FUNDAMENTALS OF GAME DESIGN, SECOND EDITION
Progression Considerations
If your game will be a long one, the player will need a sense of progress through it. At this stage of game design, you must decide what will provide that sense of progress:
levels, a story, or both. Will your game be so large that it should be divided into levels? Will your levels be unrelated, and all available to the player at any time, or will they be organized into a sequential or branching configuration, in which completing a level makes the next one available? What types of conditions will determine when a player has completed a level? The genre that you have chosen will help you to determine your answers.
The other question is whether you want a story. Stories give games a context and a goal. Some genres, such as sports and puzzle games, don't usually include stories because their context is self-explanatory. In other genres, such as role-playing and adventure games, the story is a large part of the game's entertainment. Representational games frequently have a story; abstract games generally don't, although Ms. Pac-Man was an exception in a small way. Stories about abstract characters are seldom very involving.
If you do choose to have a story in your game, you don't have to know exactly what narrative content you want to include at the concept-formation stage. All you need to know is whether you want a story and, if so, what its overall direction will be. You should be able to summarize it in a sentence or two; for example: "Jack Jones, leader of a secret anti-drug task force, will conduct a series of raids against the drug barons, ending in an apocalyptic battle in the cocaine fields of Colombia. Along the way, some of the people he encounters will not be quite what they seem."
Errors in the storyline are much easier to correct than errors in the gameplay, and gamers will forgive story errors more quickly as well. Make sure you understand your game first; then build your story into it.
Do not spend a lot of time devising a story at the concept stage. This is a cardinal error frequently made by people who are more used to presentational media such as books and film. You must concentrate most of your efforts on the gameplay at this point.
