After this, you evaluate the mechanisms for how the story will be conveyed: is it cinematic, is it menu-driven talking heads, or is it devoid of all conversations and solely relies on environmental storytelling? You also want to be conscious of the budget: If you only have the budget for X lines of voice dialogue, or 10 minutes of cinematics, those are very important “design bookends” to know before deciding how you’re going to flesh out the story and what kind of story you can tell with those limits.
You also need to start from the fact that it isn’t just your story. It’s also the player’s, and it’s also the team’s: You want the team to have ownership of the game elements they’re creating, and the chance to create their own visual and written narratives as long as they fall within the bookends above. I’ve found that giving designers their own space (whether key characters, certain areas of the game, or a faction) gives them more freedom and more investment in what they’re doing vs. continually shifting those same elements across different designers every few months.
Once you have the basic game story premise down, you ideally present it to all the leads before anyone else, get their take on it, and make sure that at the end of the meeting, they can “speak” to the story if asked by someone in their department. As an example, if an animator comes to the lead animator and asks for information on the Think Tank in Old World Blues, the lead animator should be able to give a brief explanation of what they are all about, and also point that same developer to key people involved in that story aspect – say, Brian Menze for the foundation concepts and inspirations, then the level designers or I for any quirks each individual Think Tank member may have, and so on.
Also, one thing that I’ve found helpful – decide what’s important to you and what’s not, and if it’s not key to the narrative, consider letting other team members explore an idea on their own. For example, in Knights of the Old Republic II, there were some companions and antagonist concepts I was very invested in, but there were others where the concept artist had more freedom to explore the characters’ visuals the way they wanted, as long as it met the basic criteria of what the character was supposed to do.
So after you’ve run the narrative premise by the leads, got their approval/included their suggestions/did a revision, etc. then you present it to the whole team, using as many assets people have already created (for example, if Brian Menze had done some concepts of the Ghost People for Dead Money, I would include those concept art pieces in the story/game presentation for the DLC). People like to see how their work is being used to support the game’s theme and story, and the more concrete examples you can use of people’s work, the better.
After this story presentation (which you should record so you can play it for others coming on to the project later), then ideally, each team member should have a grasp of the vision for the DLC, what mechanics we’re focusing on, what gear is to be found, what the story is, and who the key characters and antagonists are. We did story presentations like these as standard practice for most of the Fallout New Vegas DLCs, and it seemed to work well.
