This blog post will be about a new way to approach narrative design in games – the 4 Layers Approach. It is based on a GDC talk I gave in March this year. The approach is primarily meant to suggest a workflow that focuses on the story and makes sure the narrative and gameplay are connected. The end goal is to create games that provide a better interactive narrative.
GDC 14 Lecture Resources
I am making this blog as place with extra resources for a talk I will be giving at GDC on Tuesday next week (14.20 at the Narrative Summit). The talk is called “Making Storytelling a Fundamental Part of the Gameplay Experience” and will be about a new approach to narrative design called 4-Layers.
Tech Feature: SSAO and Temporal Blur
There are many publicised algorithms for high quality SSAO. This tech feature will instead focus on improvements that can be made after the SSAO has been generated.
The Five Foundational Design Pillars Of SOMA
The foundational design pillars of SOMA. When creating a game I think it is crucial to have a few basic rules that underlie all other decisions. That way it is much easier to keep everything on track and get the final game to play out as intended. For SOMA our intention is to craft an experience where players become deeply connected and affected by the game’s world and themes.
Thomas Grip: Co-founder, creative director
My name is Thomas Grip and I am one of the two founding members of Frictional Games. For the first few years at Frictional Games I used to work from my living room, on a desk placed next to the TV.
Gone Home – The Amnesia Edition
From time to time we get requests from people who want to license our HPL2 engine in order to make a commercial game. This is quite flattering, but the answer is always “no”. Our reply is to simply state that there is no documentation, we do not have time for support and they are better …
Useful Tips for Horror Game Designers
A while back Chris Pruett (creator of the excellent Chris’s Survival Horror Quest and currently at work with some creepy stuff at Robot Invader) and I had some discussion about common horror / puzzle tropes over twitter. Now all of these little nuggets, and more that came up during subsequent mail discussions, have been collected into a nice blog post by Chris. If you are ever going to make a survival horror please read this first.
SOMA Officially Revealed
After more than two weeks of teasing, we are happy to properly announce our new game: SOMA. It is a sci-fi horror game played from a first person perspective with the goal to deliver a truly disturbing experience. Having worked on this project for over three years now, it is really nice to finally reveal it to the world!
5 Core Elements Of Interactive Storytelling
Over the past few years I have had a growing feeling that videogame storytelling is not what it could be. And the core issue is not in the writing, themes, characters or anything like that; instead, the main problem is with the overall delivery. There is always something that hinders me from truly feeling like I am playing a story. After pondering this on and off for quite some time I have come up with a list of five elements that I think are crucial to get the best kind of interactive narrative.
Thoughts on The Last of Us
I have now finished playing The Last of Us and feel it has quite a few things worth discussing. Overall it is a great game and there is a lot that can be learnt from it.
