Nathan Savant's Blog
Game and Narrative designer with a focus on conveying personality through gameplay. I believe actions speak louder, and that narrative can be far more compelling if we focus on building better characters.
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A deep dive into how Magic The Gathering expresses character through game mechanics, and how those same concepts can be applied to video game characters without breaking the design budget.
Discussing observations in developmental psychology vs how development is presented in video game skill trees, and how those things can help us tell stories.
A summary of a series of quest design articles examining the quest design of film and novels for the sake of better understanding how they approach quests and how that can be used by games.
A discussion of how to tell a linear story in a medium that is inherently nonlinear.
Explanation and Exploration of a narrative structure based on map location that is frequently found in games like Zelda or Metroid.
A breakdown of the Three Act Structure and how it can be expanded to help guide non-linear narratives
Nathan Savant's Comments
Comment In:
[Blog - 07/01/2021 - 10:15]
When experienced devs say that ...
When experienced devs say that it doesn 't matter, they 're not saying no one wants better AI, they 're saying: How do you improve the AI in a meaningful way Because the answer to that question has very little to do with AI at all. Let 's assume you ...
Comment In:
[Blog - 05/03/2021 - 08:35]
A valid criticism. I chose ...
A valid criticism. I chose not to go into the specific problems that a skill tree or class system tries to solve because every use of those things is trying to solve something slightly different. For some games my approach here would not add much benefit, and I acknowledge that ...
Comment In:
[Blog - 01/08/2020 - 10:40]
Absolutely r n r nThere ...
Absolutely r n r nThere are so many great design choices made for Outer Wilds, it 's truly impressive The open design of the world, the fact that the game is entirely based on rules, the narrative conceit tying all of that together. It 's easily my favorite game I ...
Comment In:
[Blog - 10/11/2019 - 10:47]
Yes, the order is implied ...
Yes, the order is implied by the left to right flow. In this case, it 'd actually be more accurate to chart each of these You must do this in order to progress moments as gates and sub-gates, with things like fishing, collecting shells, and anything else that 's optional ...
Comment In:
[Blog - 09/20/2018 - 10:00]
Comment In:
[Blog - 03/06/2018 - 10:02]
To add another example game, ...
To add another example game, as loathe as I am to admit to liking anything in the title, Metroid: Other M 's seamless transitions between gameplay and cinematic moments was frustrating at times, but did seem to allow the story to flow directly from my actions. The story in that ...
