It’s been an embarrassingly long time but we are BACK! Again!!! And this time we’ve brought returning guests Adam Dolin and Jolie Menzel to discuss breaking in, how they define narrative design, the differences between creative directors who come from narrative versus other displiclines, the three c’s, can game writers exist without knowing narrative design, favorite narrative tools, what makes a good opening to a game, tutorials, letting players have choices where the results lead to them missing lots of content, bad habits they’ve noticed in younger writers/narrative designers, the future of the industry, pieces of media they go back to get reinvigorate/inspired, the themes they’re always writing into their stories, stuff they’re always editing out of their writing, how to write good dialogue, and maybe one or two other things. It’s great!

Our Guests on the Internet

Jolie's Linkedin. Adam's Linkedin and BlueSky, and his ELVTR class starts in April!

Stuff We Discussed

Larian Cinematics: A Top-Down Look at Our Bottom-Up Approach in 'Baldur's Gate 3'

Jolie's 3C's of Game Design Presentation

Twine

Visual Studio Code

Highland 2 (FYI looks like a Highland 3 launch is imminent)

Ink

YarnSpinner

Castlevania: Symphony of the Night

Pentiment

Against the Storm

UFO 50

Balatro

Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast 

The Callisto Protocol

God of War (2018)

Detroit: Become Human

The Darkness 2

Another Crab’s Treasure

The Videogame Industry Does Not Exist by Brandon Keogh

Sonic Adventure 2

Hank confronts Walter in Breaking Bad

Barry

The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr

Burn Notice

Clerks

Dogma

Nick's Dialogue Playlist

Game Narrative Summit: Building Rome in a Day: A Sociological Storytelling Primer

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin

Futurama Commentaries 

Tetris Forever

Listen To a Movie

Script Lock BlueSky

Our Theme Music was composed by Isabella Ness, and our logo was created by Lily Nishita. The vampire sucking noise was created by Robinhood76.