6 Narrative Design lessons for Casual Games
- Shashank Uppalike
- Aug 4
- 6 min read
I spent the last 5 years working on storytelling for casual games. You’ve probably seen the type: An endless treadmill of increasingly hard to beat levels (think CandyCrush), sandwiched between home renovation mechanics (like Homescapes) and telenovela styled storytelling.
It is no surprise that these games aren’t primarily designed to tell meaningful stories. Instead, by their very construction, stories serve a practical purpose which is to keep players engaged emotionally.
That is not to say that stories take a back seat in the creative process. If anything, the construct of casual games sets a stage filled with limitations and constraints for narrative delivery; forcing designers to think within the box and deliver more with less. Having immersed myself in this world for so long, here are some insightful things I’ve learnt along the way:
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Lesson 1: Two short dialogues are better than a long one
Any written story (especially in the beginning) needs to be bitesized. For instance, if each dialogue is under 60 characters long, it constrains the writer to convey just one simple but important piece of context at a time. This reduces the cognitive load on players from moment to moment especially when they just started the game and are trying to figure everything out.
Lesson 2: Storytelling in games is much more than dialogues
One of the hardest pills to swallow for us game writers is that this is a game first. Unlike movies or books, players are here to play, and the story is something they engage in during the act of play. For this reason, players do not owe us their attention, the likes of which a full length novel would demand. The challenge is to figure out the most important bits of story context that can set up the rest of the lore organically over time. Not just that, how would the selected bits of story find its way to the players over the first session of gameplay? Use of visuals and sounds, on top of text is very underrated in this regard.
Most players who say they don’t like story, just don’t like reading. When presented with gameplay and visual context about the story (eg. An animated cat stuck on a tree, hanging on to its dear life, pun intended), the same players get intrigued to know what will happen next. So leading with visual and interactive context first can go a long way in D1 retention.
Lesson 3: Universally appealing themes for the win
Talking about the target audience, we often end up overthinking what they would like or prefer. Naturally, we would target a specific demographic while making a game, and this is important for the players to feel familiarity with cultural nuances. That said, when it comes to stories for casual games, there is an element of universal relatability that appeals to a global audience. At some level, all of us experience basic emotions like hate, love, fear or hope. So we need to stop asking if the story we have is something that a 73 year old Canadian lady would find in her social media feed, and instead focus on building universally appealing themes which can then be finetuned for the specific demographic in the details.
Lesson 4: Characters impact recall
Players love characters with exaggerated traits in a humorous capacity. This is so because players can see parts of themselves or others they may know personally in these characters, and go like — “Ah! That’s just like Tanya. Now I can’t unsee it” This is magic. Now, that doesn’t mean the whole cast is filled with caricatures for characters — that would lead to saturation obviously. The trick is to find some quirks in each character that come out in unique situations in a predictable way. If you’ve ever watched Sitcoms, you’ll instantly know what this is about.
More than the plot, or the features of the game, characters hold a lasting impression on players. Characters, when well done, play a big part in helping players return to the game — Eg: “Does Nora choose Peter or Carlos for her date?” or “I really think Oscar stole the teapot, I wonder if I’m right about that” These are narratives that ought to be designed for players to engage with outside of the game so that they return and characters make it easy for players to have memorable hooks. Remember, more than the mechanics or the plot, players are most likely to recall our game based on the game made them feel. And characters can go a long way to that end.
Lesson 5: Casual vs Conflict
Storytelling cannot exist without conflicts, this is wisdom as old as it can get. Casual game stories, however, cannot be too intense. While it is tempting for story writers to get carried away with lots of conflicts in the form of suspense, drama, tension and what not, a balance needs to be struck between emotional stimulation and light hearted cosy vibes. Players often complain that they come on to a game to escape the harsh stress of life and it can be a demotivating experience if our game’s plot gets stressful all the time.
Lesson 6: The lost opportunity of building for a long term IP
If we build content for long enough, we eventually attract a hardcore story fanbase. There are always those passionate ones that love harping and debating about the plot, the morally grey characters, and betting on what happens next.
However, the harsh reality of free-to-play casual games is that most players will never stick around for long. Keeping the game free to play, naturally, allows entry to all kinds of players who would want to try the game before deciding if it is for them. While this is seldom a knock on the game’s or the narrative’s quality, the product development lens is less likely to be empathetic when viewing raw KPI numbers.
For instance, our D7 retention could be a mere 6% (for the normal people reading this, this just means that by the 7th day of playing this game, only 6% of the players who ever stated playing, came back for more). In that case, it wouldn’t be unheard of for the product owners to devalue those eventual hardcore story fans.
I’ve heard people say things like: “Let’s push more players further into the content funnel” or “Let’s monetize them before day 7 so that we can squeeze more revenue out of them before they drop off”.
In my personal view, this is a short term strategy that ruins the product.
In my professional view, teams are more often than not instructed to slow down or even stop building content for those 6% of hardcore story fans under the pretext of “Make the game profitable first”.
Whatever the case may be, one thing is hard to ignore. Some of the biggest spenders in these games are inevitably those highly engaged story fans. And one of the most overlooked opportunities in my experience is the lack of interest in building an IP for the long haul. Unless your game goes insanely viral by organic means, User Acquisition and Marketing is an expensive affair. It is not atypical for management to deem any efforts towards building an IP unnecessary, especially when the returns on investment are uncertain in the short term.
And yet, the most iconic fanbases in media history were never planned. They were built organically over years if not decades through transmedia narratives that engaged players and viewers long before they paid a single cent. In other words, giving our players content not just in the game but outside of it through events, mini-games, memes, gags and what have you, helps build an inter-subjective reality for fans to keep coming back to. And the longer those few early fans stay, the larger the community grows over time. Eventually, they become our biggest marketing force, free of cost.
Naturally, all this can take time, effort and a generous amount of luck, and the potential upside in the long run can be endless revenue streams built over emergent media with their roots in the same fictional universe that we create today.
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Whew! That was a lot more than I thought.
If you’ve reached this far, you have my genuine gratitude. I would gladly welcome your thoughts and questions if any. Feel free to drop your comments on things that you’d like me elaborate more on too.
Stay curious and dream big, fellow story stormers!
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