Honest tales from the trenches of AAA game writing

August 14, 2015 5:57 AM

“Even that didn't work," she said. "One of the directors on God of War 3 said, 'I need your input on this, this is what design's doing. And I said ‘this is bullet proof, there is no way you can ruin my narrative moment.’ -- "I come back the next week and they ruined my narrative moment."

Gamasutra talks about writing for AAA games
posted by MartinWisse (36 comments total)

Where does this fall in the hero's journey?

I want to steal this to use whenever I'm questioning someone's choice. At work, when we're deciding where to order dinner, there's no time I don't want to ask this question.
posted by Bulgaroktonos at 6:24 AM on August 14, 2015 [39 favorites]

"one of the directors".
posted by mhoye at 6:38 AM on August 14, 2015 [5 favorites]

Where does this fall in the hero's journey?

I'm going to bring up Save The Cat next pointless agile planning meeting I'm at.
posted by Artw at 6:49 AM on August 14, 2015

Bulgaroktonos - often find that it's effective to add "in accordance with the prophecy" either before or after most work interactions.
posted by plinth at 7:08 AM on August 14, 2015 [12 favorites]

Prophecies are too waterfall.
posted by Artw at 7:13 AM on August 14, 2015 [11 favorites]

Those three writers sound awfully pleased with themselves.
posted by Cool Papa Bell at 7:24 AM on August 14, 2015 [2 favorites]

This is great!

"When it's Christmas morning, and it's like, 'Ice Bomb, I dunno,' it gets pretty grim." (Bissell)

"‘I thought, I thought it was funny I'm so sorry.’" (Fixman)

And I just learned about Bissell's "documentary" Twine game, The Writer Will Do Something (link).
posted by grobstein at 7:32 AM on August 14, 2015

New book idea: FILM CRIT HULK IN THE BOARDROOM.
posted by Artw at 7:34 AM on August 14, 2015 [1 favorite]

I am making a game now. I'm an amateur programmer, but it's going well enough that I think if I was really committed to pivoting, I could probably eventually find work in the industry. In some ways, this would be a dream! But honestly it sounds like hell. Both un-fun and poorly compensated. Yuck!
posted by grobstein at 7:35 AM on August 14, 2015 [1 favorite]

The Writer Will Do Something, previously
posted by RobotHero at 7:36 AM on August 14, 2015

But honestly it sounds like hell. Both un-fun and poorly compensated. Yuck!

Yeah, making games is very high up there on the list of jobs where, because "OMG this job involves stuff that's so cool!!", the expectation is that you are supposed to be willing to put up with shitty hours, shitty pay, and generally being treated like shit.

I've said it before, but I will repeat myself: I'll take a boring office job over that, every time (and then work on games in my free time, where I can still have fun but not burn myself out).
posted by tocts at 7:41 AM on August 14, 2015 [6 favorites]

Well weapon
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 8:24 AM on August 14, 2015 [2 favorites]

For a while comics folks I knew were migrating over to games writing because it paid better and was more of a straight up job, then there was some kind of collapse of rates within the industry - I want to say about five years ago? - and they all came drifting back.
posted by Artw at 8:27 AM on August 14, 2015 [1 favorite]

Bulgaroktonos - often find that it's effective to add "in accordance with the prophecy" either before or after most work interactions.

When a head-enough honcho leaves the meeting/office, that's a good time to say "Bless the Maker and his water. Bless his coming and his going. May his passage cleanse the world. May he keep his $PLACEOFWORK for his people."
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 9:33 AM on August 14, 2015 [2 favorites]

I could probably eventually find work in the industry. In some ways, this would be a dream! But honestly it sounds like hell. Both un-fun and poorly compensated. Yuck!

There's a wide, wide variance of experiences. The horror stories are real, but if you were to step back and really look at things objectively, you can most often pretty clearly see the nightmare coming. Are you going to be yet another faceless drone working on a AAA console title with a huge publisher that has over-scoped and under-budgeted the game that absolutely, positively has to come out by the holidays? Or is the company a small developer that lives and dies from project to project because they have more passion than payroll? And you can't ever forget that it's a hit-driven industry. That's always going to be hanging over your head.

That said, there are plenty of mighty fine places in between the two extremes.
posted by Cool Papa Bell at 9:43 AM on August 14, 2015

"... dialogue existed in [...] Excel files".

You thought you were the apex predator. You are in fact the bacterium in the sewage tank.

Eat it up, baby.
posted by Devonian at 9:53 AM on August 14, 2015 [1 favorite]

"The game writer’s biggest challenge: No universal tool or format"

This. I've long had this vision of a software world-building tool that basically keeps track of everything for writers. Plot points, locations, events, relationships, even ownership. While they're primarily talking about dialog, I see something much larger.

But everytime I ask about where to start making such a tool every experienced person tells me I'm insane to even think of such a project. Which is a shame.

That said, there are some great writing tools - I see they mention Final Draft. What does final draft lack? It seems like they're primarily talking about script writing not world building, anyways...

Revision control? Is there any reason you can't use something like Git to track your changes universally?

I am very curious to know more about their process and what tools they're lacking.
posted by symbioid at 9:54 AM on August 14, 2015 [2 favorites]

“I wrote this joke, where Ratchet and Clank are in a ship together and the designers wanted them to fall asleep so they could wake up in a new environment," he explained. "So this gas comes out, Ratchet goes, 'ah cryosleep gas, I'm not gonna fall asleep!' And of course he falls asleep. And Clank says 'oh it’s good that gas doesn't work on robots!' and a boxing glove pops out and knocks him out.”

“They just started peppering me with, 'Why is this funny? What Is the joke? Where does this fall in the hero's journey?"

Crossing the Threshold/Belly of the Whale? See Gilgamesh or Frankenstein for more examples of passing out as transition device in narrative.

Do video game companies hire mythologists? Even if they think Campbell is reductive as shit?

And it's funny because the robot gets punched in the face.
posted by bibliowench at 9:55 AM on August 14, 2015 [5 favorites]

Great game writing coupled with excellent voice acting is sadly so rare that it can pull me out of a scene as quickly as an NPC telling me to "press triangle to jump!" does.
posted by Blue Meanie at 10:02 AM on August 14, 2015 [1 favorite]

Excel is used because they wants lots of snippets of content they can keep track of, localize, store as assets, etc... Final Draft would probably be a bit clunky for that.
posted by Artw at 10:05 AM on August 14, 2015 [1 favorite]

Well, it helps explain Mass Effect 3, to some extent. (Although the infamous original ending came from the project leader and head writer locking themselves in a boardroom with zero input from the rest of the team, so the opposite extreme doesn't always pan out, either.)
posted by Halloween Jack at 10:30 AM on August 14, 2015 [1 favorite]

Final Draft would probably be a bit clunky for that.

Except that voice actors and directors want it in standard script format, so you invariably have to pull it out of whatever you had and reformat it. I tried bringing in Excel printouts, and it was like:

"This isn't printed in Courier!"
/me looks at sheet
"It's Calibri."
"The fuck is Calibri?"
"It's the Microsoft Office default font."
"You mean Helvetica."
"No, that's Apple."
"What's Microsoft Office?"
"Oh, right, you're a creative."
"It needs to be Courier."
"Why?"
"If it's always the same size, everyone can see how much we're shooting."
"Why are we discussing the merits of proportionally spaced fonts? We're recording voices for a video game. Now get in there and give me a scream like your arm is being ripped off."
"Ooo, yeah, sooo, I can't scream. I've booked another session for the afternoon and I don't want to wreck my voice."
posted by Cool Papa Bell at 10:48 AM on August 14, 2015 [5 favorites]

Sigh, film people and their bullshit world of ritual... Everything looking like it was written on a typewriter is their version of saying "the Scottish play".

This is where theoretically having your data in XML and being able to transform it with XSL would help.
posted by Artw at 10:53 AM on August 14, 2015

Though TBH professional voice actors tend to be a hardier breed than the flighty on-screen kind.
posted by Artw at 10:54 AM on August 14, 2015 [2 favorites]

Hmm, this looks... interesting... Non-linear dialog editor... "Publish to HTML5, XML, JSON, PDF, Excel, Word, PNG" amongst many other features...
posted by symbioid at 11:01 AM on August 14, 2015 [1 favorite]

It does trees too.

A tree editor is actually on my sideproject todo list - when I had my own stab at doing a dialog tree/IF engine I thought the content could be in a nice simple JSON format that could be entered by hand, but that's proven less than optimal.
posted by Artw at 11:07 AM on August 14, 2015

That said, there are some great writing tools - I see they mention Final Draft. What does final draft lack? It seems like they're primarily talking about script writing not world building, anyways...

Revision control? Is there any reason you can't use something like Git to track your changes universally?

I am very curious to know more about their process and what tools they're lacking.

God, where to even begin? My fiancee and I could write a thesis - no, several theses - on what drives these decisions and why basically all existing options are terrible and even a competently-written custom tool is absolutely 100% guaranteed to also be terrible.

It's not just the non-linear narrative. It's not just the desire to have explicit narrative, player-driven systemic, and ambient systemic dialogue under one roof. It's not just the incessant iteration and constantly-shifting level designs. It's not just the fact that every recording session rewrites a third of the script for that character, with plot-related fallout for other characters, and further fallout during their pick-ups. It's not just changing needs over the course of the project cycle. It's not just the staff churn meaning there are always people learning the pipeline while working within it... it's, well, everything.

To start: you have to accept, no matter how much you hate it, no matter how much power you have to influence the process - even complete backing of the Project Lead! - that your writers will NEVER a) work in any kind of in-engine or web-based tool, or b) use version control. You can kick, scream, struggle, preach about discipline and whine about downstream impact all you want but at the end of the day the writing team is going to default to emailing each other Final Draft (film majors) and Word (everyone else) files back and forth at 3AM and this will be where the majority of your script changes come from. This basic fact of life is forever set in stone, end of discussion, and you are therefore going to need a dedicated person to sort out those changes, make sure that they're integrated with the latest master script (a solid quarter of the changes you receive will have been made to outdated script documents), and get the latest changes entered into whatever In-engine tool/Wiki/PHP & MySQL DB/Excel spreadsheet the rest of the team (mainly Audio and Level Designers) are working from.

The larger problem is that the nature of a AAA project shifts over the course of the production cycle. Tools that work for early demos, vertical slices and "locked" key plot moments written in pre-production and early full production are nothing like the tools necessary for the pre-cert deathmarch. In the former you're generating demos with maybe 50-200 lines, meticulously cared for and subject to several refinement passes and pick-up sessions. You're worried about tracking revision, here. In the latter you're shunting 10-25 thousand lines of dialogue through a system that directly and immediately affects the work of up to 50 other people, all of whom also legitimately need write-access to at least the status flags and metadata of a significant portion of those lines. You're worried about write-access here, and any sort of checkout system will prevent you from shipping on time.

Excel is generally the least-worst option, partly because of flexibility and partly because an Excel file in a shared network drive can be edited by multiple (50+) users. It's surprisingly easy to roll your own lock/unlock tools for major post-recording session updates, send out an email and then forcibly kick any stragglers off the currently-viewing-with-write-access list of network users that Excel maintains internally (yep), and it's even more surprisingly easy to write completely customized layouts/views purpose-built to each department's needs (producers, level designers, audio devs, and QA have completely different and at times nearly opposing needs) that anyone can switch between with the push of a button in Row 1. This can be done in 3-5 days of Visual Basic (even if your background is any programming language but), and getting a Final Draft->Excel export/import via XML system working is another 1-2, depending on the stylistic discipline of your writing team. You will probably encounter performance issues: there's a flag in VB to disable recalculating each cell on update. Use it.

Oh, and because this is negotiating between high-level recording session script and in-engine content, as a high-level design imperative you need to make it virtually impossible to actually REMOVE lines, as opposed to simply flagging them *for* removal with nice big strikethrough conditional formatting that will annoy everyone into doing the actual removal work from both ends.

Of course you can try rolling a custom [Python/PHP/Perl/Ruby] + [MySQL/PostgreSQL] tool (I think I've encountered every permutation therein, or am just a couple shy of it), but given the constant industry churn and the fact that this is usually written by the programmer lowest on the totem pole (often with reason) or an exceptionally gifted producer/audio person - they're likely not with the studio very long, and there's nothing worse than being left with a massive block of custom code that you need to constantly retool and literally nobody else understands.

There are dedicated tools for dealing with non-linear narrative out there, and the reason I recall none of them is the same reason this industry is stuck with tools as shitty as MAX and Maya: familiarity for the avalanche of late production hires you'll be taking on in order to get this fucker out the door in time for Christmas. Every writer knows Final Draft and Word. Every VO producer, audio engineer and Level Designer can already use Excel. In a major hiring push the inertia of a common toolset counts triple against your homegrown efforts.

Okay, I need to stop there because this is giving me hives. Point is, the situation is absolutely fucked - similar to the thread we had on graphics programming and APIs in games a month or two ago - and it's fucked for good reason, and if I saw a possible solution I'd be out there selling it.
posted by Ryvar at 11:21 AM on August 14, 2015 [23 favorites]

The comics folk I knew doing it were maybe not happy using excel, but we're at least using it.

(actually probably just pasting into it from Word or whatever)
posted by Artw at 11:23 AM on August 14, 2015

Well, there goes that dream...

Years back I noticed the direction much of the industry was heading; physics, UI, tree/landscape generation, all being replaced by dedicated toolsets. So the one area I'd never seen a game ship with was dialog tools.

So I thought about it and brainstormed a system: SQL-backed, a nice non-linear diagram editor based on industry standard use (as in for shaders and other scripting tools, you know, boxes and connecting arrows) for branching dialogue so you could easily, interactively set up all that branching dialog depending on state. In-editor 'playback' so you can test the dialogue, setting states and flags while still editing. And it would all compile to a nice plugin+data you could hook into your engine so it would spit out the correct sound and text as needed (a nice little json containing all onscreen possibilities and the id's needed to call the next options).

You'd have a couple of views within the tool: one for the writers who could compose storylines and arcs, have islands of random/location dependant dialog and a zoom out function which also combined character tracking/notes, location based ambient stuff. You'd have just the plain DB view which outputted/displayed for the actual recordings, which all went into the DB so you could have multiple takes for the same lines (which could then be selected/played/chosen from by the game designers when doing the level design and could also be used to play the correct lines ingame depending on flags dependant on character feeling towards you). And of course the 'level designer'/writer view, where it could all be strung together in that box-and-arrow view, creating dialog trees so vast they where actually more mindmaps which transferred to dialogue maps the in-game characters would use.

And it turns out writers just plop for Excel...

Funny how all the usual suspect here have thought about it, though :-)
posted by MacD at 1:07 PM on August 14, 2015 [2 favorites]

This is the one department in which AAA games are failing nearly across the board against indie titles. Any AAA game's dialog goes through so many people, each of which have an idea of what they'd like to be in there, that it's almost impossible to make anything stick to a singular vision or display any kind of consistency through the whole game. An indie title can (and usually must) stick to a dedicated narrative vision without too much interference.

That's also a large part of why tools that were not really meant for dialog (Excel, nearly always) are used instead of dedicated tools. The dialog needs to be given to contract writers who work from home, producers who need to check line counts for contracting voice actors, QA in another state for spellchecking, localization in another country, etc. etc. It then needs to be imported into various applications for putting into the actual game. It's just easier to use a format that everyone can read rather than a dedicated tool, although many places I've worked have such a thing that imports from Excel for inclusion in the actual game.

And all of these people can write. I mean that in terms of anyone being able to take a line of dialog in their head and transfer it to the screen through a keyboard. For nearly any other discipline anyone who has an idea about how to change the game needs to go through a intermediary to actually change the art, sound, scripting, etc, unless they know what they're doing. Dialog? It's just changing around the words, so anybody can do it, and lots of people think they should.

Some of my favorite tales from game development involve the headaches that can occur from writing troubles, because they are so immediately explicable to someone not familiar with the industry. Poor coding and design only comes across to people who play the game. Poor writing is universally understood.
posted by Durhey at 7:28 PM on August 14, 2015

> Sigh, film people and their bullshit world of ritual... Everything looking like it was written on a typewriter is their version of saying "the Scottish play".

It's not "ritual." The reason they want it in Courier is that in a film or TV script, one page of dialog/action in 12 point Courier equals approximately 1 minute of screen time. It makes it easy to determine length, and a standard page length with a set number of lines makes it easy to substitute pages in scripts as revisions are made. It's a standard in the writing part of the entertainment industry, just like submitting a double-spaced manuscript in publishing or air traffic control talking to jet liner pilots in English is in aviation. You don't have to like it, but to make it in that industry you have to do it.
posted by lhauser at 8:02 PM on August 14, 2015 [4 favorites]

Ah, I see, it's not a "ritual", just a "standard". So instead of a series of prescribed actions done to a prescribed order for historical reasons that people expect you to do whether or not you like it, it's...uh...
posted by Earthtopus at 8:45 PM on August 14, 2015

MacD: Please, pretty please, with Unity on top?
posted by Tick Tock Tourmaline at 8:57 PM on August 14, 2015

The reason they want it in Courier is that in a film or TV script...

But we're talking about video games.

Unless it's a cutscene, in many cases, videogame VO often has zero narrative continuity from line to line, because it's an interactive medium where you can't control or be assured of the player's actions from moment to moment.

Even calling it a "script" is misnomer, as it implies something with a fixed beginning, middle and end.

It's more like, "You're a dwarf innkeeper. Here are the nine things your character might say when the player walks into your tavern. Next, here are the seven things you might say based on all the things the player can do. Now scream like the player shot you in the chest with arrow. Now scream like he stabbed you with a sword. Now scream like he set you on fire..."

And script length and edited sides are pretty much irrelevant to everyone but the developers. SAG actors are typically booked to record everything they'll do in a single four-hour session. Your leads might be booked for two or (very rarely) three sessions. If you're lucky (meaning, big budget), you'll get a few pick-up sessions.

So, insisting on film/TV/state conventions is a giant waste of time and energy. It's not the same medium.
posted by Cool Papa Bell at 9:47 PM on August 14, 2015 [2 favorites]

I once had a boss that edited out proper grammar to add words like "zillions" and awful sentence constructions ecause they looked cooler to non-Anglophones. Shit like that.
posted by mobunited at 4:59 AM on August 15, 2015

Let's not forget the real reason why videogame dialog is written in Excel: localization. The ability to quickly see whether a given line has been translated/recorded/subtitled in 9 languages is critical, and Excel is the lazy man's database.

I've only worked on one project that actually enforced a real database for localization, and the interface was clunky enough that nobody would have used it if it wasn't required by their job.

Related: here's Double Fine's Anna Kipnis talking about how they handle dialog as part of a lecture series I program at NYU.
posted by GameDesignerBen at 5:24 AM on August 15, 2015 [3 favorites]