Process
Narrative structure
You might say: story architecture, branching structure, story flow
Narrative structure arranges scenes, conversations, quests or storylets into the order and conditions in which players can encounter them.
- What it does
- Controls pacing, scope and how earlier actions shape later content.
- Ask
- Which pieces are linear, branch, rejoin, float or repeat, and what state carries between them?
- Typical
- Linear outline, branching tree, branch-and-bottleneck, quest, open map, floating modules or loop-and-grow.
- Trouble
- Branches explode beyond production capacity, reconvergence erases choices, or players cannot tell what state they are in.
What to look for
- Scenes, conversations or quests in sequence
- A branch, rejoin or repeat in the story
- Earlier actions shaping later content
Sources
- Bruno Dias, Introduction: A Discipline, if We Can Define It, How stories are structured
Sometimes a game story can be written down as a linear outline; sometimes it's a branching tree structure; sometimes chunks of narrative are free-floating, and can be encountered in different orders.
Use it on your project
teardown-apply: hold "Narrative structure" (narrative-structure) from the teardown at https://teardownatlas.com/game-design/ against my project
Paste it into a coding agent that has the teardown skills.
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