Beyond Level Blueprints: Visualizing the Progression of Emotion and Narrative Driven Games

This pictorial presents ECT (Emotion-Centric Timeline) -- a visual schema that visualizes the progression of emotion and narrative driven games. The visualization aims to equip analysts and designers in their learning and creative processes of emotional design for games. We illustrate how the visual schema can be used to reveal the dynamics of various design elements with the example game Journey and its comparisons with two other games. We also demonstrate with three student game design examples that the schema can serve as a creativity support tool for designers, especially novices, to conceptualize and plan a game that is driven by emotion and narrative.