Lydia Cockerham
Dambuster Studios
Lydia is an Associate Lead Narrative Designer at Dambuster Studios, with 8 years' experience writing and designing for games – from AAA to indie. Her focus is on turning collaborative, clear, cohesive work into powerful narratives that weave together all disciplines in game dev to reflect why players play.
Lydia Cockerham is speaking at the following session/s
Games as Dreams: Using Symbolic Archetypes to Craft Powerful, Flexible Narratives
It’s every Narrative Designer’s worst nightmare. A quest has been cut, an enemy descoped, or a character nixed. We know we should be calm, collected and above all flexible, but the panic sets in. The game narrative makes no sense anymore! This session will explain and explore a tool to help in this situation and many more: “Dream Mode”. By using symbolic archetypes, like the kind we encounter in dreams, we can turn overwhelming narrative complexity and confusion into functional building blocks that can quickly be moved around, adapted, or removed entirely. And in the process build stronger, more powerful and more flexible narratives.
Session Takeaway
- How to use “Dream Mode” to transform a narrative into its symbolic and functional core
- How to distil characters, locations, enemies, objects and gameplay/story beats into symbolic archetypes
- Some of the most useful and recurring symbolic archetypes
- How to work with these building blocks to adapt a narrative when change occurs, and test out new approaches quickly
- How to reduce complexity in a narrative and amp up the emotional power
Session speakers
