Game Writing: Storytelling through Video Game Design (Udemy.com)

As a hobbyist game developer, I'm trying to create an engaging experience for myself and, hopefully, others. What interests me is the why - why are these characters here? What is going on? How can the situation be navigated? Learning how to create a story using words and music, the environment, and character behaviour is what separates an empty experience from a living, engaging one.

In general, the course is nice and informative, if you've yet to read books like The Write's Journey or The Hero with a Thousand Faces, there is a lot of information that you can get here. However, I would have liked to see more examples of games and how they break the roles, more examples of branching narratives, story structures in games that are not linear, and so on... (This might be an issue with copyrights). This course doesn't tell you what your story has to have, but it can give you tools that might help.

I really enjoyed this course! Even though it might look like a “short course” at under three hours, the instructors actually go so deep into the topic that I ended up studying and applying the concepts for much longer than expected. The way the course is designed kept me engaged throughout, the videos and the delivery were both entertaining and thought-provoking. If I had to mention two very small points for improvement: First, one of the two instructors had slightly worse microphone quality compared to the other. It’s not a big deal, but the audio isn’t as perfect as you might expect. The same speaker also spoke very quickly, which was a bit challenging for me at first as a non-native English speaker, but after a few videos I adapted to the cadence and could follow along without issues. Second, in the middle part of the course, especially during the section on story structure, the same game example was mentioned about three times in a row in successive videos. This felt a little repetitive, though I understand they preferred to keep using the same game rather than spoiling others, which I actually respect. Overall, I feel truly enriched by this course and I can’t wait to apply the new mental skills and storytelling techniques I learned here to create stories for my next video games. Thank you very much for this amazing experience!

This course was a very good match. It ties in with many aspects of myself; my love for D&D and storytelling, video games. It even works with not-explicit areas, such as drawing or music. My interpretation of storytelling through this course is "portraying the history and dynamics of the world through the characters and settings, in a way where the characters see the world from their own perspectives. So far, a very good course to listen too. Would highly recommend.

This is a good course and covers the right types of content and at the right level to help budding game designers add depth to their games. The visual is nice (if a little soporific at times because it's quite relaxing), and the worksheets provided are a useful tool to help you craft your characters and stories. I think some reviewers here expected more from the course in terms of the level of detail explored, but for a beginners course aimed at aspiring indie game devs then i think the level is spot on.

I was creating a simple platformer game and wanted to add more depth to it in the form of a story. I am a big fan of good story in games. Took the course more for motivation purposes, to get things rolling, and it totally did that for me. What I didn't expect though, is actually create that big of a story, which are now before me in form of several paper sheets: Covering the hero's story, the story of the world and the characters in it. This course truly helped me to generate a lot of ideas and connect them together as a coherent whole. Now I am much more confident to finish my game, which should have an actual sense behind it :)

It's effective and a good introduction, what I expected at first.

This is an excellent course that clarified many questions I had about how to incorporate an engaging and immersive story experience in games while not detracting from the agency of the player in determining game outcomes. As a bonus, the course itself was presented in a story-game format. Thank you for a wonderful course.

Well, as far as now, it was Mind Opening. It directed me to ask the questions to find meaning behind what i like about something or not like.

i am learning a lot from this course i hope to apply it to a game that i am making

It was a good course that gives you a helpful framework for setting up a story

I loved this course!
I would only suggest to put some bookmarks in the videos to flag where the spoilers of x and y games start and where they end.