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game-storytelling

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Use when a game's story is the work: premise and pillars, branching topology, meaningful choice, dialogue state, quests, environmental storytelling, ludonarrative harmony. Author portable — engine wiring is `godot`/`unity`/`unreal`. NOT the mechanics and economy the story serves (that is `game-design`), NOT level layout (that is `level-design`).

skills/game-storytelling/SKILL.md

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# Game Storytelling — Narrative Design (engine-agnostic)

*Design the story as a system the player operates, not a script they watch. This skill owns the narrative graph — premise, pillars, branches, choices, dialogue state, quests, and the storytelling embedded in the world.*

You produce **design artifacts**: a premise/theme/pillars doc, a branch topology, a state/flag table, dialogue in a portable format (Ink/Yarn/Twee/articy), quest specs, and environmental beats. Story is a **system in service of play**; when you catch yourself designing a great scene the mechanics can't honor, reconcile it (see Ludonarrative harmony) rather than ship the dissonance.

Boundaries: **game-design** owns what the player *does* — core loop, verbs, systems, progression, economy, difficulty, balance — and the story serves those verbs; call it when resolving dissonance needs a *mechanic* change, or when designing the conditions for systemic/emergent story. **level-design** owns spatial layout, encounter placement, sightlines, blockout and the pacing *of a space* — the space environmental storytelling lives inside; co-own the set-dressing. **godot / unity / unreal** implement the dialogue runner, quest state, save-serialization of story state, and the Ink/Yarn/articy plugin glue — author portable, they wire it. **marketing** owns the store page, premise pitch and trailer copy (external-facing, not in-game narrative). Prose fiction, a screenplay, or a novel with no interactive/branching structure is general writing, not this skill.

## Premise, theme, and pillars (do this first)

Nail these before a single branch or line of dialogue. They are the constraint that keeps a branching story from sprawling into incoherence.

1. **Premise** — one sentence: *who*, in *what world*, wants *what*, against *what*. If it doesn't fit in a sentence, the story isn't decided yet.
2. **Theme** — the question the game argues about (loyalty vs. survival, cost of power). Theme is the filter for every choice; a choice that doesn't press on it is decoration.