Rivac LabsNarrative Designer
Narrative design is the difference between a story that's written and a story that survives being played — branching dialogue that doesn't collapse into a mess of flags, lore that stays consistent across a hundred barks and cutscenes, and pacing that respects the fact that players skip text. We build the dialogue systems and world bibles that let a writing team scale past one person's head, and we implement branches directly in your engine's dialogue tooling (or build that tooling if it doesn't exist yet) so writers can see their work running, not just read it in a doc. Studios come to us when a story has grown past what one spreadsheet can track, when branches contradict each other, or when there's no lore bible and every new writer is guessing at canon. We hand back a structure a writing team can keep extending after we're gone.
How We’d Approach This
A clear, staged plan — not a black box
- 1
Map the existing story, branches, and lore for contradictions and gaps before writing a single new line.
- 2
Build or wire up a dialogue/branching system in-engine and pilot it on one questline or arc.
- 3
Playtest the branch with real players to check that choices read as meaningful, then review the results with the writing team.
- 4
Scale the system and the lore bible across the full narrative, with documentation your writers own going forward.
What You Get
Deliverables from this engagement
- A world lore bible with canon call-outs, not just flavor text
- A working in-engine branching dialogue system
- One fully implemented, playtested questline as a template
- A dialogue-authoring guide for your ongoing writing team
Six Ways We Could Architect This
Different engagement, different build — pick the shape that fits
There’s more than one way to deliver on this service. Browse a few of the ways we’d structure the work, depending on your speed, budget, and integration needs.
Ready to get started?
Tell us what you’re trying to get done and we’ll help you find the highest-leverage place to start — scoped small enough to prove itself before you commit to anything bigger.
Talk to us about Narrative DesignerMost engagements like this start as a $500–$2,500 pilot — see full pricing.