Story Workshop with UsTwo Games
One of our most frequently-requested services is our Story Workshop, where we take the raw ingredients for your story and help you shape it into something solid.
We find that it’s a useful process to go through near the start of a project, where you have lots of ideas about your story, but haven’t managed to piece them together.
Often this can be a part of a longer writing process between your company and Talespinners, but we also offer this service as a standalone exercise, allowing you to take a couple of intensive days of purely focusing on your story and coming out with something that allows you to go away and actually build it.
The Process
Story Workshop with UsTwo Games
We like to spend about 8 hours on a workshop. Typically we’ll split this over two days. On the first day, we’ll help you break down your ideas to find the core of your story. On the second day, we’ll help you build it back up again.
This is a deeply collaborative process that will involve lots of discussion, lots of sticky notes, writing things down, tearing them up, coming up with out-of-the-box ideas, throwing those away, and then finding new ones.
Although this can be done in a day, the process is fairly exhausting, and we recommend taking the evening off; partly to rest, but also because the human brain is great at problem solving and finding patterns when you’re using it for something completely different. So while everyone is gossiping and relaxing, often new ideas will pop up which will make sense of the story.
Outcomes
Story Workshop with UsTwo Games
Although each workshop can be tailored, typically we’ll produce a document as the result of the workshop, and that document will contain:
- A good idea of the game’s themes.
- Concrete inspirations for how the game feels.
- Specific moments that you want the player to experience.
- Ideas about how the world works, and how it integrates with the mechanics and any narrative.
- An idea of what the player’s narrative role in the world is.
- Ideas for any other characters which might be involved; at least their narrative function within the game.
- An outline overall plot with some specific plot events (that is, if it’s actually a story-driven game).
Interested?
We’re happy to travel to run story workshops. Get in touch and we can tailor something to suit you!
