Storytelling for Digital Media:
Class Two—Plotting Individual Scenes

1. If you arrive at a particular location, various challenges and opportunities will present themselves.

2. Then you will need to:

   • Enter into combat
   • Solve a puzzle
   • Interact with other characters
   • Collect or lose an item
   • Make a decision

3. Resulting in:

   • Experience points
   • Greater skills and abilities
   • Money
   • An object significant to attaining the goal
   • A loss of any of the above
   • The removal of an obstacle to attaining the goal
   • Information
   • Setback
   • Death

Some Notes

• Make sure to vary encounters in each scene. Repetitiveness quickly gets boring.
   
• A sense of accomplishment is vital to the playability of a game:
• Create rising tension as the story progresses by plotting in bigger challenges at each stage of the game.
• Give the player a chance to develop the abilities to meet these challenges.
• Do NOT simply make the same monsters, knights, spaceships, etc. tougher at each stage.
• Knock characters back rather than killing them off too frequently or easily.

Plots

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Copyright © July 2006
Dr. Katherine Phelps