How I (will) plan a story

Instead of posting questions asking for help with outlining, I decided to post some advice that might help others who, like me, are struggling with how to organize their game in the planning stages.

The blog is full of really great articles, and I just came across this one that I found especially helpful at this stage:

End Game and Victory Design

It’s a couple of years old at this point, so hopefully it will be news to some of you. In short, one way to plan your game is to figure out the goals of the MC. It shouldn’t be a simple binary, win-or-lose goal. There should be multiple independent goals that are in some way mutually exclusive. In other words, if the character pursues Goal A, it will be at the cost of Goal B, C, and/or D.

For me, this means that after I’ve brainstormed my premise, my vignettes, my characters and my attributes (using this handy article here: How We Plan a ChoiceScript Game), I’ll come up with a list of 4-5 different goals for the protagonist, and brainstorm some ideas for endings that could represent each goal.

I hope this is helpful. Does anyone have any other methods that have worked for them? Please share!

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