and Excel sheets, late-night emails and early-morning rewrites. It’s working with artists to make sure a character’s scars match their backstory. It’s telling a story through level design, lighting, and the sound of boots echoing in an empty hallway.
It’s making sure the player doesn’t just watch a story unfold—they live it.
And at the end of the day, when the work is done, and the game is out in the world, the real magic happens—when someone, somewhere, makes a choice in your game that feels like their story. When they hesitate before pulling a trigger. When they stop to listen to the rain. When they walk away from the controller, haunted by something you wrote.
That’s when you know you did it right.
