A Neale Sourna story text.
Awards:
Best storytelling @ White Nights Conference 2016
Excellence in audio @ DevGAMM Moscow 2016
http://store.steampowered.com/app/671390/agecheck#
http://store.steampowered.com/app/671390/Metropolis_Lux_Obscura/
Sunday, October 8, 2017
A Neale Sourna Game Story Text _ METROPOLIS: LUX OBSCURA at Steam
A Neale Sourna story text.
Awards:
Best storytelling @ White Nights Conference 2016
Excellence in audio @ DevGAMM Moscow 2016
http://store.steampowered.com/app/671390/agecheck#
http://store.steampowered.com/app/671390/Metropolis_Lux_Obscura/
Thursday, October 27, 2016
8 Questions That Improve Your Game's Narrative by Angel Leigh McCoy
http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/AngelLeighMcCoy/20161024/283602/8_Questions_That_Improve_Your_Games_Narrative.php
8 Questions That Improve Your Game's Narrative
by Angel Leigh McCoy on 10/24/16
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.
Quips: Quick Tips for Game Narrative and Other Noodlings
Creating narrative for a video game has similar challenging, frustrating, and fun elements as those you encounter when putting together a jigsaw puzzle. Both tasks require critical thinking and the ability to see the big picture as well as the details.
Half the battle is learning how to evaluate each piece and determine where it belongs in the grand scheme of things. The following questions can help guide your narrative design toward stronger, more cohesive storytelling.
Does it support and strengthen the brand?
Every product has an identity that players and readers rely on. If a player is looking for a science fiction first-person shooter with mature situations, then they're going to look for a brand that has all those markings. They will then be surprised and disappointed if they start playing and learn that it's actually all about relationships and RPG-style interactions. Thus, it's important that your story support the brand.
If you're completely unfamiliar with what brand identity is, the article "Defining Brand Identity" by Christy MacLeod has basic information on it. Read that first, then come back.
At its core, the brand identity is a promise to players that you will deliver what you've said you will. As a narrative designer, it's your duty to support and strengthen the game's (and the company's) brand.
Most existing companies will have well-established definitions of what their brand identity is both for the company and for the game itself. This may include a mission and/or value statement, the voice/tone of the game, and its look and feel. With games, the ESRB rating also plays a strong role in a game's identity. And, if you're starting to make your own game (hello, indie teams), one of the first things you'll want to do is determine and document your game's identity. Many of your decisions will be based on it.
Does it make sense from a player's perspective?
Sounds basic, right, but this is one of the most challenging aspects of game writing. You have to always put yourself in the mind (and heart) of the player. There's a phenomenon I like to call "writer omniscience syndrome" which describes the fact that a writer knows everything about the story and thus assumes everyone else does too.
This, however, is never the case. Your readers and players do not know the whole picture, and so they may be confused by events that make perfect sense to you.
How do you avoid this? Avoiding writer omniscience syndrome is a skill you develop over time, like a muscle, and it starts by exercising that muscle at every turn. Ask yourself, "Have I given the player all the information they need to understand what's happening here?"
If your answer is "No," then you need to look into foreshadowing and lore delivery in prior content. Getting the set-up right is critical to a satisfying pay-off.
Have you ever experienced writer omniscience syndrome? I'd love to hear about your experience in the comments below.
Are the physics right?
Every story has its own set of internal physics that determine how the world and its elements work. The two most important story physics are world dynamics and character motivations. If the tale you're telling in-game breaks the rules you set up previously, then you'd better be fully aware of it and know exactly why you're making that story choice.
For example, in a science fiction world, interplanetary travel could be established as taking hundreds of years. If you choose to now say that your characters can teleport between planets, you must explain why they can now do this. If you can't explain it, then don't make the change.
The same applies to character motivations. If one of your characters behaves out of character, then either fortify the behavior by building in a new motivation or modify the behavior to fit. When a character changes its motivation or methods in mid-stream, it pulls the player out of their suspension of disbelief and triggers their right-brain critic, and that is not immersive storytelling.
TRAP: Many writers fall into the Shiny! trap. Don't be that writer. Your idea may be awesome, but examine it closely to see if it truly fits what you're trying to accomplish with your product.
What other areas of storytelling have story physics that you should fortify?
Can I make this story idea fit?
Game companies are filled to brimming with passionate, creative people who are overflowing with great ideas. A large part of the narrative designer's job is taking someone's else's great idea and fit it into the narrative. Game design is collaborative at its heart.
These ideas may come down from the director level, from the level designers, or from support teams like Art or Quality Assurance. Depending on the force of the passion behind the idea, you may find yourself working magic to weave an idea into the rest of the world and story.
Straight up, this isn't always possible and you may have to explain why and see the excitement die from the eyes of your coworkers. (My least favorite part of the job.)
When it is possible, then it's a puzzle that demands solving, and it will call on you to use your most creative and strategic muscles to make it not just work, but work smoothly. Your coworkers love it when their ideas become canon. It's your job to evaluate ideas and find ways for the best of them (or the one's forced on you by bigger fish) to fit into the story.
Ever had to incorporate someone else's idea into a creative project? How did it go? Tell me about it in the comments.
Is there a better way?
Neurologist David Eagleman, host of the PBS show "The Brain," believes that the first idea you have may not be the best idea—and I agree with him based on my own anecdotal experience. The problem is that we're wired to grab the first thing that comes to mind, and often that originates with whatever pop culture we're enjoying at the moment, or whatever game we played most recently, or just whatever's foremost in our minds.
The real trick—and challenge—is to stretch beyond that and really dig into your creativity for all the ideas, some of which may be better than your first one. Eagleman recommends that you not stop at the first idea, but force yourself make a list of ten ideas. I've also heard the advice to force yourself to come up with 100 ideas, but when I tried that it devolved quickly into the ridiculous. Ten seems a good number.
Remember that you're the narrative designer and that means it's your responsibility to come up with the best ideas and then pitch them to others. If you had one idea, then others did too, and they're not trained—as you are—to look beyond the obvious for the extra cool option. You will have to walk them there yourself, by explaining and justifying why your idea is better.
Let's talk about the lazy human brain!
Is this plot necessary?
In my job, I talk a lot about stages and spotlights. I view the game environment as the stage, and where you shine the spotlight defines the story you're telling. Many parts of the story will and should remain in the eaves, never making it into the spotlight. Learning to discriminate between what should get the spotlight and what shouldn't is another important narrative skill to hone.
Any plot point you put in the spotlight should advance the story—no exceptions. There are no good digressions or detours in game narrative design because we don't have that much gas to go wandering around the countryside. The focus, and thus the spotlight, should be on the core through-line and any moments that strongly support that through-line.
If you were the technician behind the spotlight, how would you choose where to shine it?
Does the story moment ask questions we can't/won't answer?
It's also important, when choosing what moments to spotlight, to consider the future. Does using this dialogue or introducing this item cause players to speculate and yearn for more? Great if you plan to pay it off! Boo, bad if you can't or won't. Players hate few things more than when the game teases them with something that they never get to experience.
We call this "story debt." It's a debt that we creators owe players, and we should endeavor never to renege on that debt. Any game that is putting out multiple releases and advancing the story in each will undoubtedly create "story debt" by introducing plot lines that they won't pay off.
This may happen because the people working on the game change, because tribal knowledge is lost over time, or because the team no longer has the bandwidth to pursue the storyline despite their best intentions.
Narrative designers can learn to be vigilant and recognize these situations, evaluate the risk, and determine whether it's worth it. Is there a better way?
Ever been saddened because an anticipated game story got dropped?
Where is this going?
"The past is already gone, the future is not yet here. There's only one moment for you to live, and that is the present moment." —Gautama Buddha.
What Buddha said is true, unless you're a narrative designer and the future of your story is at stake.
While it is true that the future cannot be set in stone until it becomes the present—and this is especially true with game design—it pays to have some idea of where the story will be going. This allows you to seed elements early on that you can pay off later to fans' delight.
You don't need to know exactly what the destination will be, but you do need to have an idea what the next few story landmarks will be. Foreshadowing, as mentioned above, adds depth and clarity to your story. The more you know about the future of your story, the more control you have over foreshadowing.
The best laid plans of mice and men (and women) often go awry, however, so you have to remain flexible. If a tree falls across the path you're on (or an asset doesn't get completed in time), you'll have to take a detour. It's this flexibility and practical use of all these questions that makes you a great narrative designer and allows you to create awesome experiences for your players.
For the past 9 years, Angel McCoy has been a writer and narrative designer on the AAA MMO Guild Wars 2. In the past, she lent her creative skills to industry heavy-weights XBox.com, Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, and White Wolf's World of Darkness.
In her spare time, she founded and serves as Creative Director for the indie game team at Games Omniverse. Her narrative toolbox is overflowing with lessons learned and shortcuts discovered, so she's sharing some of the best of them with you.
The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.
Quips: Quick Tips for Game Narrative and Other NoodlingsCreating narrative for a video game has similar challenging, frustrating, and fun elements as those you encounter when putting together a jigsaw puzzle. Both tasks require critical thinking and the ability to see the big picture as well as the details.
Half the battle is learning how to evaluate each piece and determine where it belongs in the grand scheme of things. The following questions can help guide your narrative design toward stronger, more cohesive storytelling.
Does it support and strengthen the brand?
Every product has an identity that players and readers rely on. If a player is looking for a science fiction first-person shooter with mature situations, then they're going to look for a brand that has all those markings. They will then be surprised and disappointed if they start playing and learn that it's actually all about relationships and RPG-style interactions. Thus, it's important that your story support the brand.
If you're completely unfamiliar with what brand identity is, the article "Defining Brand Identity" by Christy MacLeod has basic information on it. Read that first, then come back.
At its core, the brand identity is a promise to players that you will deliver what you've said you will. As a narrative designer, it's your duty to support and strengthen the game's (and the company's) brand.
Most existing companies will have well-established definitions of what their brand identity is both for the company and for the game itself. This may include a mission and/or value statement, the voice/tone of the game, and its look and feel. With games, the ESRB rating also plays a strong role in a game's identity. And, if you're starting to make your own game (hello, indie teams), one of the first things you'll want to do is determine and document your game's identity. Many of your decisions will be based on it.
Does it make sense from a player's perspective?
Sounds basic, right, but this is one of the most challenging aspects of game writing. You have to always put yourself in the mind (and heart) of the player. There's a phenomenon I like to call "writer omniscience syndrome" which describes the fact that a writer knows everything about the story and thus assumes everyone else does too.
This, however, is never the case. Your readers and players do not know the whole picture, and so they may be confused by events that make perfect sense to you.
How do you avoid this? Avoiding writer omniscience syndrome is a skill you develop over time, like a muscle, and it starts by exercising that muscle at every turn. Ask yourself, "Have I given the player all the information they need to understand what's happening here?"
If your answer is "No," then you need to look into foreshadowing and lore delivery in prior content. Getting the set-up right is critical to a satisfying pay-off.
Have you ever experienced writer omniscience syndrome? I'd love to hear about your experience in the comments below.
Are the physics right?
Every story has its own set of internal physics that determine how the world and its elements work. The two most important story physics are world dynamics and character motivations. If the tale you're telling in-game breaks the rules you set up previously, then you'd better be fully aware of it and know exactly why you're making that story choice.
For example, in a science fiction world, interplanetary travel could be established as taking hundreds of years. If you choose to now say that your characters can teleport between planets, you must explain why they can now do this. If you can't explain it, then don't make the change.
The same applies to character motivations. If one of your characters behaves out of character, then either fortify the behavior by building in a new motivation or modify the behavior to fit. When a character changes its motivation or methods in mid-stream, it pulls the player out of their suspension of disbelief and triggers their right-brain critic, and that is not immersive storytelling.
TRAP: Many writers fall into the Shiny! trap. Don't be that writer. Your idea may be awesome, but examine it closely to see if it truly fits what you're trying to accomplish with your product.
What other areas of storytelling have story physics that you should fortify?
Can I make this story idea fit?
Game companies are filled to brimming with passionate, creative people who are overflowing with great ideas. A large part of the narrative designer's job is taking someone's else's great idea and fit it into the narrative. Game design is collaborative at its heart.
These ideas may come down from the director level, from the level designers, or from support teams like Art or Quality Assurance. Depending on the force of the passion behind the idea, you may find yourself working magic to weave an idea into the rest of the world and story.
Straight up, this isn't always possible and you may have to explain why and see the excitement die from the eyes of your coworkers. (My least favorite part of the job.)
When it is possible, then it's a puzzle that demands solving, and it will call on you to use your most creative and strategic muscles to make it not just work, but work smoothly. Your coworkers love it when their ideas become canon. It's your job to evaluate ideas and find ways for the best of them (or the one's forced on you by bigger fish) to fit into the story.
Ever had to incorporate someone else's idea into a creative project? How did it go? Tell me about it in the comments.
Is there a better way?
Neurologist David Eagleman, host of the PBS show "The Brain," believes that the first idea you have may not be the best idea—and I agree with him based on my own anecdotal experience. The problem is that we're wired to grab the first thing that comes to mind, and often that originates with whatever pop culture we're enjoying at the moment, or whatever game we played most recently, or just whatever's foremost in our minds.
The real trick—and challenge—is to stretch beyond that and really dig into your creativity for all the ideas, some of which may be better than your first one. Eagleman recommends that you not stop at the first idea, but force yourself make a list of ten ideas. I've also heard the advice to force yourself to come up with 100 ideas, but when I tried that it devolved quickly into the ridiculous. Ten seems a good number.
Remember that you're the narrative designer and that means it's your responsibility to come up with the best ideas and then pitch them to others. If you had one idea, then others did too, and they're not trained—as you are—to look beyond the obvious for the extra cool option. You will have to walk them there yourself, by explaining and justifying why your idea is better.
Let's talk about the lazy human brain!
Is this plot necessary?
In my job, I talk a lot about stages and spotlights. I view the game environment as the stage, and where you shine the spotlight defines the story you're telling. Many parts of the story will and should remain in the eaves, never making it into the spotlight. Learning to discriminate between what should get the spotlight and what shouldn't is another important narrative skill to hone.
Any plot point you put in the spotlight should advance the story—no exceptions. There are no good digressions or detours in game narrative design because we don't have that much gas to go wandering around the countryside. The focus, and thus the spotlight, should be on the core through-line and any moments that strongly support that through-line.
If you were the technician behind the spotlight, how would you choose where to shine it?
Does the story moment ask questions we can't/won't answer?
It's also important, when choosing what moments to spotlight, to consider the future. Does using this dialogue or introducing this item cause players to speculate and yearn for more? Great if you plan to pay it off! Boo, bad if you can't or won't. Players hate few things more than when the game teases them with something that they never get to experience.
We call this "story debt." It's a debt that we creators owe players, and we should endeavor never to renege on that debt. Any game that is putting out multiple releases and advancing the story in each will undoubtedly create "story debt" by introducing plot lines that they won't pay off.
This may happen because the people working on the game change, because tribal knowledge is lost over time, or because the team no longer has the bandwidth to pursue the storyline despite their best intentions.
Narrative designers can learn to be vigilant and recognize these situations, evaluate the risk, and determine whether it's worth it. Is there a better way?
Ever been saddened because an anticipated game story got dropped?
Where is this going?
"The past is already gone, the future is not yet here. There's only one moment for you to live, and that is the present moment." —Gautama Buddha.
What Buddha said is true, unless you're a narrative designer and the future of your story is at stake.
While it is true that the future cannot be set in stone until it becomes the present—and this is especially true with game design—it pays to have some idea of where the story will be going. This allows you to seed elements early on that you can pay off later to fans' delight.
You don't need to know exactly what the destination will be, but you do need to have an idea what the next few story landmarks will be. Foreshadowing, as mentioned above, adds depth and clarity to your story. The more you know about the future of your story, the more control you have over foreshadowing.
The best laid plans of mice and men (and women) often go awry, however, so you have to remain flexible. If a tree falls across the path you're on (or an asset doesn't get completed in time), you'll have to take a detour. It's this flexibility and practical use of all these questions that makes you a great narrative designer and allows you to create awesome experiences for your players.
For the past 9 years, Angel McCoy has been a writer and narrative designer on the AAA MMO Guild Wars 2. In the past, she lent her creative skills to industry heavy-weights XBox.com, Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, and White Wolf's World of Darkness.
In her spare time, she founded and serves as Creative Director for the indie game team at Games Omniverse. Her narrative toolbox is overflowing with lessons learned and shortcuts discovered, so she's sharing some of the best of them with you.
Sunday, June 19, 2016
Becca Gets Her Sea Legs (film short from novel BECCA DuMAURIER)
From short story to short script to full novel(s). Film short / book trailer "Becca Gets Her Sea Legs" is two chapters from the novel BECCA DuMAURIER by Neale Sourna.
The novel coming in late 2016.
"Becca DuMaurier"
(a novel)
It's 1688, in the midst of the Glorious Revolution, an English civil war between Protestants and Catholics which has international players interested from France, Ireland, and the Netherlands.
But, British courtier Rebecca DeLann DuMaurier has more personal cares; she is on the run from a forced marriage to an elderly earl; she returns home to her stormy ocean-tossed Cornwall, where pirates sail the high seas and stalk the many tiny coves of Cornwall's shores.
And where Cornwall's rocky, treacherous coast is but a stepping stone for lovely Becca, her soldier fiance and an intriguing Irish Catholic pirate whom Becca will soon meet just steps from her family home.
http://becca.neale-sourna.com/
http://www.Neale-Sourna.com
http://PIE-Percept.com
Tuesday, May 10, 2016
Thursday, April 7, 2016
My answer to a possible client. Actually, I seemed to have worked for this person....
My
answer to a possible client. Actually, I seemed to have worked for this
person / group before; and they were unpleasant in the work last Aug
and I had to arbitrate at Guru.com in early Sept last.
The same client I.D. invited me last Sept.
I reminded them we were apparently in dispute.
The
same client I.D. invited me again this month, we've been talking
amiably.
I've finally had to ask, if they have more than one person
using the ID. Or the person is.... What?
My answer to this possible client, re-client? about not playing CYOA games:
CLIENT: ...but you don't seem to play at all.
NealeSourna's Writing-Naked.com:
Gaming
is not calming to me. I find limited personal fun and interest in them.
That goes for card and table games, even chess, as well. It's just the
way my brain functions.
I
bore easily with playing the system; but making the puzzle of a
well-told story about great characters that a client can come back to
again and again is of high interest, though.
Other
game companies have not even asked about play activity before ordering,
they answer my questions from my game research and guide me with their
corrections to suit what they specifically need and want, especially for
new genres and then publish the stories I crafted for them.
There
are a LOT of different styles and platforms, after all. Story and how
to entertain are the cross over between RPG, CYO, and other successfully
published online or card games I've worked on.
Thank You,
Neale
Monday, December 28, 2015
Sunless Sea, 80 Days and the rise of modular storytelling
The
last few years have seen the rise of modular storytelling, which offers
players something akin to a collection of short stories tied together
with character or theme. They offer a wealth of self-contained vignettes
for players to interact with, and new ones can be continually added,
increasing the breadth and richness of the narrative.
Inkle's 80 Days is the most prominent example of this, casting players as Phileas Fogg’s personal valet, Passepartout, as the two make their way around a steampunk Victorian globe. Each city on the trip offers its own self-contained story, occasionally spilling out into other locations, but by and large limited by geography to something that you discover and leave behind as you circumnavigate.
Failbetter Games’ Sunless Sea adopts a similar approach, casting you as the captain of a vessel in the game’s ‘Unterzee’, ranging out of a mostly submerged London to discover the islands of its unlit ocean, each with its own history and events.
This story-telling approach fundamentally alters the structure of the development process, both before and after release. “The main reason to build the game this way was because we didn’t know how big it was going to be” Jon Ingold of Inkle tells me. “To be frank, we didn’t know if Meg [Jayanth, 80 Days’ writer] would give up halfway! We needed to make sure that, whatever happened, we could pull the game together and deliver it. But it also meant that we could be very flexible about adding diversions, side-content and additional routes.”
“It gave us a natural pattern for production. We developed the game through Early Access, we pushed out monthly-ish updates, and each update had 3-5 islands on it, until the whole sea was populated. That’s much easier for players to understand than story-line based announcements.”
What this also means is that players are less likely to see the ‘seams’, so to speak. Often in a standard linear narrative there are difficulties including everything that was initially planned, leading to scenes, plot points and sometimes whole characters being cut from the final game.
With a modular approach, those ‘missing’ pieces are almost completely isolated from the other pieces of the story, leading to their absence being very hard to feel, as a player moves through the game.
Talking about the iteration process with both developers, it’s clear that modular storytelling helped immensely when it came to playtesting and iteration, too. For 80 Days, all Inkle had to do was get one trip around the world complete and they essentially had a working prototype. From there, it was just about adding cities that branched out from that already established route, and the game grew from there. A complete experience that just became broader and richer as content accumulated.
Similarly, Sunless Sea’s islands ‘worked’ as soon as there was one of them thrusting out of its Unterzee. “We had much more informed ideas on how island stories should work by the end of the process than we did at the beginning,” Kennedy tells me “We didn’t have to commit to one form from day one.”
This was an important point, especially for Failbetter, but also for Inkle; both companies brought in freelancers to help write their games, and while Jayanth for 80 Days played a very central role, Sunless Sea had fully 30% of its islands written by freelancers. But when those freelancers don’t have to worry about maintaining absolute consistency with an already established story, they can produce much more interesting work.
“The Fallen London universe is big, sprawling and complex in the way that only worlds built by thoroughgoing nerds are complex.” Kennedy continues. “By isolating stories on different islands, we allowed our freelancers much more liberty to experiment, to add new odd lore, and above all to use a voice that was very different from our well-established house voice. The polyphony of different voices - I think – really added to the sense of exploring foreign spaces in Sunless Sea, and gave us a range and breadth of perspectives that would have been impossible if we’d had to squeeze everyone into the same approach.
"The benefits of the approach extend past release, too, as both games have proven. Taken today, 80 Days and Sunless Sea are far more expansive than they were when they originally launched. In the case of the former, each new platform (Android and PC), gave the team at Inkle a good excuse to add a big chunk of new locations and stories, each more outlandish and unique than the last.
“The post-release updates were an unexpected benefit, and not something we had planned for in earnest.” Ingold tells me. “But when we came to do it, it was just like continuing our development process from where we left off. It’s been particularly satisfying to weave extended new storylines into the existing framework, such as the jewel thief plot that, once activated, follows you around the world wherever you go.”
Similarly, Sunless Sea has been receiving regular new geography to its eponymous body of water, but despite the already well-established lore that they created with their browser based Fallen London, writing a new island didn’t require an absurd amount of research; instead they just had to reacquaint themselves with one element, and then the isolation of the sea did the rest.
None of this is to say that modular storytelling is a cure-all for games’ narrative woes. It’s difficult to argue that having isolated vignettes is more emotionally rewarding than wholly bespoke cinematic experiences, but that is also not to say that they can’t deliver a satisfying narrative arc. Both 80 Days and Sunless Sea have created their own ways of delivering that arc, and they’ve both managed it, with varying degrees of success.
“The level of drama [is] proportional to longitude.” Ingold tells me. “So the soup is too hot in Europe, the soup is on fire in India, and the soup is talking to you about your death in South America.” This, combined with the natural drama that comes out of dwindling resources and health states, means that on the average trip in 80 Days, you’re running out of money and time by the time you’ve crossed the Pacific.
That the stories themselves then escalate in drama and stakes means that the final leg of your journey should feel like a third act, so to speak.
Sunless Sea is less rigorously structured, so it can’t rely on the same tricks. “One of the things we got right was the strength of the core loops.” Kennedy explains.
“You leave port; you cross the darkness; you find the lights on the far side, which you’ve been anticipating during your time in the darkness. You do that again and again. And then, in aggregate, you complete a much larger loop, where you leave London for the unknown; explore a series of ports, and then return home. That outgoing-homecoming loop, with the relevant music and visuals to signal your departure and return, is the heart of the game.”
This structure also has a knock-on effect that I hadn’t considered until Kennedy pointed it out to me; player choice, when framed as a choice of where to go rather than explicitly what to do, becomes something that’s both very interesting and exceedingly manageable on the part of the developer.
Instead of having to limit choices to the world of morality, and all the design headaches that that naturally leads to, you instead need only to provide a fork in the road, and the player will feel the weight of that choice bereft of the trappings of ethics that often present a choice that’s barely a choice at all.
“For the player to feel that the journey has meaning,” Kennedy says. “They have to be free to decide where they’re going; for them to be free to decide where they’re going, the ports have to be untethered and modular. Players long for the opportunity for self-expression. Anything that validates and extends that self-expression is welcomed, and plays to the medium’s strengths.
"At Failbetter, we talk about ‘fires in the desert’ as a model for our variety of storytelling. Imagine a desert, seen from above. Paths lead between the villages in the desert. When travelers cross the desert, you can clearly see the route they take, where they stop off, and so on. But what if night has fallen? Then, all you can see are the little fires in the village. Occasionally, travelers emerge from the darkness and sit by the fires for a while, and then move on. But the routes they take between those fires belong to them alone.”
In other words, the player provides the context, and the game provides the stories. While the developer can provide certain elements that influence the order with which the stories are experienced, ultimately the final call is with the player. Especially in Sunless Sea, there’s no guaranteeing that a player will go to this island or this island first. In 80 Days, the only constant is Paris; everything else is up for grabs.
“Just as in a film the story is told through the edit, [here] the story is told through the darkened paths between the fires.” Kennedy finishes his conversation with me by saying. “In cinematic terms, it’s a montage; we provide the shots, the player does the arrangement. In comic terms, Scott McCloud calls it ‘the blood in the gutters’ – the creative space that exists for the audience to instantiate the potential between specific events. There’s not much space in a traditional told story for that."
Inkle's 80 Days is the most prominent example of this, casting players as Phileas Fogg’s personal valet, Passepartout, as the two make their way around a steampunk Victorian globe. Each city on the trip offers its own self-contained story, occasionally spilling out into other locations, but by and large limited by geography to something that you discover and leave behind as you circumnavigate.
Failbetter Games’ Sunless Sea adopts a similar approach, casting you as the captain of a vessel in the game’s ‘Unterzee’, ranging out of a mostly submerged London to discover the islands of its unlit ocean, each with its own history and events.
This story-telling approach fundamentally alters the structure of the development process, both before and after release. “The main reason to build the game this way was because we didn’t know how big it was going to be” Jon Ingold of Inkle tells me. “To be frank, we didn’t know if Meg [Jayanth, 80 Days’ writer] would give up halfway! We needed to make sure that, whatever happened, we could pull the game together and deliver it. But it also meant that we could be very flexible about adding diversions, side-content and additional routes.”
Alexis Kennedy, the Creative Director on Sunless Sea, has similarly positive things to say about how modular storytelling impacted scope-management."This story-telling approach fundamentally alters the structure of the development process, both before and after release."
“It gave us a natural pattern for production. We developed the game through Early Access, we pushed out monthly-ish updates, and each update had 3-5 islands on it, until the whole sea was populated. That’s much easier for players to understand than story-line based announcements.”
What this also means is that players are less likely to see the ‘seams’, so to speak. Often in a standard linear narrative there are difficulties including everything that was initially planned, leading to scenes, plot points and sometimes whole characters being cut from the final game.
With a modular approach, those ‘missing’ pieces are almost completely isolated from the other pieces of the story, leading to their absence being very hard to feel, as a player moves through the game.
Talking about the iteration process with both developers, it’s clear that modular storytelling helped immensely when it came to playtesting and iteration, too. For 80 Days, all Inkle had to do was get one trip around the world complete and they essentially had a working prototype. From there, it was just about adding cities that branched out from that already established route, and the game grew from there. A complete experience that just became broader and richer as content accumulated.
Similarly, Sunless Sea’s islands ‘worked’ as soon as there was one of them thrusting out of its Unterzee. “We had much more informed ideas on how island stories should work by the end of the process than we did at the beginning,” Kennedy tells me “We didn’t have to commit to one form from day one.”
This was an important point, especially for Failbetter, but also for Inkle; both companies brought in freelancers to help write their games, and while Jayanth for 80 Days played a very central role, Sunless Sea had fully 30% of its islands written by freelancers. But when those freelancers don’t have to worry about maintaining absolute consistency with an already established story, they can produce much more interesting work.
“The Fallen London universe is big, sprawling and complex in the way that only worlds built by thoroughgoing nerds are complex.” Kennedy continues. “By isolating stories on different islands, we allowed our freelancers much more liberty to experiment, to add new odd lore, and above all to use a voice that was very different from our well-established house voice. The polyphony of different voices - I think – really added to the sense of exploring foreign spaces in Sunless Sea, and gave us a range and breadth of perspectives that would have been impossible if we’d had to squeeze everyone into the same approach.
"The benefits of the approach extend past release, too, as both games have proven. Taken today, 80 Days and Sunless Sea are far more expansive than they were when they originally launched. In the case of the former, each new platform (Android and PC), gave the team at Inkle a good excuse to add a big chunk of new locations and stories, each more outlandish and unique than the last.
“The post-release updates were an unexpected benefit, and not something we had planned for in earnest.” Ingold tells me. “But when we came to do it, it was just like continuing our development process from where we left off. It’s been particularly satisfying to weave extended new storylines into the existing framework, such as the jewel thief plot that, once activated, follows you around the world wherever you go.”
Similarly, Sunless Sea has been receiving regular new geography to its eponymous body of water, but despite the already well-established lore that they created with their browser based Fallen London, writing a new island didn’t require an absurd amount of research; instead they just had to reacquaint themselves with one element, and then the isolation of the sea did the rest.
None of this is to say that modular storytelling is a cure-all for games’ narrative woes. It’s difficult to argue that having isolated vignettes is more emotionally rewarding than wholly bespoke cinematic experiences, but that is also not to say that they can’t deliver a satisfying narrative arc. Both 80 Days and Sunless Sea have created their own ways of delivering that arc, and they’ve both managed it, with varying degrees of success.
“The level of drama [is] proportional to longitude.” Ingold tells me. “So the soup is too hot in Europe, the soup is on fire in India, and the soup is talking to you about your death in South America.” This, combined with the natural drama that comes out of dwindling resources and health states, means that on the average trip in 80 Days, you’re running out of money and time by the time you’ve crossed the Pacific.
That the stories themselves then escalate in drama and stakes means that the final leg of your journey should feel like a third act, so to speak.
Sunless Sea is less rigorously structured, so it can’t rely on the same tricks. “One of the things we got right was the strength of the core loops.” Kennedy explains.
“You leave port; you cross the darkness; you find the lights on the far side, which you’ve been anticipating during your time in the darkness. You do that again and again. And then, in aggregate, you complete a much larger loop, where you leave London for the unknown; explore a series of ports, and then return home. That outgoing-homecoming loop, with the relevant music and visuals to signal your departure and return, is the heart of the game.”
This structure also has a knock-on effect that I hadn’t considered until Kennedy pointed it out to me; player choice, when framed as a choice of where to go rather than explicitly what to do, becomes something that’s both very interesting and exceedingly manageable on the part of the developer.
Instead of having to limit choices to the world of morality, and all the design headaches that that naturally leads to, you instead need only to provide a fork in the road, and the player will feel the weight of that choice bereft of the trappings of ethics that often present a choice that’s barely a choice at all.
“For the player to feel that the journey has meaning,” Kennedy says. “They have to be free to decide where they’re going; for them to be free to decide where they’re going, the ports have to be untethered and modular. Players long for the opportunity for self-expression. Anything that validates and extends that self-expression is welcomed, and plays to the medium’s strengths.
"At Failbetter, we talk about ‘fires in the desert’ as a model for our variety of storytelling. Imagine a desert, seen from above. Paths lead between the villages in the desert. When travelers cross the desert, you can clearly see the route they take, where they stop off, and so on. But what if night has fallen? Then, all you can see are the little fires in the village. Occasionally, travelers emerge from the darkness and sit by the fires for a while, and then move on. But the routes they take between those fires belong to them alone.”
In other words, the player provides the context, and the game provides the stories. While the developer can provide certain elements that influence the order with which the stories are experienced, ultimately the final call is with the player. Especially in Sunless Sea, there’s no guaranteeing that a player will go to this island or this island first. In 80 Days, the only constant is Paris; everything else is up for grabs.
“Just as in a film the story is told through the edit, [here] the story is told through the darkened paths between the fires.” Kennedy finishes his conversation with me by saying. “In cinematic terms, it’s a montage; we provide the shots, the player does the arrangement. In comic terms, Scott McCloud calls it ‘the blood in the gutters’ – the creative space that exists for the audience to instantiate the potential between specific events. There’s not much space in a traditional told story for that."
Friday, September 4, 2015
A Practical Guide to Game Writing By Darby McDevitt
A Practical Guide to Game Writing
By Darby McDevitt
[In this detailed Gamasutra feature, veteran game writer McDevitt (Assassin's Creed: Bloodlines, Where the Wild Things Are) outlines useful processes for collaboration between design, production and writing staff, from pre-production through production of a game.]
Video game writers are a frequently misunderstood sort. Even in the most ideal situations, we are often relegated to the status of mortar to the designers' bricks, slipping between the cracks to paste fun moments of gameplay together with a few lines of snappy, expository dialog.
Writers can be further marginalized by a lingering sense among our team members that we want nothing more than to stuff our games full of melodramatic, Metal Gear-sized cutscenes, burdened by a cast of dozens sputtering flowery lines from our 450 page script.
I'd like to steer us clear of this idea, one likely sustained by the apparent misconception that writing is fundamentally about arranging words into meaningful strings.
Clearly this isn't the case, but somehow a large contingent of the game industry has institutionalized this attitude anyway, and its effects can be found in an upsetting number of games released in the past few decades.
Just count the uneasy puns and strained moralizing spilling from your favorite avatar's mouth -- when a writer is hired to write a game, and is subsequently barred from having input into its pacing, its setting, the motivations of its characters, and its mood and tone, writers resort to the only weapons they have left: wry witticisms and declarative pop-philosophy.
The spirit of collaboration games are supposed to embody often seems well outside the writer's reach.
But the truth is, we don't want to hijack your game with pointless soliloquies, and we don't want to write a posturing Hollywood-style epic. Game writers simply want to help designers craft an immersive, interactive narrative experience. With or without dialog, with or without characters, we simply want the game to start somewhere interesting, climb its way over a few emotional peaks, and end somewhere even more interesting. We're good at that sort of thing too.
Not all games require a narrative arc, of course, but it's a rather common feature of quite a few mainstream console titles, and these days if an actual writer is going to pen the script of one of these games -- as opposed to the lead designer or the producer -- some Very Important People probably have a Very High Opinion of the property.
But this doesn't happen as frequently as you might think. Consider yourself blessed if you have actually seen a game writer in the wild, for they remain one of those elusive, added-expense luxuries that many game producers -- their eyes always on their margins -- believe they can do without. And in many cases, it humbles me to say, they're right.
The average game-playing public will suffer a deluge of poor storytelling if a game is knock-down, drag-out fun. But a great story with terrible gameplay will die a fast and lonely death on the shelf. I respect and support this pecking order. Gameplay must come first -- this is the golden rule.
However, if some form of narrative happens to play a design-critical role in your proposed game, it is vitally important to treat it exactly as you would any other design element, not as a separate discipline. So if your team has taken that bold extra step to build a narrative-driven game, there are a number of precautions you can take to accommodate the writer and prevent the story (and your writer) from getting buried beneath endless revisions of your GDD.
First and foremost among these is to make one simple conceptual change: treat your writer as an associate designer. Involve her in the design process from the outset. Even if she is not an experienced technical designer, a good writer can be instrumental in helping inspire unique moment-to-moment experiences that provide gameplay variety while integrating seamlessly into the narrative.
Again, writing is not just about clever sentences -- it can also be about narrative shape, motivation, and pacing, i.e. what you do, why you do, and when you do.
When writers and designers band together and discuss a game's story, characters, dramatic set-pieces, and settings in parallel with ideas about the game mechanics and levels, the team will begin to find exciting and creative ways of conjoining the two disciplines into a more unified experience.
Unfortunately, this synergy can be difficult to find, especially in the trenches of third-party development where the average dev cycle is less than a year. When schedules are tight, producers and designers often maintain a slight distance from writers, imagining we are off "doing our thing" while they do theirs.
But our thing is their thing too. Writing is design. We are both building a world from scratch, after all. So if you empower a writer to absorb and occasionally contribute design ideas, she will carry on with a solid understanding of how the narrative elements contribute to (or detract from) the overall game experience.
Before Writing Begins
For a clearer picture of this process, let's pinpoint a game writer's most critical early-milestone tasks, beginning with a few pre-production goals. In these early weeks, it's easy to get drunk on a thousand and one ephemeral ideas -- by all means do -- but you'll need to conclude this reverie with a few tangible results:High Level Narrative Summary. During preproduction, the design team should work directly with the writer to concoct a brief (one to four pages) high-level summary of the primary story. Think of it as your elevator pitch: make it succinct and snappy. This short piece is probably the only story document most of the team will ever read, so it should be clear and compelling.
Do this early, and get the client to sign off on it as soon as humanly possible. Read that previous sentence again. Get quick client sign-off every step of the way. Failure to guide your client to a swift agreement on the story may result in endless misery for the remainder of the project.
Major Locations / Levels. This is one area where writers can really get sore if they are left out of the conception process. Designers frequently forge ahead with level concepts and designs without consulting the writer, not taking into account the huge role that setting plays in crafting an interesting narrative.
In video games, place is often more important than character, so this is doubly important. If the writer, designers, and artists band together to nail down the scope of the game's environments, and get a rough idea of how much is needed and how much is feasible, everyone will walk away happy.
This cuts all ways: writers need to know that they'll have the locations they need to tell a good story, while the artists and designers will want to make sure the writer is asking for content that is relevant to gameplay.
Obviously this "relevance threshold" varies with the size of the project, but on small projects with short schedules getting this right can mean the difference between environment artists going home at 6 pm or 6 am the next morning.
Once production begins, the writers work ramps up. This is the point where the entire design team needs to function as a single unstoppable force (for good):
A Detailed Story Outline. With the narrative arc complete, it's time to produce an exquisitely detailed story document, complete with scene descriptions and gameplay objectives. The amount of detail in this doc will vary according to how much the story influences the design, but it should be as thorough as possible. In any case, generating a detailed outline will give you an early understanding of just what sort of game you're making, and how reliant on the writer you will be for design iteration down the road.
In the case of heavily plot-driven games, the design challenges will stem directly from the story -- e.g. rescue a prisoner, assassinate a guard, courier a package. For non-linear games like RPGs this document should be incredibly dense and detailed. For less structured games, the writer's direct impact on the design may be minimal. Understanding this balance ahead of time is critical.
Story Presentation Plan.
How, exactly, is the game's story being told, and who is responsible
for telling it? Do you have pre-rendered cutscenes or in-engine
cutscenes? Who will be putting these scenes together? Perhaps you have
no cutscenes whatsoever, and would like to tell your story on-the-fly.
Is this feasible? Possible?Figure it out early.
Nothing is more frustrating for a writer than seeing a project scoot forward without anyone having a firm understanding about how the story will be told, since this will affect what she intends to write.
Estimated Cut-Scene Breakdown. If your game does contain cutscenes or animated in-game sequences of any kind, it is crucial to estimate their number very early on to get a good sense of the work to come. If you have a detailed story outline, this should be easy. On tight projects it also helps to determine ahead of time what the expected intricacy and quality of each scene is so your teams can allocate their resources appropriately.
Characters. As you generate your detailed story arc, you'll need to make a clear list of the number of characters needed. Who are these people, and what roles do they play in both the narrative and the gameplay? Which are simple NPCs? Which are robust, interactive characters? Which are bosses? Mission givers? Shop keepers? Tutorial mentors? Et cetera.
The artists will be generating all character models and animations, and they'll want to know the scope as soon as possible. If you spring 15 new NPCs on your artists halfway through the project, they will shank you in the break room -- believe it. Getting the character scope nailed down early will also help you determine how much "incidental dialog" the game will require, for these throwaway lines frequently take up as much space in the script as the main story dialog. This is no trivial amount, so keep close track of it.
Sort Out Your Text Database. This can be a tedious task, but it is crucial to sort out your text pipeline very early, and get your tools up and running. The longer you wait, the more you will hate yourself. Some games have complex or esoteric text requirements -- non-linear conversation systems, for instance -- so it is critical that you organize your data cleanly and clearly.
Also, take a moment to decide how the script will be delivered. Not all writers are familiar with the esoteric architecture of your text database, so if your writer is delivering the script in Word or Final Draft, you're going to need a pipeline to handle its transfer.
When Writing Begins
Once your game's foundation has been laid and the team is ready to start production, the actual writing can begin. This is the fun part. Writers love to write, but without constant contact with the design team, they run the risk of giving you more script than you need, or a script you don't need at all. This wastes everyone's time and makes the writer sad when you have to tell him, "as beautiful as they are, your 100 part limerick-cycle has no place in Chaz Dastard's Intergalactic Star Safari 2: Misremembered Legacy".Nip your writer's graphomania in the bud by establishing clear boundaries. This should be simple if the writer has been involved in the design from the beginning, since all parties involved will understand the extent of the game's writing needs. Keep track of everything before it needs to be written, as it is being written, and after it has been written. A game writer without defined boundaries or direction -- especially an off-site, contracted writer -- runs the risk of writing something as sensible and useful to your game as Andre Breton's Soluble Fish.
Script, First Draft. Between the greenlight and first milestone, the writer should be busy as hell. On short projects, ideally she should have a finished first draft of the script by the first production milestone, as this will help the level design process move smoothly.
On longer projects, the writer and level designers will be working back and forth quite a bit to make sure neither one lets a detail slip, edging ever closer to a first draft.
Demand Story and Script Sign-Off, Again. Be crystal clear with your client: the script needs to be read and comments forthcoming as soon as possible. Of all the client-side headaches I have ever encountered, this is the most painful.
Many clients make the mistake of believing the script is the single most important aspect of their game, and therefore spend months and months poring over details that contribute very little to the final game experience. Delays of this sort can hold up level designers and cutscene artists in the most asinine ways imaginable, wasting time that cannot be easily recovered.
One little discussed benefit to hiring an experienced writer is the fact that, relative to coders and artists, good writers work incredibly fast. Text is cheap and takes very little time to edit and revise. But this advantage is of no use to anyone if writers aren't aware that anything needs revising.
I have lost count off the number of times a seemingly innocuous level design change or map layout has rendered a chunk of my dialog obsolete. When I have not been made aware of this chance, the resulting headache cannot be cured by earthly medicine.
Darby: Listen to this gem, guys: "Sally
forth to yonder Black Forest, stalwart Wayfarer, for there you shall
find a crystal dagger of such rare-"
Producer Person: Ah, Darby, sorry... the Black Forest was scrapped and replaced by a Walmart. We should have told you.
Darby: Ah... okay, hold on. Where's my pen?
Into Production
Now you're well into production, and the heavy lifting has begun. If you have nailed all the earlier tasks, the rest of production should proceed smoothly, barring any client interference. This is supposed to happen only if you've been naughty, but the unfortunate truth is not so black and white.There are more than a few imposing clients out there who, for understandable if not always sensible reasons, believe the story can be endlessly revised up until Beta. So be wary, keep calm, and carry on.
At some point during production, the script will be finished and the writer will feel like she is nearing the finish line far before the rest of the team. Don't let this illusion persist. There is still a bit of work your writer can help you with:
Casting. If you are recording with actors (and who isn't, these days?) now is the time to figure out who will be making your characters speak. On small projects that don't have an official story director, the writer can be of immense help. It's crucial to get your casting done well in advance of your recording date. Actors have hectic schedules and you'll find all the best ones rather busy if you try to snag a few the week of your recording session.
Final Script. As difficult as it is, the writer will have to stop tweaking her dialog and settle on something. Of course, it's a good idea to encourage the writer to streamline what she can. The script may be laden with timely wit and wisdom, but it is still, above all else, a game script and if it tests a player's patience, that can be a problem.
More to the point: the longer the script, the more time it will take the cinematics team to craft the cutscenes or scripted sequences. So when the writer buckles down and kills her darlings early, it keeps everyone from doing superfluous work.
Voice-Over Recording Sessions. Some writers make great VO directors; some don't. But all good ones should be able to re-write their dialog on-the-fly, so make sure your scrivener is available for the recording sessions. When she hears her dialog spoken aloud for the first time, she's probably going to want to change it. Allow some leeway, but don't let her get carried away. Try to limit changes only to what is egregious or erroneous.
Once you hit Alpha, the writer's job gets a lot easier. But there are still a number of good reasons to keep one around, locked in a cabinet somewhere, just in case.
Proofreading. Writers should never copyedit and proofread their own work, it's true. This is a fact that holds doubly true in the game industry where the volume of text written is often comparable to that of a novel. On the other hand, it's rare to find excellent proofreaders hiding in the QA department, so make sure as many eyes are on the text as possible, including the writer's.
Non-Dialog Text Revisions. It can take a long time to nail down all that tutorial, database, and menu text your game has accrued slowly but consistently over the span of the production. Lucky for you, text is cheap to implement and fix, and is quite safe to alter even up to the last minute (provided you're still proofreading).
And with that, your writer's job is finished and your game is nearly complete. Well done, folks. Take a breath and clean your white board. The whole process starts again in five... four... three... two... one...
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Copyright © 2015 UBM Tech, All rights reserved
Copyright © 2015 UBM Tech, All rights reserved
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