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Shapeways' 3D Board Games_Have a look! And make your own.

http://www.shapeways.com/marketplace/games/board-games?li=nav

Shapeways Picks

Knucklehead

$99.00 by Ethan_Chodos

Surreal Chess Set - My Masterpieces - Bishop II

$56.00 by MANDELWERK

mikelepage's Cyvasse piece set (one side)

$85.00 by mikelepage

Love Letter tokens (13 pcs)

$11.20 by Roolz

All Board Games

1/144 Fokker Dr.I

$8.98 by kampfflieger

Senate Starship - With base

$21.70 by TOPO

Lazo piece version 4 width 20 thickness 3.0

$3.94 by twixter

Cargo ships (4 pcs)

$8.55 by Roolz

Senate Starship

$14.99 by TOPO

Replacement Clips Betrayal at House on the Hill

$18.99 by raso

Catan_sheep_hexagon

$18.00 by tedparsec

Typographical Chess Set

$94.80 by OneSaveSolutions

 

More at: http://www.shapeways.com/marketplace/games/board-games?li=nav
 

How Everybody's Gone to the Rapture is a response to the state of story and game writing over the last few years. by Dan Pinchbeck on 06/08/15_Gamasutra

http://gamasutra.com/blogs/DanPinchbeck/20150608/245370/How_Everybodys_Gone_to_the_Rapture_is_a_response_to_the_state_of_story_and_game_writing_over_the_last_few_years.php

The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community.
The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.

---

 

Let’s talk about Nosgoth. The environment of Soul Reaver: Legacy of Kain is, for me, still an outstanding example of world design, but also a great example of what we wanted to try and do differently with Rapture. It remains one of my favourite ever games (I’m a huge Amy Hennig fan). For me, what’s so special about Nosgoth are places like this:

That’s Nupraptor’s Retreat and you can explore it, climbing up through the skull, and right at the top there’s the Stone Glyph. That’s not in any way essential for the main quest, it’s a complete diversion, but it’s a lovingly crafted diversion that is amazing probably because there’s nothing there really that is essential.

You don’t engage with it for a goal, particularly, but because of the love of exploration. It adds depth to the world, and I think this is largely because of two things. Firstly, it’s because of this lack of goal orientation (I wrote about this a little while back in relation to Far Cry 4). Secondly, it remains deeply ambiguous. 

I hadn’t played Legacy of Kain: Blood Omen when I played Soul Reaver so I didn’t know any of the mythos or background for it – it was just a big artificial skull lying in a desolate landscape and that just screamed “ATMOSPHERE!” at me. It’s like the ruins in the Forbidden Land in Shadow of the Colossus. They are powerful because you don’t know. Or like the subterranean Dwemer ruins in Skyrim, the real power comes from what isn’t there, not what is (for me actually, the Dwemer’s got increasingly less interesting the more I knew, the more my imagination was replaced by fixed mythos – which is a perennial problem with RPGs and the old school approach of chucking as much mythos at the screen as humanly possible, which is something – interestingly – the Bloodborne doesn’t bother with, but still creates a phenomenally powerful sense of place).

Likewise, The Forbidden Land in Shadow of the Colossus is amazing because it’s already gone, dead, there’s nothing you can do or understand. It draws its power from its ability to harness your imagination as a player because it doesn’t crowd it out. This is tried and tested in games – Bioshock relies on the gaps between the narrative beats – the lack of knowing exactly what has happened allows you to fill those gaps with your own interpretation. It’s the old horror adage that there’s nothing as scary as the monster you create yourself. Games might be awesome but they have nothing on player imagination.

Anyway, it was this absence and the power of inferred story rather than explicitly told story which led to a lot of the design decisions, particularly early on, in Rapture. The other major thing we wanted to look at – again as a replacement for the traditional model of linear story threads in a non-linear argument – was the idea of the discovered fragment that forces, or rather inspires, you to re-evaluate what you know about the world that’s been presented to you. This is trickier to achieve without resorting to linear narrative twists, which are a common enough tactic. 

It’s a filmic and novelistic conceit really, or at least, it’s an inheritance from those traditions, the reversal twists of films like Shymalan’s The Sixth Sense or novels like William Golding’s Pincher Martin. Whilst not going as far as that, most narratives do rest on the continuous re-evaluation of events and characters as our knowledge changes, but games tend to not be very good at this. It’s perhaps a result of the fact that most game dialogue still tends hover around the descriptive level, not pushing for more poetic or ambiguous language, so the subtleties get lost. This is exacerbated by the majority of game narrative being tied to pushing the player on, or providing a narrativised wrapping for actions. 

The oldest gameplay function of story being to create a framework for repetitive activity that if not actually cloaking the repetition, gives us a get-out suspension of disbelief architecture so we don’t get bored of just hunting down and pressing the Big Red Button for twenty plus hours at a time. This is something I wrote about a lot when I did my PhD on First Person Shooters – if you’re feeling strong and can bear to wade through a lot of academic stuff, there's a lot more detail there.

What I really love about game writing is rarely the core stuff, the plot, the main thread, which can be great (actually, it’s rarely great, but it can be great and not always where you expect it to be, like Wolfenstein: The New Order which is my favourite game writing of last year, and criminally under-rated), but in the incidental narrative fragments. Metro: Last Light has some brilliant vignettes that just fall along your path – I’ve talked recently about the “Can you catch cancer” dialogue between father and daughter fishing, and there’s also the brilliant diatribe by the old critic just outside the theatre in Bolshoi.  

These moments might not be plot twists or reveals but the affect your emotional mood – this is the real power of environmental storytelling or, as Rob Briscoe once called it “emotional signposting”. 

Game story is not just good at telling you what to do next, or providing a bandage for it, it’s absolutely terrific at creating an emotional architecture that you carry forwards, changing the way you relate to or even interpret the game. 

Argo’s death creates a different emotional tone for the final Colossus, even if you strip away everything else. It matters. Your own anger and sense of betrayal at the end of Red Dead Redemption give the final sequence meaning – and the really clever thing there is, if you are like me, you are really hacked off at the game for putting you in an unwinnable position so there’s a genuine anger being co-opted by the fiction.

So anyway. Here’s the two key components underpinning what I wanted to do with Rapture’s story:

1)      focus on inferred story by foregrounding absence and inspiring you to use the most powerful tool in our design kit – your imagination – to create a story together (rather than offering what usually transpire as meaningless, frustrating branches where I’m actually forcing you to accept my inevitably limited reading of events rather than letting your imagination flourish)

2)      play down a central linear plot that is all about solutions, or tied to goals or serving gameplay as a mechanic, and create a space for those small moments that really create depth and a rich, full capacity for emotional signposting to be the core of the experience.

In other words – here’s the basic premise. It’s your story, as much as mine. We’ve been talking about this as a community and industry for a long time now, how your actions throughout a game, if it does its job of connecting to you properly, create a narrative. What still is the normal model however is that you have to wedge your story into the spaces left by a plot that is like an unwieldy oil tanker wallowing in rough seas, as it tries to force you into the correct emotional tone to justify the story itself. This is really wrongheaded.

I’ve used the example of shooting Jen in Prey before, where the game was so desperately heavy-handed and clumsy in its attempts to make me feel sad, the whole thing became unintentionally comic. 

I had a similar experience at the end of Far Cry 4 when I took great pleasure in capping Sabal on the basis that I was so sick and tired of the hamfisted ‘oooh, but every moral decision you make has a counter-argument’ crap I’d been hosed down with for the last few hours. I sided with Pagan frankly, because he was only person in the ENTIRE COUNTRY who wasn’t serving up a moral lecture EVERY DAMN OPPORTUNITY HE GOT.

I wanted to write a story that left you free to form your own emotional connections that let the core of the experience be about how you felt about what was going on, that didn’t restrict your imagination to branches or a pre-defined slot, and where what you found and how you felt about it was given room to breathe. A genuine collaboration between the game and your imagination.
We’ll find out in just a couple of months whether or not I managed it, I guess.

Writing in Games: It’s Much More Than Narrative_Why some of the best writing has nothing to do with character or story. By Tim Biggs

22 Jun 2014  Warning: This feature contains a minor spoiler for The Last of Us: Left Behind.

Writing can make or break a game. It takes many forms - from dialogue to in-game literature, voiceovers or even scripted environmental events - but in almost all cases it aims to move the game along, distil complexity into something meaningful, give justifications for gameplay conceits and keep the player attached to the characters and scenarios through story.

When it comes to pointing out ‘good writing’ in games though, we don’t always look to the examples that do these things best. More often than not we associate ‘good writing’ with well-crafted story content and entertaining text or dialogue, and while this obviously isn’t a negative thing in and of itself, it leaves room for the idea that there are games with great, skilful writing that we don’t think of as such because they aren’t literary or don’t tell a gripping story. So is there a problem with the way we evaluate the quality of writing in games?

With the exception of pure narrative, writing in games must be function first; less to do with crafting a story and more to do with non-literary concerns like player retention and awareness.

 
Often when we talk about writing, we refer to the bits between or on top of the gameplay, where the characters talk to one another or you read some text to gain exposition. Yet while that kind of writing is easier for us to identify and analyse (by looking for the indicators of quality we recognise from literature and other media), the more game-specific, more technical (and depending on the game, more vital) form of writing that takes place during and informs the gameplay can often be overlooked.

With the exception of pure narrative (for example in a cutscene), writing in games must be function first, which is to say it’s less to do with crafting a story and more to do with non-literary concerns like player retention and awareness. Concerns like how does a player know the only way to exit the room is through a ladder in the roof? What does an AI character say to alert the player to incoming danger? How will the game explain to the player that a particular area is off-limits?

Whether these concerns are addressed seamlessly depends almost entirely on the quality of the writing which, like most other art in games, is usually there to build part of the scaffolding as much as part of the pretty façade. For example having a character deliver a “no, this doesn’t go here” or a “just three more to go” or heaven forbid a “hey, listen” serves a gameplay purpose rather than a literary one, and so should be judged on whether that purpose is realised.

Ride as fast as you like, you can't get away from Navi...

Even if an offhand character remark gives you exactly the information you need at the right time to have things click into place and make you feel like a genius or a badass, such writing is unlikely to be called out as ‘good’, and I think it boils down to the fact that this kind of functional writing only really exists in video games.

As a baseline, consider Naughty Dog's Uncharted trilogy and The Last of Us, which are generally very well regarded in terms of writing and storytelling. This can be seen most recently in The Last of Us Left Behind DLC, in which the narrative cleverly negotiates our familiarity with coming-of-age stories. 

Although stories of this type tend to be predictable and hard to pull off owing to the sheer number of times they’ve been told, the characterisation and literary restraint in Left Behind allows an experience that feels exciting and surprising while still managing to convey something deeply universal. Had the characters been written more salaciously or more in line with traditional young love stories, the player would surely have anticipated this and the impact of Left Behind would have been undermined.

Such a believable relationship.

Stories like these show that video games are just as capable of incredible storytelling as film and literature, but it’s plain to see that the cleverness and skill with which the game’s narrative aspects are handled are satisfying to us in all the ways we recognise from those purely narrative forms. We recognise them as hallmarks of good storytelling. So what about the cleverness and writing skills unique to video games as a form? For an example of that I’m going to jump to a game similar to The Last of Us in many ways, but also very different.

 

The Gears of War games, not always regarded as having ‘good writing’ (“Never thought it would end like this, huh Maria!?”) make an interesting example in my argument that the way we measure writing quality in games might center the discussion mostly on the overtly artistic or narrative kind.

Whether or not the story being told in the latest game - Judgment - was of a high quality in the traditional sense, the writing was exceptional. Take the declassified missions for example, which appeared in each chapter and offered an optional set of parameters to the player, increasing the challenge but also the reward.

The parameters obviously had to be fun from a gameplay point of view, but their in-game justification required scenarios that made sense to that exact part of the narrative, could be left out entirely if the player so chose, and delivered a reasonable explanation for why visibility was suddenly limited or the mission had to be accomplished under a certain time constraint. In addition to this, voiceover had to be written that explained these ludicrous happenings from the perspective of one of the main characters, bringing in their own perspective and personality.

In the end the player has an understanding of the option, the consequences and the story, and they’ve stayed immersed in the artifice of the game throughout. It’s a great (if not very subtle) example of games writing acting as the carpenter’s hammer rather than the novelist’s pen. While none of it hit you in the gut, brought a tear to your eye or made you gasp with an unexpected twist, it was good writing nonetheless.

Turns out DudeBros can also be effective communicators too.

Zooming in from the overarching scenario-type writing to the minute-to-minute experience kind, you can also see a vital role that’s easy to overlook. We’ve all had experiences where the entirety of what’s happening in a game fails to be communicated to us coherently, either because we haven’t grasped an important mechanic or are just not looking at it the intended way.

Often in fast-paced action-heavy games where that doesn’t happen a lot (like Gears), it’s because your focus and understanding of the scenario is being shaped by mission directives or context-specific character speech. For all its malignment, “RAZOR HAIL” is a pretty stunningly effective thing for a character to scream at you if you need to be told “keep yourself covered from above at all times or you’ll be ripped to shreds”.

Whether a particular game is built around mechanics or a story at its core (or both), the function of this seemingly incidental writing is to connect the player in their limited perspective to their place in the immediate scenario and the wider game world.

A poorly written or communicated aspect of the game will break the player’s ability to experience the game as intended, even as the disruptive and unpredictable tendencies of the player will break any writer’s attempt to focus attention too absolutely or tell a story too linearly. Yet for all this, if the writing of a game is absolutely nailed the player will hardly even notice it’s there while they’re playing.

It’s this unique relationship between players and game designers - each affecting the way the other creates and experiences - that makes the supporting writing in games so largely unlike the writing in any other media, and it’s why that writing is just as worthy and just as deserving of our analysis and attention as the more literary kind we tend to focus on. 
 


Tim is a freelance writer based in Sydney. You can catch up with him on Twitter and why not join the whole IGN Australia team on Facebook?

Tips for Writers / Ubiblog Columns by Richard Dansky | Central Clancy Writer | on September 19, 2013 |

http://blog.ubi.com/the-write-stuff-september-2013-advice-for-writers/

Columns by Richard Dansky | Central Clancy Writer | on September 19, 2013 | 5 comments | in Blog Updates

The best resource you have as a writer is other writers.

For those of us of a certain age (which is to say, those of us old enough to remember typewriters, buy music on vinyl in a non-ironic way, and have fond memories of non-CGI Transformers), the image of the lone writer holds a romantic appeal – one that’s definitely echoed in the wider audience. The idea of a solitary wordsmith – locked in a room with only a typewriter and a blank page – plays to a certain fantasy of the artist, and for some forms of writing there’s some merit to it.

But even the most supposedly solitary forms of literary expression, be they novels or short stories or naughty limericks that include the word “Nantucket,” aren’t entirely solo efforts. There are editors involved. First readers. Copy editors. You get the idea. And that’s for forms that involve no other asset besides the words.
And believe me, it’s a good thing to get those other folks involved.

Most writers, in their more candid moments, will simultaneously admit to being their own worst critics and getting so wrapped up in what the writing should be that they can’t edit it properly. Having other eyes on your work is a tremendous help. Good readers and editors will mercilessly uncover the weak spots and the cheats in your narrative, will relentlessly expose places where you got stylistically lazy, and call out the places where you shortchanged the reader.

Also, if you’re lucky, they’ll catch the typos.

The trick is, of course, finding readers and editors who can do that for you, who can read what you’ve written and provide feedback that is not only not yours, but also actively useful.

Which brings us, in a roundabout way, to games.

 

Don’t Go It Alone

For a long time, most game writers were solitary creatures, whether they wanted to be or not. The role of narrative in game design wasn’t necessarily highly regarded, and a dedicated writer was viewed as a luxury. The idea of two – or more – on a single project was mind-blowing in its extravagance.

Good readers and editors will mercilessly uncover the weak spots and the cheats in your narrative [Digression: At the first Game Writers Conference, now the Game Narrative Summit, I walked into the conference room before Marc Laidlaw’s opening talk and my first thought as I scanned the room was My God, I’m not alone. Every other person I’ve talked to who was there that day has told me roughly the same story, often using the same words.]

Which meant that when a writer wanted feedback on something they were doing, they weren’t getting it from writers.

Now wait a minute, I can hear you saying. Most of the people who are going to play the game aren’t writers, so feedback from writers is kind of key there, Spartacus. And yes, that’s true – knowing that things are or aren’t working for an audience is vitally important. If a reader hates the protagonist, it doesn’t matter if they’ve memorized Strunk and White or not; that feedback is useful.

But.

What that feedback is not, is directed, which means it’s not necessarily phrased in a way that makes it actionable. I don’t like the main character is feedback; there’s a serious disconnect between the way you position your protagonist’s backstory and her diction in the dialog you’ve written is actionable.
Let’s rewind a bit. Imagine you’re an artist and you’re showing someone your work. Their response, quite reasonably, is that they don’t like it and something’s wrong with the way the sky looks. Now, this is useful feedback insofar as it A)suggests that the project needs more work and B)calls out a rough area that could use some improvement. However, what that feedback is lacking is technical criticism, using the language of the visual arts. There’s nothing there about composition, about color, about tools – in short, it’s not couched in the professional context that would allow the artist to use it as a clearer roadmap to iteration and improvement.

And just like art, or engineering, or any other discipline within game development, writing has its own professional and technical language. Here is where the romantic notion of creation-exclusively-through-inspiration breaks down; writing is first and foremost a craft, requiring sweat and iteration and technical skill.

Like any other craft, it has techniques and best practices and standards, and the people best equipped to give feedback that addresses the needs of the craft are – wait for it – other writers. They do the job, they speak the language. And just as artists get valuable feedback from other artists, and engineers get better feedback on their code from other engineers, some of the most directed, useful feedback a writer can get will come from another writer.

[This assumes, of course, that the writer in question is good at critique and isn’t a jerk. But for the sake of continued employment of all concerned, we’ll assume both.]

I’ll confess, the first time I was put in the harness long-term with another writer (while working on Splinter Cell: Double Agent), it was a weird feeling. I’d gotten used to working alone, to the point where I wasn’t sure how to interact. I’m fairly certain Taras Stasiuk, the other writer in question, felt something similar. This was something new and different and challenging. (Which is writerese for What if they don’t like my stuff?)

 Then something weird happened. I passed Taras some of my stuff. He passed me some of his. He sent back comments on mine, which were very useful, and I sent him a few on his. I didn’t agree with all of his notes, but we discussed the places where we disagreed, which made me lay out why I’d made those choices and what they implied, and that led to some new discussions about where the characters were coming from, and before you knew it A)we had a great working dynamic and – this is the important part – B)the work was better. And I’ve relished having other writers to work with ever since.

Writing is first and foremost a craft, requiring sweat and iteration and technical skillThis is, of course, old hat to folks who’ve worked in TV writers’ rooms or found that mythical beast, the useful writers’ group. But for too many writers out there, there isn’t or hasn’t been a professional peer they could turn to. That means learning to rely only on themselves, to set up perimeters around their work, and – after too many rounds of being told I would have done it this way, and you should totally add a few dinosaurs – learning to view feedback as not necessarily in the work’s best interest. Those are hard habits to break.

They’re worth breaking, though, and that ultimately circles us around to the original premise, namely, that the best resource you have as a writer in games is other writers. Specifically, other writers who know and understand the sort of work you’re doing and who can give you the targeted feedback that will allow you to improve specific aspects of that work. So if you’re lucky enough to be on a team, or in a studio with multiple writers, then the best thing you can do is use them. Share your work, and let them share theirs with you.

Because they’re the ones in the best position to give you specific feedback you can use to make your own writing better.

columnsrichard danskythe write stuff

the author

 

Perhaps best known for his brief stint as the world’s leading authority on Denebian Slime Devils, Richard Dansky has been with Red Storm/Ubisoft since 1999. His first game was Shadow Watch and his most recent one is Splinter Cell Blacklist. In between he’s served on the advisory board for GDC’s Game Narrative Summit, helped found and develop the IGDA Game Writing SIG, and appeared on Gamasutra’s list of the top 20 game writers in 2009. He has also published six novels, one short fiction collection and a ton of tabletop RPG sourcebooks, which is why you should never tell him about your character. For a tantalizing taste of Dansky's inimitable insights, read his recurring column on the UbiBlog ("The Write Stuff") and follow him on Twitter: @RDansky

On Becoming a Game Writer / Gamasutra Columns by Richard Dansky | Central Clancy Writer | on October 10, 2013

http://blog.ubi.com/the-write-stuff-on-becoming-a-game-writer/

Columns by Richard Dansky | Central Clancy Writer | on October 10, 2013 | 36 comments | in Blog Updates

One of the questions I get asked most frequently is How do I get into game writing? Now, this isn’t the same as How did you get into game writing? Ask ten game writers that question and you’ll get twelve different answers. No, what people are looking for is the clear and well-manicured path into the profession – a certain set of steps to follow that, once completed, will yield a position as a game writer.

This is a perfectly reasonable question to ask, and in a just and fair and logical world, it would have a simple and concise answer. Unfortunately, we are not living in that world. There’s a reason every game writer’s journey is different, and that’s because different companies are looking for different things in a writer. Some embrace the role and smooth the path, some have very specific needs and wants, and some aren’t quite sure what exactly they’re going to do with a writer, but they’re pretty sure someone needs to be generating some text assets for their game right about now. There is no one true way, and anyone who tells you there is, is most likely trying to sell you something they’ve written about how to become a game writer.
That being said – and bearing in mind that I am not, in fact, trying to sell you anything – there are a few things you can do to advance toward game writing. They’re not hard and fast, there’s no achievement unlocked after accomplishing them, and they may seem a little counter-intuitive in places. But in 14 years of doing this, I haven’t found anything better. So, if you want to be a game writer, here’s what you’ve got to do:

Check Your Ego

If you believe that you are going to walk in the door as a writer, elucidate your grandiose vision for the story you want to tell and have the development team magically transmogrify into Oompa-Loompas who are there to actualize that vision, you may find yourself sadly disappointed. A writer is part of a team, there to mesh harmoniously with folks from other disciplines in order to create the player experience. Fail to understand that you are part of a team – that you are creating assets and providing deliverables, not cavorting through the fields of the Swiss Alps in a smock whilst declaiming Romantic poetry that the rest of us are privileged to hear – and you will probably also fail to understand why nobody wants to work with you.

Play Games

If you want to write games, play games. To write for any medium, you need to understand that medium’s unique form and demands. The best way to acquire that knowledge is to consume that medium, and by consuming that medium – or as we call it, “sitting your butt on the damn couch and playing some games” – gain both experiential and instinctive knowledge of what works.

It’s not the only thing, of course. You don’t sit through twelve hours of Dynasty Warriors 8 and emerge with the knowledge of how to write meaningful systemic dialog chewing its way out of your head like a particularly hungry Athena. You do, however, walk away with a pretty decent sample size of things that worked and things that didn’t work, and you can start putting that knowledge to use in your own work.

Observe Games

Of course, when I say “play games” I don’t just mean “play games.” Racking up body count in adversarial is cool, but if you’re focused exclusively on optimizing your play, you’re missing the chance to observe game writing in its natural habitat.

So play as a player, but also play as a writer. Listen to the dialog. Observe the visual storytelling. Look at the text that gets used, and ask yourself why those choices might have been made. See if you can reverse engineer – and thus understand – the narrative design.

Do this, and you’ll get a better grasp of how game writing works when the rubber hits the road. It’s not just the words, it’s when the words get used, and how many, and to what end, and where there are no words at all. Watch the game as you play it, and learn.

Make Games

The best way to learn what works as writing in a game is to get your writing in a game. Luckily, we’re in a place in the evolution of the industry when it’s possible to get your writing in a game even if you’re not working for a game company.

Go find yourself a Game Jam, or haunt a local college’s CS department bulletin boards to find groups that are making games on their own. Offer your services as a writer, even if all they need is menu text. Grab a tool kit and make something with your words in it. Get your stuff in a game and see how it plays.

And I’ll be honest here – odds are your first few cracks at it aren’t going to be great. That’s OK. This is the space where you can learn, and you can get better without your employment being on the line. Because the more games you write for, the better you’ll get at recognizing what does and doesn’t work, and the quicker you’ll build the habits of good work you’re going to need.

Besides, it doesn’t hurt to have actual, honest-to-Murgatroyd games in your portfolio.

Tweet

And by tweet, I don’t mean HAW HAW CAT VIDEO LOL. One of the things Twitter does is force you to phrase complete thoughts in a constrained space. This is entirely akin to writing for games, where you must on occasion phrase a complete thought in a space that is entirely constrained by the number of characters the German localization is going to require. Or, more likely, constrained by the fact that you don’t want your dialog to ramble, potentially interrupting gameplay in the process.

So tweet, and tweet smart. Learn how to write short, pithy sentences that communicate a point. And lay off the cat videos.

Talk With Game Writers

The best way to learn about the job is to talk to people who have done the job. This is not a surprise, nor is it unique to game writing. So, if you’re interested in the role, find ways to interact with people who are doing it. Go to conferences where game writers are speaking. Follow them on social media and engage – respectfully. I was wondering if I could ask you a few questions goes a lot further than Why did you make that incredibly stupid decision in your last game? Look to the IGDA Game Writing Special Interest Group and get on their mailing list. Make a reputation for yourself as someone who can engage cogently and professionally, and who has interesting things to say about the subject matter.

Also, don’t be a jerk.

If you do these things there’s a better shot that when someone has an opening and your name gets floated as a possibility, you’ll get a positive response. As opposed to, say, slagging a writer on your blog and then turning around and asking them for work. Because that always goes so well.

Taking the Next Steps

Will doing all these things get you a job as a game writer? No. Knocking on doors, sending out resumes, applying for gigs and presenting good work in your portfolio will actually get you the job. But if you do these things, you’re in a better position to be ready to knock on doors – and to be prepared to seize the opportunity when somebody answers.

For more of Dansky’s advice for writers, check out this post:

Tips for Writers

 columnsrichard danskythe write stuff

the author

Perhaps best known for his brief stint as the world’s leading authority on Denebian Slime Devils, Richard Dansky has been with Red Storm/Ubisoft since 1999. His first game was Shadow Watch and his most recent one is Splinter Cell Blacklist. In between he’s served on the advisory board for GDC’s Game Narrative Summit, helped found and develop the IGDA Game Writing SIG, and appeared on Gamasutra’s list of the top 20 game writers in 2009. He has also published six novels, one short fiction collection and a ton of tabletop RPG sourcebooks, which is why you should never tell him about your character. For a tantalizing taste of Dansky's inimitable insights, read his recurring column on the UbiBlog ("The Write Stuff") and follow him on Twitter: @RDansky

Build your own_Magnum Opus Crosswords (formerly Crossword Express): Word, Number and Logic Puzzles

http://www.crauswords.com/

Magnum Opus is a program which you can use to create all of the word, number and logic puzzles included in the following:-

Crosswords   Freeform   Acrostic   Akari   Codeword

Domino   Doublet   Fillin   Fillomino

Futoshiki   Gokigen   Kakuro   Ladderword

Kendoku   Minesweeper   Letterdrop   Pyramidword

Roundabouts   Sikaku   Sixpack   Slitherlink

Sudoku   Tatami   Tents   Wordsearch

• Automatic construction applies to all puzzles, and in some cases you can also use manual construction.
• Solve the puzzles interactively using the integrated Solve functions.
• Print the puzzles directly to the printer, or to PDF files.
• Export the puzzles to graphics files having the following formats BMP : GIF : JPG : PNG
• Export the puzzles to the system Clipboard ready for pasting into your preferred WP or DTP application.
• Six of the puzzle types can be exported to Web Application files which allow you to publish your puzzles interactively on your web site.
• Magnum Opus is free. No payment is required.

LEARN MORE

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Use this link to download a FREE copy of Magnum Opus.

Magnum Opus Version : 20140822
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