When designing your story you can choose from a few common storytelling approaches to structure your game narrative. Two of very popular storytelling structures are: Three-Act structure and Hero’s journey.

Three-act structure describes the well known storyline where

• Act 1 sets the story context and introduces the character or situation that happened and why the player is now here. It also tells what is the quest that the player has to fulfill to solve the situation.
• Act 2 is the story building time where the player is getting ready to achieve the goal, collecting materials, meeting people, exploring surroundings to get closer to the goal.
• Act 3 the climax of the story where player is confronting the challenge and reaching the conclusion of the game.

Hero’s Journey storytelling scheme was first described by Joseph Campbell in his book “The Hero with a Thousand Faces” (1949), where he analysed many mythical stories about heros to find out what these stories have in common. Almost every Hero story consist of these 5 stages:

1. A call to adventure reaches the hero. The hero begins their journey outside of the safe world.
2. The trail of trials. The hero passes through many different challenges on their way.
3. The hero will struggle with a major problem or face a major evil.
4. The hero returns to the safe world.
5. Finally, the hero shows how they have learned something in their adventures that applies to their everyday world.