This paper presents the development and evaluation of a toolkit designed to optimize the workflow of game designers working with narrative content and game design for indie RPGs in the Godot engine. The relevance of this study stems from the growing number of independent studios utilizing Godot and similar game engines, which necessitates the creation of specialized tools to compensate for the lack of built-in solutions for RPG development, such as dialogue systems, turn-based combat design, cutscene management, and complex user interface implementation.

The aim of the work is to design a toolkit based on an architectural analysis of the reference game Persona 5 Royal, ensuring an optimized workflow for the game designer and reducing their dependence on the programmer. Methodologically, the research relied on identifying player states, independent modules, and areas of professional responsibility, which led to the development of five tools. Their effectiveness was evaluated with the participation of 12 novice game designers, including task completion time measurements, interviews, and expert ranking.

The results of the study showed that tools without analogues in Godot ("Combat Segments," "Complex User Interface," "Dialogue System") received high expert evaluations. The "Interactive Location Objects" tool, which has an analogue in Godot, reduced task completion time by an average of 65.5%. The "Commands to the Game World" tool did not demonstrate effectiveness and requires further improvement.

The practical significance of the research results lies in the creation of a ready-to-implement toolkit that enables indie teams to reduce RPG development time and increase the autonomy of their game designers.

In open-world games, classical tools of dramatic analysis – the three-act structure, Freytag's pyramid, the hero's journey – fail to describe the actual gameplay experience: players gain freedom to choose the traversal order of modular content, making authorial control over pacing impossible. This paper introduces the concept of storytelling literacy – a player competency encompassing recognition of the emotional register of content, conscious pacing construction through activity sequencing, and narrative framing of one's own gameplay trajectory. Based on a formal model of player narrative state – an adaptation of the story-object/phase/facet/threshold-state formalism – we propose an architecture for an IT system supporting player-driven narrative. The system comprises a Narrative State Engine (feedback loop between action telemetry and the content subsystem), trajectory visualization tools for players, narrative coverage analysis tools for designers, and an adaptive content generation module based on large language models.