Tips on storywriting for games update#
Tips on storywriting for games series#

“I was a huge bottleneck because I was also directing the project, coding, and just doing lots of other stuff,” he says. While Lemoore says he’s very happy with what the team ended up with, it wasn’t a perfect process. Having a writer on hand during recording for things like this, and having a way to get changes in front of the actors quickly, is invaluable to keeping the writing authentic.” It made these types of changes effortless.

Tips on storywriting for games update#

“When the actors and I would talk through last-second script changes, I could update them in Google Docs and have it update on their iPads in real-time. “During recording, we had Bryce and Seth reading the script off of iPads from Google docs, and I had the script open as well on my PC,” Lemoore explains.

When working with Bryce Dallas Howard and Seth Gabel, the actors who portray Kenzie and Michael respectively, Lemoore worked with the actors and incorporated their suggestions and rewrites to make the scenes even better. He oversaw big picture issues, like how the story connected back to gameplay, while writer Gracie Gardner focused on character realism and dialog flow. Lemoore’s experience with Maquette is a shining example of the multiple layers of collaboration that are possible on a gaming project even when centered on writing. “But after you are used to writing the plot like weaving a web, brilliant ideas will come,” he concludes. “What you need to consider is not just sentence or audio-visual language, but also how it will adapt to the interactive experience.” There are unique rules that writers have to abide by in the game development process, like considering how the game’s camera moves around a character or being mindful that some players may skip cutscenes entirely. “Be a part of the entire development team,” he says.

“I love it, but it took me a few years to really be comfortable working on a team.” “Pitching ideas and working with other creators is how I spend a lot of my time,” she says. As a game writer, she came to love collaborating more than being a solo operator. Then, her time traveling, researching, writing, and fact-checking was entirely solo. Writing can be an isolated experience in many instances and Kenney’s experience was exactly that when she worked as a journalist. “I wish I’d understood how collaborative the business of making video games is,” Kenney responds when asked what she wishes she’d known when starting out her career. In this second part, they share advice they wish they’d had when starting out, discuss the process of editing, and dive into how different game genres determine how the writing is approached.

The trio gave insight into the differences between narrative design and game writing, discussed how gameplay and story impact each other, and shared tips on getting into the field alongside stories of how they made it where they are today.

Tips on storywriting for games series#

The first part of our Writing for Video Games series featured stories and advice from three video game design professionals: Insomniac’s Mary Kenney, Graceful Decay’s Hanford Lemoore, and TiGames’ Isaac Zhang.