As a film professional, I’ve worn many hats – from editing and cinematography to roles as an assistant director and second unit director – on a range of independent productions. Transitioning into game development, I’m leveraging that cinematic experience to inform how we craft interactive stories. In this article, I’ll explore how classic directing principles from film can apply to video game design, especially in systemic and procedural storytelling. I’ll also share how we’re implementing these principles in Wardrome through RIDLEY, our in-game “invisible director” AI that dynamically orchestrates the player’s experience.

Why Cinematic Principles Matter in Games

Game developers have long borrowed techniques from cinema to heighten immersion and emotional impact. However, unlike a film director, a game’s “director” (whether human or AI) must work within an interactive medium where the audience is also an active participant. The challenge is to deliver cinematic moments and storytelling without taking agency away from the player.

RIDLEY addresses this by observing player behavior and adjusting game events on the fly – much like Valve’s famed AI Director in Left 4 Dead, which monitored players and dynamically spawned enemies or offered respite to maintain pacing. The goal is to marry cinematic direction with player-responsive design, creating an experience that feels filmic yet personal to each play-through.

Below, we break down key directing principles – Visual Composition, Pacing, Point of View, Emotional Framing, Environmental Storytelling, and Editing/Montage – describing their role in film, seeing how top games use them, and showing how RIDLEY leverages each in Wardrome.

Visual Composition: Crafting the View

In film, visual composition is the art of arranging what’s in the frame – actors, lighting, set design, camera angle – to convey meaning without words. A well-composed shot guides the viewer’s eye, highlights story elements, and evokes mood (consider the balanced symmetry in a Wes Anderson film versus the chaotic framing in a Paul Greengrass action scene). Filmmakers use techniques like the rule of thirds, leading lines, and foreground/background layering to create visually appealing and thematically resonant shots.

In Games: Game designers don’t have quite the same level of control over framing, because players often control the “camera” or viewpoint. In many games the perspective is either fixed (e.g. a side-scroller) or player-controlled (free camera in 3D). Despite this, developers achieve cinematic composition through environmental and camera design. For example, Inside (2016) by Playdead is a 2.5D platformer that uses a fixed side view – but every scene is artfully composed, with stark lighting and depth creating striking silhouettes.

The result feels like a sequence of meticulously framed film shots. Reviewers noted Inside’s “evocative scenes” use drawn-out quiet and visual storytelling in a way that “daringly lets the player fill the void with meaning,” something overt exposition would only spoil.

In The Last of Us (2013), the over-the-shoulder third-person camera is deliberately kept tight on the characters during conversations, emulating a shallow focus shot to direct our attention and empathy to their facial expressions.

Even fully 3D games use level geometry and camera cues to compose vistas: stepping onto a cliff in Shadow of the Colossus reveals a panoramic view with the tiny protagonist against a colossal landscape – a composition that underscores the theme of a lone hero in a vast world.

Wardrome is not cinematic because of camera tricks or visual spectacle. It is cinematic because it is structured as a sequence of directed situations. RIDLEY does not behave like a virtual cinematographer, but like a television-era director and story editor, closer to Star Trek: The Original Series than to modern blockbuster staging. Its core unit is not the “shot,” but the mission: a distress signal, a diplomatic incident, an unexpected encounter, a tense exchange between characters.

RIDLEY assembles and sequences these situations based on context, player state, and narrative pressure. A mission may begin with a calm transmission, escalate through dialogue and moral tension, and resolve without a single shot fired. Visual presentation remains secondary and functional; what matters is who speaks, what is at stake, and when the player is forced to decide. The cinematic quality emerges from pacing, dialogue timing, and consequence, not from spectacle.

Because the system is procedural, the same narrative structure can produce radically different episodes across playthroughs. Two players may both receive a distress call, but from different factions, under different political conditions, leading to entirely different outcomes. In this sense, RIDLEY does not compose images, it directs episodes. It ensures that Wardrome feels like a living sci-fi series, where each session is an authored chapter, even though no fixed script exists.

Pacing and Rhythm: Timing the Experience

Pacing – the control of timing and rhythm in a narrative – is a cornerstone of directing. A great director modulates tension and release: consider how a thriller might alternate quiet dialogue scenes with bursts of action, or how a drama lingers on a silent, emotional moment after a climax. In film, pacing is controlled through editing, scene length, and screenplay structure. The director deliberately paces the story to guide the audience’s emotional journey (Hitchcock famously likened suspense to “playing the audience like an organ,” building and releasing tension).

In Games: Pacing is uniquely tricky because players can linger or rush, potentially disrupting carefully planned timing. Nonetheless, game designers use various tricks to enforce or encourage pacing. Linear action games (e.g. Call of Duty campaigns) often use scripted triggers – the game waits for you to hit an invisible checkpoint, then a flurry of events ensues. This ensures a consistent pace (though at the cost of replay surprise).

Other games give players freedom but use dynamic difficulty or AI “Directors” to pace challenge. Valve’s Left 4 Dead (2008) pioneered this with its AI Director: if the players are breezing through, it might spawn extra enemies to amp up intensity; if they’re struggling, it might hold off and give a breather. The result is a rollercoaster of tension that feels natural and player-responsive.

The Last of Us uses pacing masterfully in a more scripted way – after a harrowing combat sequence, the game often gives you a calm exploration segment where characters chat and the player scavenges in peace. This ebb and flow keeps the emotional journey from overwhelming the player and makes the intense moments hit even harder.

On the experimental end, Hideo Kojima’s Death Stranding (2019) embraced slowness: long stretches of solitary hiking with minimal action, punctuated by occasional spikes of danger or poignant cutscenes. Many players found this unconventional, but it was a deliberate pacing decision to evoke loneliness and relief – a very “directorly” move in game form.

RIDLEY’s Approach: Pacing is perhaps RIDLEY’s primary directive. Acting as an “invisible director,” RIDLEY monitors what the player is doing and how they’re doing. Is the player cruising through without challenge? RIDLEY might escalate tension by generating a new enemy encounter or triggering an unexpected story event. Has the player just survived a tough battle by the skin of their teeth? RIDLEY will recognize this and hold off any new threats for a while, perhaps triggering a serene music track or a friendly NPC encounter to let them catch their breath.

Essentially, RIDLEY dynamically paces the gameplay and story – much like a human dungeon master adjusting a D&D session. This extends to narrative pacing too: if the player has gone a long time without any plot development, RIDLEY can inject a procedurally generated story (for example, a distress signal that leads to a short side story) to keep the narrative momentum. By controlling tempo in real-time, RIDLEY prevents the dreaded “mid-game slump” or pacing dead zones. The game’s flow adapts to the player, aiming for that cinematic balance of rising and falling action that keeps players engaged from start to finish.

Point of View: Whose Eyes (or Camera) Are We Seeing Through?

Point of view (POV) in film refers to the perspective from which the audience experiences the scene. Directors decide whether to show events through a particular character’s eyes (literal POV shots or over-the-shoulder perspectives) or from an objective, third-person camera. Changing the POV can dramatically shift how the audience feels – think of a horror movie where we see through the monster’s eyes versus watching the victim from a detached view. It’s a powerful tool: a first-person perspective can create intimacy or fear, while a wider, third-person view can establish context or grandeur.

In Games: POV is literally built into gameplay – every game has a default player perspective (first-person, third-person, side-scrolling, isometric, etc.), which is a design decision affecting both gameplay and storytelling.

For example, Resident Evil 7 shifted to first-person to amplify the horror with an immersive, claustrophobic POV, whereas God of War (2018) chose an over-the-shoulder third-person with a “one-shot” continuous camera to maintain both intimacy with the protagonist and cinematic presentation.

Importantly, game designers trade off control for immersion: unlike in film, once you let the player control the camera, you relinquish precise framing. As one design analysis noted, “games don’t focus your view with directorial camera control or insist on a certain pace; instead, they invite you to step into the space and explore at your own pace”. Still, games can borrow POV techniques. Inside is essentially one long side-view tracking shot – a deliberate, authored POV that makes the player feel like an observer to a dark fable, which heightens its impact.

The Last of Us frequently uses an over-the-shoulder POV not just in gameplay but in cutscenes, to keep us tied to Joel or Ellie’s perspective emotionally. Meanwhile, Death Stranding alternates between player-controlled third-person exploration and director-controlled cutscenes where Kojima uses camera angles you’d never see in gameplay – effectively switching POV from player to storyteller when it’s time for narrative beats.

RIDLEY’s Approach:
In Wardrome, point of view is not defined by a camera position, but by who holds narrative relevance at a given moment. RIDLEY does not shift perspective through cinematic camera moves or cutscenes; instead, it reassigns informational and emotional focus. A change in POV is expressed through dialogue priority, message framing, interface emphasis, and the ordering of events, not through visual spectacle.

When a major event occurs, such as the detection of an unknown vessel or a diplomatic incident, RIDLEY may temporarily privilege a specific perspective: a bridge officer reporting with incomplete information, a civilian transmission breaking protocol, or an NPC interpreting the event through their own bias. The player experiences the situation as that character understands it, often with uncertainty or distortion. No omniscient view is provided unless it has been earned.

Similarly, communications such as distress calls or direct conversations are not treated as cinematic inserts, but as diegetic narrative moments. RIDLEY decides who speaks first, what information is delayed, what emotional tone dominates the exchange, and when silence is more meaningful than exposition. The result is a POV shift that is cognitive rather than visual: the player is encouraged to think from inside a viewpoint, not to observe it from outside.

This approach preserves player agency while still applying directorial intent. RIDLEY does not “show” the player what to feel; it constrains and frames what can be known, much like classic episodic science fiction television. The cinematic effect emerges from perspective control and narrative timing, ensuring that each situation in Wardrome delivers the right sense of urgency, ambiguity, or scope without ever breaking the interactive flow.

Emotional Framing: Setting the Mood and Tone

Directors are essentially emotion managers – through framing, lighting, music, and actor performance, they frame each moment emotionally to make the audience feel what they intend. “Emotional framing” in film might involve using a close-up shot to capture a character’s tearful eyes (to evoke empathy), shooting a scene in warm sunset hues (to create nostalgia or romance), or composing a wide shot of a lone figure in a vast empty landscape (to convey isolation or awe). All elements in the frame serve the emotional tone.

A classic example is Spielberg’s use of low-angle shots and swelling music in E.T. when the bicycles lift off – the framing and audio cue the audience to feel wonder and joy. Horror films, by contrast, use tight framing with lots of shadows to create anxiety. The director also controls pacing and actor blocking as part of emotional framing (a slow push-in camera move can build dread or intimacy, for example).

In Games: Games engage emotions through both narrative/cinematics and gameplay feedback. Visual and audio design are crucial: color palettes, lighting, and music dynamically change to reflect game states (think of how Silent Hill envelops you in fog and creepy radio static to instill dread, or how Journey uses sweeping desert vistas and an orchestral score to inspire awe and melancholy).

Notably, games must often do this in real-time, responding to player actions. The Last of Us again is a masterclass – its visual and sound design work together to “communicate an arc of emotion,” ensuring all elements – from the desaturated, decaying environment to the haunting score – align with the tone of each chapter. Even in pure gameplay, mechanics can frame emotion: a high difficulty fight can create desperation and triumph, a forgiving peaceful area creates relief.

Death Stranding is worth mentioning for emotional framing: Kojima intentionally made the landscape barren and hostile, but at times the game triggers a Low Roar song and pulls the camera out to a cinematic wide shot when you crest a hill – it’s a directed moment of emotional reflection, making the player feel small and lonesome yet hopeful in reconnecting this broken world. These techniques mirror film but with a twist: interactivity. Unlike a passive viewer, the player’s own input (like struggling up a mountain path) contributes to the emotional framing – the game might slow the character’s movement and remove HUD elements as music plays, essentially framing the gameplay itself in an emotional light.

RIDLEY’s Approach:
In Wardrome, emotional framing is not achieved through visual effects or cinematic presentation, but through context, tone, and narrative pressure. RIDLEY does not “set the mood” by altering lighting or music cues in a filmic sense; instead, it modulates what the player is told, when it is told, and under what emotional conditions decisions are made.

RIDLEY continuously evaluates the state of the story and the player’s position within it. A situation of impending failure may be framed through fragmented reports, hesitant dialogue, conflicting advice from NPCs, or the conspicuous absence of reassuring information. Conversely, a moment of success or alliance may be undercut by unease, ambiguity, or delayed consequences rather than overt celebration. Emotional framing in Wardrome is rarely explicit; it is often inferred, forcing the player to sit with uncertainty rather than being guided toward a prescribed feeling.

Procedural systems play a central role in this process. RIDLEY links narrative states to shifts in conversational tone, mission structure, and information reliability. A betrayal does not require a dramatic reveal; it may surface through subtle inconsistencies, altered priorities, or a sudden change in how characters address the player. The emotional weight emerges from accumulation and timing, not from presentation.

This approach mirrors what skilled film directors achieve through restraint rather than emphasis. RIDLEY applies emotional direction by controlling narrative access, not by amplifying signals. As a result, Wardrome remains emotionally responsive without becoming manipulative: tension, doubt, relief, or resolve arise organically from the player’s engagement with the system. The story feels alive not because it tells the player what to feel, but because it consistently places them in situations where feeling becomes unavoidable.

Environmental Storytelling: The World as a Character

In film, production design and set dressing often tell a story before any character speaks. The term environmental storytelling refers to conveying narrative through the setting itself. A director might show a wall full of family photos in the background to imply a character’s history, or linger on graffiti in a dystopian cityscape to hint at societal collapse. Classic examples include the abandoned clutter in Wall-E’s opening (speaking volumes about the lost human world) or the eerie, lived-in Nostromo ship in Alien, which tells you it’s a working-class freight operation in space through details alone.

In Games: Environmental storytelling is arguably even more vital, as players spend a lot of time exploring worlds. A well-designed game environment can imply events or backstory without any cutscene or text – letting players discover story bits organically.

Bioshock (2007) is frequently cited: the underwater city of Rapture is laden with visual clues (faded art-deco grandeur, signs of violent collapse, audio diaries) that let the player piece together what happened.

The Last of Us uses this to heart-wrenching effect: you often stumble upon scenes like a skeleton slumped against a wall, a family photo and a half-written note nearby – from those environmental details, you infer the tragic final moments of a family during the infection outbreak. No cutscene needed; the player fills in the blanks, making the discovery personal and poignant. This kind of subtle, “implied narrative” encourages players to act as detectives, co-authoring the story by interpreting clues.

Playdead’s Inside and Limbo are also great examples – nearly everything you understand about the plot and world comes from the scenery and how it changes (ominous labs, mind-controlled zombies, etc.), with zero dialogue. Environmental storytelling isn’t just backstory, either – it can guide gameplay. Designers use cause-and-effect vignettes in levels (a trail of blood leading to a door hints danger ahead) or landmarks (a distant tower to orient the player) – all storytelling through setting.

RIDLEY’s Approach:
In Wardrome, environmental storytelling is not treated as the placement of static props, but as the contextualization of narrative situations. Because locations, narration, and dialogue are all generated dynamically, RIDLEY does not “decorate” environments; it assigns meaning to them. A place becomes narratively relevant through what is said about it, what happens there, and how characters interpret it.

When a player is sent to a derelict space station, RIDLEY does not rely on pre-authored environmental clues alone. Instead, it constructs a coherent narrative frame around the location: reports describing partial failures, conflicting testimonies from different sources, fragmented logs, or uneasy silences during briefings. Any environmental detail that emerges, whether physical or descriptive, is selected to reinforce that frame. The environment exists in service of the narrative, not the other way around.

Similarly, the consequences of events are not conveyed through spectacle, but through narrative residue. If a colony is attacked or abandoned, RIDLEY ensures that subsequent missions, conversations, and reports reflect that outcome. A later visit may be accompanied by altered briefings, changed attitudes from NPCs, or second-hand accounts of what was lost. The “ruins” of a place are often reconstructed in dialogue and narration rather than shown explicitly, allowing the player’s imagination to complete the picture.

Crucially, RIDLEY tracks player decisions and propagates their effects across the narrative fabric of the game. Ignoring a distress signal does not immediately trigger a visible failure state; instead, its consequences surface gradually through rumors, altered mission availability, or shifts in political relationships. Environmental storytelling thus becomes temporal and relational, unfolding over time rather than being consumed in a single location.

In this model, the galaxy of Wardrome feels alive not because it is densely decorated, but because it is consistently narrated. Every place is defined by what is known, what is uncertain, and what is remembered about it. By ensuring that narration, dialogue, and mission context remain coherent with past events, RIDLEY allows players to uncover a vast, interconnected story world, assembled dynamically but experienced as intentional and authored.

Editing and Montage: Cutting, Transition, and Narrative Flow

Editing – the assembly of shots into a sequence – is the invisible art behind film storytelling. Through cuts, montages, and transitions, directors control narrative structure, compress time, and juxtapose images for meaning. A rapid montage can cover years of story in seconds; a smash cut can deliver a shock or a laugh; cross-cutting can build suspense by interweaving two threads. In essence, editing is where the film really becomes a story. The audience doesn’t see the editor’s work on screen, but they feel it in the pacing and coherence of the narrative.

In Games: Traditional editing (cuts from one shot to another) is not commonly applicable during interactive gameplay – you can’t just cut the player’s viewpoint arbitrarily without disorienting them. Games primarily use editing in non-interactive cutscenes, which often mimic film editing exactly.

For instance, Uncharted and The Last of Us have many cutscenes with shot-reverse-shot dialogues, montages of traveling (to skip boring parts), etc., just like a movie. However, games also use interactive equivalents of editing. Consider games that let you trigger a “skip travel” – that’s essentially a montage or cut in time, executed by player choice.

Some games have adopted montage sequences in gameplay (e.g., a training montage in Sleeping Dogs happens via a series of mini-games and cutscene snippets).

Red Dead Redemption 2 seamlessly transitions to a cinematic camera and music while you ride between towns, effectively editing out the tedium and presenting travel as a montage with emotional music.

There’s also the concept of dynamic narrative sequencing: in Detroit: Become Human, scenes can be rearranged or skipped based on choices – the “editing” of the story’s sequence becomes partly player-determined, but the game ensures it still flows logically.

A critical design maxim is that while film says “show, don’t tell,” games say “do, don’t show.”

As Prince of Persia creator Jordan Mechner put it, “in a film it’s better to show than tell, but in a video game it’s better to do than watch. Give the story’s best moments to the player, and he’ll never forget them – put them in a cutscene, and he’ll yawn.”.

This encapsulates the challenge: games shouldn’t rely too heavily on non-interactive cutscene editing for their best moments. Instead, some of the most powerful “edits” in games are those the player creates – for example, the emergent narrative when a player in Minecraft builds a shelter just as night falls is effectively the player editing together their own survival story with actions, not shots.

RIDLEY’s Approach:
In Wardrome, editing is not about cutting images or inserting non-interactive sequences. It is about deciding when situations begin, when they end, and how they are allowed to follow one another. RIDLEY does not interrupt gameplay with cutscenes or montages; instead, it performs what could be described as narrative editing: the regulation of time, focus, and story progression.

RIDLEY controls pacing by advancing or compressing narrative time when appropriate. If the player has exhausted all meaningful actions before a scheduled development, the system may advance the timeline implicitly, allowing consequences to unfold without requiring the player to idle. Time passes not through visual devices, but through updated reports, changed mission availability, or new information entering the narrative space. What a film would solve with a dissolve or montage, Wardrome resolves through state transition.

Parallel storylines are handled in a similar fashion. Wardrome may contain multiple active narrative threads, political, personal, or strategic, all evolving at different speeds. RIDLEY monitors their narrative weight and intervenes when imbalance emerges. If a primary conflict has dominated for too long, RIDLEY may reintroduce a secondary thread through an unexpected message, a request for intervention, or a change in character behavior. This is not a cut in the cinematic sense, but a reallocation of narrative attention, comparable to a showrunner deciding when to surface a subplot to maintain overall coherence.

Crucially, these transitions are never arbitrary. RIDLEY intervenes only when it improves clarity, rhythm, or consequence. Repetition is minimized not by removal, but by escalation or resolution. Moments of narrative significance are allowed to resonate because they are not immediately overwritten by new stimuli.

The result is a procedural experience that feels edited rather than assembled. Even without a fixed script or predefined sequence, Wardrome maintains a sense of progression and intention. The player does not witness the hand of the editor, but feels its presence in the absence of dead time, in the measured return of unresolved threads, and in the overall rhythm of the story. This is editing translated from cinema into systems: invisible, structural, and essential.

The Director’s Touch in Every Playthrough

Bringing cinematic direction principles into game design is about creating resonance – making players feel story beats as strongly as if they were watching a great film, yet with the added immersion of interactivity. From visual composition and controlled pacing to emotional framing and environmental storytelling, we’ve seen that games can employ all these techniques, though often with a twist to respect player agency.

Modern titles like The Last of Us, Inside, and Death Stranding are proof that when done right, games can evoke the same emotional and aesthetic power as cinema while offering a unique personal experience.

With Wardrome’s RIDLEY system, we’re attempting to push this idea further by embedding a virtual “director” into the game’s AI. RIDLEY doesn’t just run the game world; it dramaturges it – adjusting angles, timing, tone, and narrative focus in response to the player. Our hope is that this results in every player’s story feeling tightly directed yet completely their own. One player might inadvertently create a slow-burn political thriller, another an action-packed space epic, purely through how RIDLEY arranges their gameplay narrative.

For game developers, the takeaway is that cinematic principles are not about making games into passive movies – they’re about using the language of film to enhance the interactive experience. Even a procedural, systemic game can benefit from a director’s touch: thoughtful composition to highlight key moments, pacing that respects the player’s emotional journey, perspective shifts that maximize impact, and world details that whisper lore from every corner.

By studying film techniques and creatively mapping them to game systems, we open up new possibilities for storytelling. After all, whether in a theater seat or at a PC, human players crave memorable stories and emotional journeys. The tools and mediums may differ, but the principles of great direction – clarity, intentionality, empathy with the audience – remain universal.

In Wardrome, those principles guide the RIDLEY AI to craft a space opera that responds to you and makes you feel. We’re excited to see players step into this directed-yet-open experience. With a bit of luck (and a lot of iteration), the invisible hand of RIDLEY will ensure that the tales emerging from Wardrome are as riveting and cinematic as any scripted saga – and that you, the player, feel like both the hero and the co-director of your own sci-fi epic.