How to Write a Video Game Story: A Beginner's Guide to Quests and Lore

Every quest game starts the same way: someone stares at a blank page and a blinking cursor, sure they have a world worth exploring in their head, with no idea how to get it onto the screen. If you've ever caught yourself redesigning your favorite RPG's side quests in the shower, or sketching a map for a world that doesn't exist yet, you already have the instinct. What you're missing is the process. Writing a video game story isn't the same craft as writing a novel or a screenplay — the player is a co-author whether you plan for it or not, and your story has to survive being interrupted, replayed, and occasionally ignored. This guide breaks down how working game designers actually build stories and quests from scratch, in an order beginners can follow.

Why Video Game Stories Work Differently Than Books or Movies

A novel controls pacing down to the sentence. A game hands that control to the player. Indie designer Doc Burford, who wrote and directed the narrative game Paratopic , put it simply: "Good quest design is good storytelling. Good storytelling matters; there's a reason each scene or beat is there." The catch is that in a game, the player decides when — and sometimes whether — they experience that beat at all. That's why so much of video game storytelling isn't really about prose. It's about structure: the world, the characters, and the sequence of choices a player walks through to discover them.

Step 1: Build the World Before You Build the Character

It's tempting to start with your protagonist. Most beginner guides on video game narrative recommend the opposite order. According to the game design education resource Pinnguaq, developing the world first "aids in character development," because so much of what a player experiences in a game is the world itself — its history, its rules, its factions, its tone. Start with real-world history, mythology, or the stories and games that inspired you, and let those become raw material rather than a template to copy. A world with clear internal rules — what magic can and can't do, who holds power and why, what happens if the player breaks a rule — gives you a foundation that quests, characters, and dialogue can all be built on later.

This is exactly the instinct students bring into Game Gen's video game development classes for adults. Our mentors — who've worked on narrative and design teams at studios like Sony Computer Entertainment America, Brass Lion Entertainment, and Worlds Untold — consistently say the students who love quest games and lore pick up worldbuilding fastest, because they've spent years studying how other games did it before they ever wrote a line themselves.

Step 2: Give Players a Character Worth Following

Once the world has rules, your character needs a reason to break or follow them. Pinnguaq's framework treats character creation as the next layer built directly on top of the world — who does this world produce, and what do they want that the world won't easily give them? That tension is the engine of the plot. Keep the answer specific. "They want revenge on the guild that exiled them" gives you scenes to write. "They want to be a hero" does not.

Step 3: Map Your Story With a Flowchart, Not a Script

Here's where video game writing splits hardest from prose. Pinnguaq recommends mapping your major story beats as a flowchart before writing a single line of dialogue — plot points, character arcs, and the places where side quests could branch off — specifically because games rarely move in a straight line. A flowchart lets you see where the story forks, where it converges again, and where a player could plausibly get stuck or lost. Writers who skip this step and go straight to prose often end up with a story that only works if the player does everything in exactly the order the writer imagined — which they won't.

Step 4: Design Quests That Actually Tell the Story

The Fetch-Quest Trap

Most first-draft quests fall into the same hole. As Doc Burford describes it: a generic fetch quest where "you know it's busywork, they know it's busywork" — kill ten rats, deliver one item, collect a reward, move on. The task carries no story weight because nothing about it required the player's specific goal, world, or choices. A quest that could be copy-pasted into any game with a find-and-replace isn't doing narrative work.

A Five-Part Framework for Better Quests

Game designer Alexander Brazie — a 25-year industry veteran whose credits include World of Warcraft , League of Legends , and Ori and the Will of the Wisps — breaks quest design into five concrete steps: determine the quest's goal and why the player should care about it, create a hook that pulls the player in (an NPC crying for help, a job board, environmental storytelling), sketch a flowchart of the objectives and any branching outcomes, plan a reward that actually matches the risk involved, and keep the whole thing focused enough that it doesn't become convoluted. Run every quest idea through those five checkpoints before you build it, and "collect ten rat tails" tends to turn into something with an actual reason to exist.

Step 5: Keep the Story Small Enough to Remember

Beginners tend to over-build. Game designer Jeff Vogel — who has been shipping narrative RPGs since the 1990s — argues that the stories players remember best are built from a small number of clearly drawn elements, not sprawling casts and nations. He points to The Last of Us as an example: at its spine, the story is just four things — Joel, Ellie, the zombies, and the Fireflies. Everything else supports those four. Introduce five factions and three rival kingdoms in your first game, and players will forget most of them before the credits roll. A tight, self-contained story beats an ambitious one your players can't hold in their heads.

Common Beginner Mistakes in Video Game Storytelling

• Writing dialogue before mapping the story. Without a flowchart first, branches don't reconnect cleanly and side quests contradict the main plot.
• Rewarding low effort with low stakes and high effort with the same low stakes. Per Brazie's framework, reward value should scale with quest difficulty, or players stop trusting your quest log.
• Introducing too much world at once. Save the deep lore for players who go looking for it — codex entries, optional NPCs, environmental details — instead of front-loading it into the opening minutes.
• Treating every quest as a delivery task. If a quest's outcome is obvious the moment it's assigned, it isn't adding anything the player will remember.

How Game Gen Mentors Help You Build Your First Original Story

None of this is a one-weekend skill, and you don't have to figure it out alone. Game Gen has spent the last 10 years building an online, neuroinclusive program specifically for people who want to go from "I have an idea" to "I built an original game" — including students who've never written a line of code or a line of dialogue before. Our mentors have worked on games and narrative systems at studios including Sony Computer Entertainment America, Brass Lion Entertainment, Game Mechanic Studios, Midnight Hour Games, and RedZone Interactive, and they work directly with students on their own quest lines and world-building, not a generic curriculum. We partner with California regional centers to make the program accessible for neurodiverse and disabled students, and classes run on flexible, mentor-guided schedules so you can put in real hours — 20 to 40 a week if you're serious about it — around the rest of your life. If quest design and lore are what pulled you into games in the first place, that's exactly what our program is built around.

FAQ: Writing Your First Video Game Story

Whether you're aiming to compare mentorship against bootcamps and community college, want to see how a strong portfolio piece comes together, or you're curious what game developers actually earn in California, the story you write today can become the portfolio piece that gets you there. Game Gen also offers video game classes for kids and teens if you're introducing a younger writer to the craft.