Story Structure

Let’s discuss 2 structures at opposite ends of the interactive spectrum: Railroads and Sandboxes

Railroad

This is a story which is largely linear. The writer is moving the player upon a tightly controlled experience and most decisions don’t matter as they have a specific narrative they want the player to experience.

• Pros: Easier to tell a great story, there’s only 1 main path to focus on
• Cons: If players feel their choices don’t matter, the promise of interaction is gone. The story must rely solely on storytelling and visuals to be compelling.
• Examples: Episode Interactive, TellTale, Final Fantasy X

Sandbox

This is a story that allows the player to go in many different directions and doesn’t try to be prescriptive. The story will be heavy with optional content and light on the main storyline. This type of story leans more heavily on game mechanics than the narrative.

• Pros: Player is delighted by the feeling they can do anything and in the order they like.
• Cons: Writing one memorable story is hard enough, having to write multiple at the same level of quality is near impossible.
• Examples: Hack and Slash MMOs, Choice of Games

The Tales Approach

We recommend that you structure your stories to be somewhere in the middle. Enough agency to keep players focused on each choice but contained enough to create a memorable narrative.

You should think of your story as a set of rooms connected through hallways. Each episode represents a room and the hallway represents divisions between each episode. You want to give your player agency to explore each room in a different fashion but generally you’ll want to end each episode in the same physical location. While players may end in the same location, the state of their character and the items they may have picked up along the path will be completely different.

Towards the latter episodes (especially the last one) this rule may be broken as you will want to make the culmination of all the players decisions result in VERY different series endings.

Story Length

You can imagine that aiming for gameplay of 10 minutes with each play-through can vary drastically depending on if your story is closer to Sandbox or Railroad. If you create a story with many optional paths, you’ll end up writing a longer story to achieve 10 minutes of gameplay than a story with minimal branching. There’s really no way to tell how many words this requires besides playing your story.

We will say that stories that feature more content/interaction have higher retention, replayability, like rates, and ultimately higher monetization. The higher the monetization, the more ad spend we can funnel to the story.

Choice Types