Storytelling for Non-Storytellers: Bringing Narrative Thinking to Production Teams

Most teams know how to plan. Fewer know how to feel the story they’re building.

In production, it’s easy to get caught in the grid: budgets, milestones, dependencies, Jira tickets. But stories don’t live in spreadsheets. They live in tension and release, in surprise and empathy, in the rhythm of what a player feels next. When every animator, engineer, and producer understands that rhythm, not just the schedule, the work transforms. Suddenly, production choices aren’t only logistical, they’re emotional. A delay isn’t just a date. It’s a beat that changes how the story lands.

When I first transitioned from film to games, I brought with me an instinct for narrative pacing — the timing of anticipation, payoff, and quiet. In film, the story is locked before the audience ever sees it. In games, it’s alive in the player’s hands. That difference forced me to teach a new kind of storytelling to teams who didn’t see themselves as storytellers.

The secret was language. When working with engineers, I’d replace “scene” with “moment.” When talking to producers, I’d describe “arcs” instead of “timelines.” Once we started speaking in emotional beats rather than task lists, alignment came faster, because everyone suddenly understood why each moment mattered.

I learned that you don’t have to write dialogue to think narratively. You just have to ask the same questions a storyteller does:

• What does the player feel right now?

• What are they anticipating next?

• How will this choice make them care?

When every discipline starts asking those questions, the product stops feeling manufactured and starts feeling meaningful. You can sense it in the energy of the team, a shared heartbeat.

Storytelling isn’t a department; it’s a mindset. It’s how we bring empathy into production, how we transform process into purpose, and how we remind ourselves, in the middle of all the moving parts, that we’re building something meant to move people.