What Does a Narrative Designer Do? And How to Become One?

Narrative designer is the type of game designer who is responsible for bringing the game world to life by integrating the story into the player’s moment-to-moment experiences. Good narrative design helps the player feel “seen” by the game, acknowledging the player’s actions.

If you’ve ever played a game where NPCs whispered as you walked by, you’ve experienced firsthand the work of a narrative designer. You’ve also seen their work in the supporting elements of the game, from lore descriptions on items to writing in the environment and more.

The responsibilities of a narrative designer often go beyond this into content design, quest design, voice-over direction and game writing, especially in small to mid-sized studios. At the end of the day, the narrative designer connects the player experience to the story.

The Growth of the Narrative Designer Role

Game narrative has been around since Zork, but even as recently as 2000’s Deus Ex, it was often created by level designers or programmers.

But just as game stories have evolved beyond two pages of text at the front of a manual, narrative design has emerged as a valuable and growing area within game design, combining story with content and systems.

One of my personal favorite examples of narrative design is from the 1995 game Chrono Trigger, when the main character Crono is tried for his crimes. Decisions as small as your response to a lost old woman or looting a chest when you thought no one was looking contribute to the final outcome.

Later games applied these concepts at a systemic level, such as the Renegade vs Paragon alignment system in Mass Effect or the World of Warcraft faction system, which would change how NPCs react to you as you develop trust or fear through your actions.

Still others would dive even more deeply into the content side, such as the League of Legends bark system, revealing the relationships and dynamics between characters outside of matches.

Famous and influential narrative designers

• Mabel Addis, first female video game designer and the first narrative designer
• Mary DeMarle, Deus Ex lead writer
• Ann LeMay, Jon Dombrow and Chris Hepler, Mass Effect 1–3
• Xalavier Nelson Jr., No Way Home, Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator
• Valerie Chu, Diablo IV
• Kevin Bruner, Telltale Games (The Wolf Among Us, etc)
• Nathan Scott, Hogwarts Legacy, Diablo IV
• Patrick Nagle & Dave Maldonado, World of Warcraft
• Leslee Sullivant, League of Legends

What Makes a Good Narrative Designer?

An amazing narrative designer is the champion of the story and gameplay as one united whole. You’re the gameplay expert on the writing team, and the story expert on the systems design team.

Maybe more than any other role, you’re expected to be a jack of all trades. You’re guiding your team to deliver on the story and script goals, but you’re also assembling prototypes directly for story sequences within the game.

You can adapt and quickly update the game as the story changes, supporting mission, level and quest designers to ensure the narrative remains on track.

A great narrative designer is a strong empathic collaborator and communicator. You chart the player’s internal story against the game’s plot and work hard to keep both intentionally aligned.

Many narrative designers also have traditional writing skills and the ability to help structure dialogue and provide direction for voice acting.

Narrative Designer vs Game Writer

At first glance, the terms narrative designer and game writer might sound like synonyms. Both are responsible for pushing the game’s story forward, but they each have distinct responsibilities.

In a nutshell, the game writer is responsible for the world’s story and plot and the narrative designer is responsible for the player’s experience of the story.

This is most visible at the junior end of the spectrum. Junior game writers focus on writing the dialogue to fit the story of the game. Junior narrative designers work on displaying that dialogue and set up interactive sequences involving the player.

Moving up in seniority, game writers work on the major beats of the story, NPC identities, player backstory and world-building. Narrative designers communicate these story elements in the game, combining traditional storytelling skills with environmental storytelling and interactive sequences.

To use an example from Mass Effect, the game writers carefully planned out the introduction of the universe and the concepts of Prothean beacons and husks. The narrative designers placed the gameplay triggers, set up the barks between characters and wrote placeholder dialogue that the game writers improved later.

The line between these two roles is narrow, and in a smaller studio, both responsibilities could be handled by the same person.

Other game development roles related to narrative design

Narrative designers work closely with a number of other game studio roles:

• Game writers – to develop the world, vision and plot
• Level designers – to carve out the spaces for game events to play out and bring the world to life
• Environmental artists – to create assets that support environmental storytelling
• Technical designers – to create the tools and features to support barks and events
• Composers / sound designers – to create the right ambience for a location
• Voice-over performers – to give the right context to their performances (at director level)

What is it like being a narrative designer?

Narrative design brings unique problems everyday, requiring collaboration, problem solving and hard work, but it’s a unique role that those suited for it absolutely love.

Jarory de Jesus, narrative designer for Housemarque:

“Being a narrative designer is fun for me. I get to craft stories and actually bring them to life in a game. It’s still work but it’s creative and fulfilling work. My Day to Day looks different all the time so I get a lot of variety, at least until production is wrapping up and we’re just fixing bugs but that’s true of any role. I enjoy it and can’t see myself doing anything else really.”

Michael Yichao, narrative designer for Phoenix Labs, Magic the Gathering and Riot Games:

“It’s a joy to get to create and contribute to fantastical worlds that players get to experience in an intimate fashion. Folks think the writing is the hard part, but it’s more the given / known part; collaboration is where the real challenge (and reward) of narrative design lives.”

Career Path

Early on in your game design career (“assistant” and “associate” in the chart above), you’ll probably be working on assigned tasks wherever you’re needed.

But as you grow into the position and earn more responsibility, you may discover you lean more in one of the following directions:

• Narrative system designers work on the structures that communicate the story. They design the dialogue system, plan when and how cutscenes move the story along, and so on.
• Narrative content designers create the actual sounds, sights, and interactive sequences that bring the narrative into the environment.

Each game studio does things its own way, and these roles won’t necessarily be completely separate from each other.

As you become an expert in your craft, you may take on more responsibilities, helping set the team’s vision by creating the best possible examples of it, and knowing the tools inside and out.

If your aim is a narrative director role, you’ll want to practice your interpersonal and management skills. As I covered earlier, narrative designers work with a lot of other roles, and you’ll want to understand all of their needs and limitations so you can help them collaborate successfully.

How to become a professional narrative designer

Before you can focus on narrative design, you first need to develop an understanding for game narrative and game mechanics, train your traditional creative writing skills, and convince someone you have what it takes.

So it’s very important that you have a general understanding of both writing and game design.

If you have a background in writing and want to enter the games industry, understanding the fundamentals of video game mechanics and design will be invaluable.

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For writing, I strongly recommend checking out both Neil Gaiman’s master class as well as Narrative Design for Indies by Edwin McRae.

For a practical game design methodology to improve player experience, you can check out my course.

Analyze existing narrative design

Playing games is a great start, but only if you break them down and analyze them. Think about what you’re experiencing, what elements combined to create those feelings, and how to recreate that yourself.

Do some deep-dive analyses of games you love. Break them down scene by scene. Write out all the dialogue and events, then keep note of what moves you, and especially what you would change.

And of course, write some game content yourself! Even if writing isn’t your focus, you will be asked to write lots of filler lines, dialogue and placeholder content that may inspire the final lines.

Learn related game dev skills

Companies often package narrative design with other roles like game writing, quest design, or mission design. A broad selection of skills in these spaces will prepare you for a wide range of game studio positions.

If you have the skills to mod an existing game like Skyrim, Baldur’s Gate or Roblox, doing so is an excellent way to create an interactive sample and see if you enjoy creating content.

In general, any experience working in a game engine, designing the player journey, and setting up events and dialogues are great ways to showcase your skills.

Keep in mind that, while many people work in these spaces, as a narrative designer your main focus would be supporting an existing story with gameplay sequences, NPC interactions, and so on.

Brainstorm outside of game development

Narrative design is closely tied to gaming, but there are other skills and interests that can help you as a designer:

• Theater and improv experience (especially set design and screen writing) help you understand how to set the mood and be flexible when the story changes.
• UX skills help a lot and show an understanding of the customer.
• Running games of Dungeons & Dragons or other TTRPGs lets you design quests and get feedback from your players.

Any of your own creative or technical interests can influence your game design too. One of the narrative designers of Returnal (2021 BAFTA Game of the Year), Jarory de Jesus, had a background in poetry, which proved to be especially helpful with dialogue and barks.

Find a career path into narrative design

Landing your first game design job is a big topic, and Michael Breese and I has a whole article series to help you based on his own experiences getting hired by Warner Bros. Avalanche and Riot Games and my experience in hiring and training game designers.

No matter how you get there, your first job will be in an entry-level game design position (i.e assistant, associate, or junior), where you create content at the direction of others. There, you will learn the tools, the technique and the style of narrative design that is done at the studio you’ve joined.

With time and practice, your teammates will trust you to do the job increasingly on your own, propose your own ideas and sequences and eventually trust you with larger and larger tasks.

Keep in mind that because story is so precious to many smaller studios, if you want to become a narrative designer, you may need to start in another position internally.

In this situation, make your intentions known to the development team and slowly begin building a portfolio by working on tasks related to narrative design. Even if you don’t get the position there, the work you did will help sharpen your portfolio and experience.

What qualifications do you need to be a narrative designer?

The best proof of your skills is a portfolio that showcases that you know how a game is made, how narrative conveys the mood, context and feeling of the world.

Nathan Scott, a narrative designer at Blizzard, did an awesome job creating an example narrative design portfolio piece with Twine, called “every time a bell rings.” You can play it here to get inspired by the other personal projects he created on his own.

Work experience

In my experience at game design studios, these are the types of resume items that will help you most in a narrative design application:

• Writing in many formats:
  • Scripts
  • Poetry
  • Short stories
• Editing
• Scripting in game engines

Education requirements—Is a narrative design degree necessary?

One of the most common sources of anxiety for someone who wants to get into this space is a concern about not taking the right college program. Well, take a deep breath—your program doesn’t matter nearly as much as how you apply yourself to this role.

The term narrative designer wasn’t used until 2006, and there hasn’t been enough time for an established, universally accepted education process to form.

The only universal is that narrative design is about understanding the fundamentals of human experiences (do the players understand, care, respond and go on an emotional journey) and applying them consistently to your craft.

Beyond that, being a creative field, narrative design is super individualized to the needs of each studio.

So no, you don’t need a specialized degree to do this work. That said, degrees in writing, literature, performance, film and entertainment could all help guide you.

Don’t take one of those just to be a narrative designer though—you’re better off starting out creating games and studying on the side.

Skill requirements

There are many different skills that come together to create a narrative designer. It’s a very unique position that requires a great understanding of games, tv series, character arcs, story beats, writing and gameplay.

You should learn how to write dialogue, item descriptions for tooltips, signposts and job board postings, descriptions of artifacts that the player scans and more. Look at every location where text pops up in a game and think about ways you can use that and more to reinforce a story.

Narrative skills are more than just writing though. Think about how level design elements can convey the same narrative elements so well the players will think they were there in the writer’s room.

Narrative designer portfolio

Nathan, the narrative designer whose work I linked to earlier, has a complete guide to making a narrative design portfolio. I highly recommend reading it if you’re not sure what kind of projects to make to get you hired—or if you have some work under your belt already, but need some advice on what to emphasize and how to display it.

Here are some examples we’ve put together of the kind of work that will help your portfolio shine:

• Example character planning
• A short video of an interactive experience you’ve set up in a game engine
• Dialogue examples
• Descriptions of locations you might provide to level designers for a location

Even if it’s RPG Maker or Twine, any amount of experience working in an actual video game goes a long way!

The ability to evoke the emotional context of a place, and how the player and any accompanying characters would respond to that situation goes far as well.

Someday, you would ideally have a portfolio like Lis Moberly’s of Obsidian Entertainment. She includes a mixture of videos of games she has worked on, writing samples, and analysis of how she’s approached both game writing and narrative design.

Narrative design job description examples

Here is an example of a recent narrative designer job post by Guerilla Games.

Below are two game development specific job boards with the latest narrative design positions:

• Gamedeveloper.com job board
• Hitmaker job board

Learning resources

• Self-Training in Narrative Design
• Balancing story and gameplay – Cory Barlog (God of War)
• For the traditionally trained
• Examples of applied narrative design on Riot’s Leona
• Creating the Haunting Story of Returnal
• Writing Realistic Dialogue in Games
• Our Free Intro to Narrative Design Class
• Player-Centric Game Design Framework

Career FAQs for narrative designer:

Do narrative designers need to code?

It depends on the studio, but even when they do, a robust understanding of coding is not required. That said, there is a specialized sub-discipline called Technical Narrative Design that does!

In the words of Jarory De Jesus:

“It’s like a narrative designer+ because it’s everything a narrative designer does with more implementation and scripting as well”

You’ll most likely learn scripting, which is a lighter version of coding that’s used to operate certain tools like Twine.

What is the hourly rate for a narrative designer?

The average yearly salary range is $40,000 to $80,000 depending on your seniority, or an average of ~$30/hr.

What games have the best narrative design?

This is a question for the ages. However, here are a few of the games with great narratives for aspiring narrative designers to analyze:

• Control – Strong integration of the gameplay and narrative moments
• Returnal – Well integrated barks and storytelling
• The Case of the Golden Idol – A game where unraveling the narrative design IS the game

Put in the practice and stay engaged with the industry, and maybe one day your own game will appear on a list like this one!