Narrative Design

Narrative design is writing that has to be played. It covers story structure and outlines, character voice, branching dialogue and its conditions, barks, quest and scene documentation, environmental storytelling, and the implementation of all of it in a dialogue or quest tool, often proprietary.

The constraints are what make it a design discipline: a line has to work in any order the player reaches it, fit a UI space and a voice budget, survive localisation, and still land. Postings therefore ask for both craft and tooling, and for the discipline to keep documentation current while quests change around it.

A scriptwriter supplies the prose; narrative design decides how prose and systems meet, and a quest designer builds the objectives and scripting that carry it. In smaller teams the three sit in one person, which is why postings often name all of them in the same paragraph.