Writing a Video Game
almost 8 years ago
– Wed, Apr 27, 2016 at 11:32:59 PM
Hi Everyone,
Moira has written up a lovely post talking about how she approached writing City of the Shroud, and how she learned and evolved her approach in the process. Grab a cup of tea (or coffee!) and settle in!
...but before you do, remember to join our Thunderclap! We're getting really close to hitting a lot of goals all at once, so like us on Facebook and tweet @abyssalarts to unlock Survival Mode!
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It’s only to be expected, I think, that writing for video games would be different from writing for novels. What has continued to surprise me, however, is just how different the two kinds of writing are. From a general lack of internal monologue to player input, writing for video games is a different thing entirely than writing for novels—but there are some massive and unexpected benefits, as well!
If you pick up a book on writing novels, a significant number of chapters will be devoted to writing the character arc and pairing it with your world. The main character and the world (or plot) will play off of one another: the main character will ideally be both uniquely suited to resolving the issues posed by the world, and uniquely ill-equipped. In other words, solving the problems posed by the plot will be possible only if the main character overcomes their own internal issues. In the pursuit of that wisdom, they will struggle, fail, learn, and ultimately conquer. However clinical this may sound, I can assure you that as one gets down into the guts of the story, working out this interplay can be exquisitely frustrating and infinitely surprising.
Still, when Keaton approached me about writing the story for City of the Shroud, I felt confident. I had written characters from bored noblewomen to scientific researchers to trainee assassins—and I love video games. I began building a story with, in retrospect, a comical level of naiveté.
One of the first unexpected emotions to hit was guilt. Now, I should have known this was coming, because years earlier, I had read a quote from Fantasy author Neil Gaiman, describing his visit to the set of the movie Stardust, and seeing the set crew building a flying pirate ship:
"I felt so guilty. I wasn’t saying how great it was; I was going, 'I am so sorry I made it up!' Because it didn’t cost me anything, just the price of whatever tea I was drinking and some ink. And now 70 people have spent two months working to build this thing and you can dance on the deck. It was very, very strange."
I had managed to forget this, and it really was very strange to dream up cities and settings, and watch artists spend hours upon hours creating sketches, coming humbly back to me to ask if this was what I had envisioned for the characters and the world. No matter how much they enjoyed their work or how much time they expected to spend working on a world, the experience was a wakeup call: I was no longer chewing on the end of a pen, sitting alone at my desk and dreaming up things I could change at a moment’s notice. Other people’s livelihoods hinged on me not only getting this right and creating an engaging world, but being respectful of their time in the process. That meant that I must do my job quickly and surely, with a minimum of rework. I went back to dreaming, but more seriously.
As I started to write the character, issues became plain: not only did I need to make a character arc largely without internal dialogue, but I needed to show the character in juxtaposition to the world without a great deal of external dialogue, either. This was an idea I had simply never faced before. The world would be shown as it was, not as my character perceived it (a massive shift, particularly from the Light & Shadow Trilogy), and my character’s main actions would need to be comprehensible, while allowing for the characters to feel they had an influence on the story. Oh, crap, would be a good assessment—if a somewhat edited transcript—of my internal dialogue at this juncture.
And this was before we added in the game mechanics, cut-scene limitations, and the opinions of the other game designers. Necessary changes began to accrue, shifting the storyline subtly in an increasing number of ways. I gave up and went to play Dragon Age, which only served to unnerve me even more. Dialogue wheels! Extensive character lists! Multiple writers! I made a gigantic pot of tea and tried to figure out how to tell Keaton that he may have picked the wrong writer for the job. In the end, I didn’t have the guts to do that, and I’m glad I didn’t —because while the solution took a few weeks to click, it finally did. We proceeded to go full steam ahead…
…In the other direction. In retrospect, maybe this approach should have been obvious from the start: with one writer, there was no way we could recreate the vastness of a AAA game like Mass Effect, using dialogue options and motion-capture. Although it was obvious, as well, that we should not have thought of that as a failure: after all, Thatgamecompany had shown with Journey that it was entirely possible to create an outstanding game and a rich story by working within limitations instead of pushing for things that were not possible.
We considered what we had, and what we could do. After all, video games are fundamentally directed by actions. Video game characters could be mostly silent and still reflect the feelings of the player, if they were allowed outlets to choose their antagonists in quests, switch alliances, and suggest new ones. Our protagonist, being an outsider, new to the complex and vicious politics of Iskendrun, would naturally take time to become vocal, with much of their character shown in their choice of allies.
Further, a live demo of the story mechanics showed me the richness that players brought to the world. Their input was endlessly fascinating, changing the world in ways I had not anticipated. We had known from the start that the players would drive the story—and yet I had continued to believe that I would need to be responsible for all of it. What I needed to do was the opposite: sit back, and let the players speak. Have a conversation, through the medium of Iskendrun.
As a novelist, there is the expectation that as soon as the work is out of one’s hands, readers will bring their own perspective to it. It is a new perspective entirely to plan for the engagement of the players to be ongoing, and to prepare for the possibility that it could shift the story in directions I had not originally planned—because once the story begins, the players themselves will be the voice of Iskendrun’s politics. And that means setting them loose in the world our development team has brought to life…and letting the mechanics I set in advance play out.
