CHAPTER   10

The Script Format

The first thing to know about writing for games is that there are absolutely no standardized formats for game scripts. There is no such thing as “a game script.” None, nada, zip. This is especially true when dealing with dialogue writing, where every company may have its own unique method or some proprietary software that is used to create and incorporate dialogue. If you’re an in-house writer (full-time employee), there will nearly always be specialized game-engine tools you’ll use to create your material.

For the contract writer, there are a few rough guidelines I can give, but don’t consider them to be hard-and-fast rules. The producer or whoever hires you may have a clear idea of what she wants you to do. If not, it may be up to you to decide what format to use.

First, you need to know what you might be expected to do. There are certain types of jobs you can typically be hired to do as a game writer. They are:

•  FMV or game intro

•  Design document

•  Game bible

  Game-world creation

  Character biographies

  Game backstory

  Game story

•  Quests or missions

•  Cutscenes/cinematics

•  Dialogue

•  In-game text

•  Naming NPCs and game objects

•  Technical material or game manual

•  Web site and promotional materials

FMV/Game Intro

As defined in Chapter 9, full-motion video is of broadcast quality and is usually of higher quality than the animation that can be generated by the game engine. With technology constantly advancing, FMV may become obsolete, but what won’t change is the desire for a really hot, enticing game intro, something that gets the players’ juices flowing and gives a taste of the game world. Essentially, it’s the trailer for the game, and runs maybe one to two minutes. It’s like writing a trailer for a movie or TV show, except that you’ll have to distill the intro from whatever game materials the company provides.

You may be called upon to write an actual introductory scene of some kind—or more likely, it will be a montage of images to capture the mood and feel of the game, as well as to show off the significant game elements (race types, locations, special effects, enemies/monsters, and so on). If it’s scenes, you’ll be writing dialogue for live actors to record. If it’s a montage, there may be some narration to be recorded, or it might have no voice and be done with music only.

This will be noninteractive and will be storyboarded, then created by animators; consequently, you can feel safe using a standard scriptwriting format. My recommendation would be to use an animation-script format, because you will almost always be dealing with animation rather than live action.

If you aren’t familiar with the animation-script format, go to the first section of this book to read up on animation writing. All the basic rules of animation writing apply here, including the need to keep recorded dialogue (if any) minimal, strong, and pithy.

Design Document

It is highly unlikely that you, as a writer, would be asked to write a design document, because this is a designer-level piece of work. However, you need to be aware of what this is in case it comes up in conversation. As defined in Chapter 9, a design document is the complete blueprint of the game. It should be written by the lead or senior designer(s), though many people may contribute to portions of it. The design document needs to contain basically everything that everybody working on the game needs to know about the game—ranging from story elements (descriptions of world, characters, mobs, and so on) to gameplay and technical specs (such as interface, combat systems, lists of items and mobs, stats for items, mobs, and NPCs). Each type of game will naturally require its own sort of design document.

What you would most likely contribute to a design document as a writer are the portions dealing with the game bible, as discussed below.

Game Bible

There isn’t a standard format for game bibles either. What you’ll be hired to write can vary according to the type and nature of the game, and whatever it is the company wants. Generally speaking, the format of an animation bible works every bit as well for games, so I recommend going to the Animation section of this book and reading up on animation bibles.

How much you do on the bible may depend on what stage the game is in when you’re hired. You could be hired at the very beginning of the game development to create the game bible from scratch (with input from the producer and designer). You might be hired when the game is already well into development and they want you only to polish up a bible that is in rough form, or perhaps to flesh out only certain portions of it, such as expanding the character bios or adding more depth to the history of the locations.

You could also be asked to describe weapons, vehicles, or other related elements, to come up with a chronology of quests, or any number of other tasks. Consequently, you want to be sure that the company is very specific about what elements you’d be covering if hired to write a game bible. You will want to know how much material already exists and how much you will be expected to create on your own.

A game bible will be whatever the person who hires you wants it to be, but these are what I consider to be the main ingredients of a good game bible:

•  Game-world creation

•  Game backstory

•  Game story

•  Character biographies (both avatar and NPCs)

•  Mobs/monsters/bosses

Game-World Creation

Game-world creation is writing the description and explanation of the entire setting of the game, which covers descriptions of geography/terrain, key locations, history of regions or places, descriptions of the various races or NPC types, histories of races, and other related information to create a coherent whole for the world of the game.

To be a good game-world creator, you should have at least some knowledge of a wide range of subjects—such as geography, sociology, politics, economic structures, mythology, personal combat, weaponry, war, military strategy and tactics, religions, foreign cultures, linguistics, physics, art, architecture, technology, weather, biology, plants and animals, trade systems, various professions and skills from primitive to technological, the development of civilization, government power structures, and all forms of human interaction. There’s your reading assignment for the afternoon.

Depending on when you’re brought into the project, you may be asked to create a world from scratch, or you may be given existing assets that have to be stitched together, or you may be working from a preexisting property (such as a comic book or movie) that will dictate what you can do.

A good example was the work I did on a PS2 RPG called The Legend of Alon D’ar. I was brought in to create the game bible, including the game story. What existed were the art designs for the world and its zones, for the main characters and races, and some mobs. The world was a chunk of land torn from a planet and floating in space, which presented an interesting challenge right there, because by the usual law of physics, nothing could live there. Because it was a fantasy-themed game, there had to be a mystical or magic-based explanation for how this world could exist. It was great fun to work out a history to explain its existence, histories and descriptions for the zones and characters and races, and come up with names for everything and everyone, inspired by the wonderful artwork alone. Plus, it all had to work together and, most importantly, have an inner consistency that allowed it to make sense within the rules I established.

Imagine how the cataclysmic event that created this Floating World must have affected each of the races, the impact it would have not only on their histories and mythologies, but on their native psyches. Imagine the unique pattern of “day” and “night” such a world would have. What about weather patterns? Imagine how the people inhabiting this terrain deal with having a clearly defined edge to their world beyond which there is only an infinite Void. Why are some of the races human, whereas others are reptilian or amphibious? How does that affect their natures, how they live, what social structures they have, what they believe in, what goals or desires they have? World creation begins with such questions and expands from there.

The same cataclysmic event that created the Floating World provided the hook for the deep backstory of the world, which in turn provided the jumping-off point for the game story and overall big quest that drove the player through the game.

You’ll find the game bible and story for The Legend of Alon D’ar at www.christymarx.info.

The largest amount of game-world creation is done for fantasy and science-fiction games, understandably. In the game bible I wrote for Tao Feng, I gave the game an alternate-history twist, so that rather than building an entirely new world, it was a matter of detailing how a turning point in real-life history had created a recognizable, but altered, version of the real world in which the Chinese immigrants to what would have been California in the 1840s established the independent nation of New China, spanning most of the western states.

Game Backstory

The backstory is often woven into the game-world creation. The backstory is everything that is pertinent to the game story up to the point the game begins. With The Matrix Online, the first three movies, comics, and animated stories made up the full backstory leading up to the point where the MMOG began. Some characters—such as Neo, Superman, Spider-Man, James Bond, King Arthur, or Robin Hood—are well enough known that there wouldn’t be much need for a detailed backstory. The backstory can be full and deep, or short and concise, depending upon the need of the game. Shadow of the Colossus, an award-winning game, had only the sketchiest, most minimal kind of backstory that set up the goal of the game, without feeling the need to explain how or why the hero’s situation or the monstrous colossi he must fight came to exist.

How much of the backstory is conveyed in the game is another issue. It may be relegated to the game manual, it may be given in the trailer to the game, or it may be woven into the game itself (for example: the player goes into a library, and there is a book containing details of the backstory that can be read if the player so chooses).

Game Story

This would be the story that drives the game by providing the overall quest/mission/goal that resolves the game, plus subquests and secondary tasks that provide the twists and turns. It should cover the locations and the NPCs that are critical to the story. It should specify and describe significant puzzles, obstacles, and other vital gameplay elements, along with what, when, and where quest objects are required, obtained, and used. It may need to specify what, when, and where cutscenes or cinematics will occur to convey pieces of the story.

The game story is intertwined with the interactive elements of the game because the story is not simply about what the goal is or achieving the goal, but how the player can achieve the goal. Some of these stories can be quite linear (often the case with console games), or may need to be highly nonlinear, allowing the player a multitude of possible paths for completing the game, with story components that can be accessed in a nonsequential order. The more linear the story, the more likely the company would be to use an outside writer. The more nonlinear, the more likely that the story will be written by a designer.

It’s not unusual to be hired when a game is quite far along and the company has suddenly realized it needs a story or other background material. My friend Katherine Lawrence used to call this “reverse engineering,” because the writer has to come into an existing game world and work backward to come up with a story that fits into it.

Character Biographies

The two categories of character biographies are the player’s main character (the avatar) and the NPCs. An avatar can be a specific character or can be left deliberately vague. How much detail is needed for the avatar’s biography will depend on a couple of factors: (a) how much detail the company wants, and (b) whether the avatar has dialogue in the game. An avatar who will have meaningful (not generic) dialogue in the game needs to be fleshed out well enough to establish that avatar’s “voice,” meaning how the personality and character traits will come out in dialogue. Will the avatar speak in a formal or casual manner (contemporary approach or based on some historical time period)? Will he use slang? If so, what kind of slang? Is he sly, droll, sarcastic, ribald, poetic, philosophical, timid, loving, hard edged? Young or old? Shaped by what sort of life experiences?

An example of avatars with bios attached would be Lara Croft (Tomb Raider), Max Payne, or hard-edged spy Sam Fisher (Splinter Cell). In Shadow of the Colossus, the player’s avatar wasn’t even given a specific name (he is referred to only as “Wander”), and all the details surrounding the avatar’s background and relationship with other characters are left undefined and open to the player’s interpretation. For most RPGs and MMOGs, it’s up to the player to create the avatar from a set of character options, so the player is creating her own avatar’s biography, if any.

Consequently, the bulk of the work lies in creating bios for NPCs. These might be nothing more than a few lines of description, depending on how significant the NPC is. For example, a minor NPC might have a bio that is nothing more than “Mortar Pestwhistle is a Leprechaun engineer with a sly sense of humor and an overbearing pride in his creations.” In The Legend of Alon D’Ar, the player had three NPC companions that he could control as a group along with his own avatar, so I gave those three characters detailed bios—including their own subquests, needs, and goals—which were featured in cutscenes along with the avatar.

In the game bible I did for Tao Feng, besides writing the character bios, I included a paragraph on how each character would interact with or behave toward each of the other major characters. Because there were twelve major characters, that meant an additional eleven paragraphs for each character to cover these relationships. This is typical for an animation bible, but somewhat unusual for games.

Mobs/Monsters/Bosses

Most mobs or monsters are usually described by their general race characteristics in the game bible, but if a mob is important enough (a boss or a major villain), it might rate its own special description and possibly a biography.

Quests or Missions

This is another area that dovetails with design, because a quest or mission is a primary interactive element. If a game is big enough, especially something such as an MMOG, there can be a lot of work involved in coming up with and writing quests/missions. A quest needs to have an appropriate reward or payoff—such as XP, money, a quest item, vital information, or unlocking the next piece of gameplay.

Here’s a list of common types of quests:

•  Collecting/gathering: Asks the player to bring back an object or x number of objects—such as “Bring me a bottle of cologne” or “Bring me 5 enemy satellites” or “Bring me 15 black tulips.” This could be a quest that simply involves finding and getting the object, or it might involve having to kill mobs or NPCs in order to get the object(s) as drops—such as “Bring me 10 pirate eye patches” or “Bring me 5 chimera snouts.”

•  Courier: Asks the player to deliver an object or message to an NPC (sometimes referred to as “FedEx quests”)—such as “Take this letter to X” or “Deliver this crate of weapons to Z.”

•  Talk to: Asks the player to find a certain NPC and talk to him/her/it. Usually that NPC will have a quest for the player. It can also be used to “push” the player to discover a new location or zone.

•  Escort/protect: Asks the player to escort an NPC from point A to point B. This will usually involve being ambushed or encountering danger of some kind while protecting the NPC.

•  Fighting mobs: In most cases, tells the player to kill x number of a mob—such as “Kill 10 raging chimeras” or “Kill 20 Putrid Bandits.” It can be combined with a collecting quest—such as “Kill 20 Putrid Pirates and bring me their eye patches as proof.”

•  Fighting elite mob: Asks the player to kill a specific boss mob or NPC, which is more powerful and dangerous than the usual kind—such as “Slay Big Badd, the pack leader of the raging chimeras” or “Destroy the planet-eating Doomship.”

•  Scouting:Asks the player to scout a dangerous location—as in “Scout the inside of this mine and report what sort of monsters inhabit it” or “Travel to the Sagittarius Sector and determine whether there are enemy ships in the sector.”

•  Rescuing/setting free: Asks the player to rescue an NPC from a dire situation. This can be similar to an escort quest if it involves helping the NPC get out of the location. Or it might involve bringing something to the NPC instead (such as a potion to cure a mortal wound). A variation on this is completing a task or bringing a quest object that will free an NPC from some form of imprisonment.

•  Finding person or object: Asks the player to locate an NPC or game item, which may or may not involve doing anything with them or bringing them back—such as “My husband left for Nasty Valley days ago and hasn’t returned. Please find out what happened to him.” The player could end up talking to the husband to resolve the quest, or might find the husband’s bones and have to return with this info (or a token found on the body) to the original quest giver.

•  Capture person or object: Asks the player to capture an NPC, mob, or object, rather than kill or destroy it—as in “Take this rune and use it to enchant a raging chimera, then lead it back here to me” or “Capture the supply depot.”

•  Unraveling clues: Gives the player clues to unravel some sort of mystery. This is often used with a linked quest (see below).

•  Chained, linked: Many quests are chained together so that the first quest leads to a second related quest, which leads to a third related quest, and so on. Any of the above quest types (or others not listed here) can be combined in a chain of quests. Usually the tasks become more difficult as the chain progresses.

Cutscenes and Cinematics

These are more commonly used in the linear types of games and can serve more than one purpose. Most cutscenes/cinematics are used to reveal key pieces of the story and to advance the story for the player. They can have an emotional payoff, or they can be bald chunks of data. They can also be used to validate the player for accomplishing something special (a paton-the-back “way to go!” moment).

You will want to have a discussion up front with the producer or designer about what the game engine can or can’t do in creating the cutscenes/cinematics. A lot of times, there will be “easy” and “hard” ways to do the scene in the engine. For example, changing the camera angle in the middle of the scene could be either easy or incredibly hard, depending on the engine design. Another example: on one PS2 game, I was initially told that the characters wouldn’t be able to move their lips, let along do lip-synching. With that in mind, I carefully wrote the scenes using animation-writing techniques to minimize the amount of time the camera lingered on a character’s face, such as using over-the-shoulder shots for the speaking character rather than looking at the speaking character from the front.

Most frequently, cutscenes/cinematics are noninteractive. Control of the game is taken away from the player, who is then expected to stand and watch the scene unfold. A wise designer will allow the player to click past the cutscene/cinematic if he doesn’t feel like following the story thread.

In Half-Life 2, a clever approach was taken in which the cutscenes/cinematics would play out inside an enclosed environment so that the player couldn’t conveniently leave right away, but the player was allowed to continue interacting with the environment. This gave the player the option to do something else in the location, and either ignore the scene or pay attention to it if she wished. There are occasionally minicinematics in World of Warcraft where a short scene plays out between a couple of NPCs, with the player free to watch or move on to another part of the game (in this case, however, the cinematics don’t affect an overall game story).

The important thing to remember about cutscenes/cinematics is that they should be short—preferably one to three pages in a standard live-action-script format, slightly more if written in an animation-script format. Again, apply the general rules of animation writing. Keep the dialogue minimal, strong, and pithy.

If you’re writing the story that includes indications for the cutscenes/cinematics, there are two things to bear in mind as you create the story:

•  There is probably a budget and time limit to how many cutscenes the developers can put into the game, so determine ahead of time what the limit is. Craft the story so that you could lose two to three cutscenes should there be a cut in the schedule or budget.

•  Be careful not to craft a story that requires big chunks of exposition or too much explanation of events in the cutscenes. Try to limit each cutscene to revealing one key piece of story, maybe two, but not three or four. Cutscenes need to be tiny nuggets of story, not big chunks of exposition.

You’ll find a few examples of cinematics from The Legend of Alon D’ar at www.christymarx.info.

Dialogue

Setting aside cutscenes/cinematics, 99 percent of dialogue you might be hired to write will be for NPCs. Common types of dialogue include the following:

•  Giving quests/missions.

•  Giving information, training, directions (to a location).

•  Giving hints: “Did you go to Sagittarius Sector yet?”

•  Generic greetings: “Hi, how ya doing?”

•  Generic threats: “Die, mangy cur!”

•  Generic default replies: “I don’t know what to do with that.”

•  Generic vendors (selling and buying game items): “Buy from me. I’ll give you such a deal.”

•  Adding flavor: for example, a storyteller who relates tales that may not be significant to the story, but adds general flavor to the background material.

You’ll want to know up front whether the dialogue will be done as text or as voice. Some games will combine the two and play audio while also showing the dialogue as text. Both ways present you with limitations in terms of length, so once again apply the rules of animation writing—keep it short and pithy. If it’s text, you could potentially have a more specific limitation, such as a certain number of characters (letters) and spaces per speech so that it doesn’t occupy too large a balloon or dialogue box when on the screen.

Because voice is expensive, time-consuming, and creates large sound files, it tends to be used sparingly. You should read audio dialogue out loud to yourself to make sure it’s easy to say and sounds right when spoken. Better yet, record yourself speaking the lines and play them back to yourself. A line that looks fine in text can sometimes be a clunker when spoken out loud. Saying the lines out loud will call your attention to speeches or sentences that are too long.

If the developer has devised specific methods of integrating dialogue into the game, you may be required to learn a special piece of software. This method can be different for each company, so you need to be good at adapting to new software. And because of this, there is nothing like a standard format. However, it is a common practice to put game dialogue into a TV/film-script format when it’s being given to actors for recording.

Writing game dialogue can involve two of the game-design elements described in Chapter 9: variables and choice.

Variables

The variables that affect dialogue depend upon the programming “flags” that need to be checked before the correct piece of dialogue is fed to the player. These flags are conditions the game code looks for. This gets back to the “If this, then this …” formula. “If this condition exists, then this dialogue is given.” There can be an infinite number of such conditions, but here are some of the most common ones:

•  What level is the player?

•  Is the player on a certain quest?

•  Is the player incomplete on the quest?

•  Has the player completed the quest?

•  Does the player have a certain game item or quest object?

•  If buying something, does the player have enough money?

•  Has the player spoken to the NPC before?

•  Has the player spoken to some other NPC yet?

•  Does the player belong to a certain race or class?

•  Does the player have a race or class bias in relation to the NPC (for example, friendly, neutral, hostile)?

•  Has the player been to a certain location yet?

•  Has the player done a specific action yet?

There might be only one variable/condition tied to a piece of dialogue, or there could be two or several in combination—or there could be none, of course. Some games don’t have these complexities of dialogue. But for those that do, it will be vital to you as the writer to have a full and detailed understanding of what variables/conditions will affect the dialogue, so that you can tailor the dialogue accordingly.

You’ll need to be good at juggling these variables in your head and making sure one piece of dialogue doesn’t contradict another, especially if they can be accessed in a nonsequential manner.

For example, an NPC could have dialogue that pertains to a particular quest that can be given only once the player is level 10, and only if the player is of the warrior class, but any player is free to talk to the NPC at any time. The variables and attendant dialogue might look something like this:

Hopefully, what you have noticed about that example is that the more variables the game design allows in the NPC dialogue, the more specific the dialogue can become (making the game feel “smarter”), but it also increases the amount of both coding and dialogue writing that has to be done. In that short example, there are a dozen or more conditions that a programmer has to code (including flags that must be created by talking to that NPC), which is one reason for a push to keep game dialogue limited. In game design, there is a constant tension between wanting to make a game feel smart and more aware of exactly what the player is doing vs. the need to keep the writing and programming from getting out of control.

One more thing about the example above—it’s one-sided and nonbranching. Only the NPC has lines, assumedly initiated by the player clicking on the NPC, and there is no input of player dialogue. It’s minimally interactive because the player can’t affect it and can’t do anything other than read or hear it. Once you go the extra step of adding player dialogue, you move into the area of player choice and branching dialogue.

Choice

The biggest mistake a non–game writer tends to make is assuming that game dialogue always consists of simple branching-dialogue trees. Many games avoid using branching dialogue, or have adapted it to be more variable. However, because you could encounter some form of it, it’s a good idea to understand the basics as well as the pitfalls. The trick with branching forms of dialogue (fig. 10.1) is to keep the dialogue from branching out of control. At some point, each branch has to come to an end or become a dead end, or the branches could become infinite. Notice from this simple example how quickly branches can proliferate.

Figure 10.1

Example of branching dialogue.

In the above example, one branch dead-ends pretty quickly. One branch will lead to useful data about a particular direction, but only if the player pays for it. But the remaining branches allow the player to deduce the right direction without paying (assuming the player has the same dialogue options to choose from each time he talks to the NPC).

The other pitfall to avoid is creating branches that don’t serve a real purpose and create only an illusion of choice. You would never, for example, want to do this (fig. 10.2).

That’s a waste of the player’s time—and frustrating to boot. Every branch and each dialogue option should have a purpose, or it shouldn’t be there. At the same time, each branch has to end somewhere, with the player feeling that taking the branch was worth it—either in getting useful info, receiving something (reward), opening up an option to do something (such as buy, sell, or trade), getting backstory flavor, or, at the very least, being given something amusing (a joke or insult).

Bear in mind that branching dialogue will be further complicated by the same types of variables and conditions as nonbranching dialogue. On one MMOG, we wrote branching dialogues for numerous variables (checking for player level, phase of the game, what step in a quest the player had reached, whether a reward was due, and so forth), with some of the branches linking to other files of branching dialogue with more variables and conditions. In more-complex cases, we had up to six interconnected files of complex dialogue trees that linked via special branches from a main file.

Figure 10.2

Example of branching dialogue with false branches.

Another variable that could come up in some games is the race or class bias that could be attached to both the NPC and the player. Being friendly, neutral, or hostile toward a particular race or class could require different dialogues to account for the bias.

In summary, writing dialogue can range from fairly simple to intensely complex, but one thing remains the same—you must be able to write clever, compelling, useful, and entertaining dialogue limited to a few sentences at a time.

Slang and Fantasy Language

You will find this section in the Animation chapters, but it bears repeating here.

Using contemporary slang will make you sound hip, but will also quickly date the game. Many clever writers get around this by inventing slang that doesn’t really exist, but sounds appropriate for the genre. This is even more useful when dealing with a futuristic or science-fiction game where you don’t want modern slang to sound out of place or archaic … unless that’s by deliberate intent.

If you’re going to use foreign slang, do your homework! It’s embarrassing to hear or read slang—say, for a contemporary Australian—that hasn’t been used for twenty years except as a joke.

Then there’s fantasy. When writing a pure fantasy game, it’s easy to forget how modern some of our phrases are. “Fast as lightning” is fine, but “faster than a bullet” is a problem if your characters use only swords. Unless you’re writing a total parody, you don’t want to hear a medieval knight say, “Wow, cool.” Be careful to avoid anachronistic slang.

I came up with the Marx Fantasy Dialogue Scale to differentiate the various ways in which fantasy dialogue could be spoken, ranging from colloquial/modern (No. 1) to High Epic/Poetic (No. 5). Here’s an example:

1.  He doesn’t know what he’s doing.

2.  He does not know what he is doing.

3.  He does not know what he does.

4.  He knows not what he does.

5.  He knows not what his purpose is, for confusion lies heavy upon him.

You would rarely want to use No. 5, because it’s wordy and sounds least natural to modern ears. Using purely colloquial language can sound jarring in some fantasy settings. Creating the right fantasy dialogue depends a great deal on how you use contractions, the word arrangement and sentence structure, and the vocabulary you employ.

In-Game Text

This is written material the player might come across in the game. One example mentioned previously is finding books that can be opened and read. Other examples would be letters, journals, dispatches, notes, briefings, decrypted code, and other such items that can be found or are given to the player as part of a quest. It might be text that appears on a monitor, PDA, or other communication device that the player uses in the game.

Technical Material or Game Manual

In addition to the game itself, there is writing that needs to be done to explain to the player how the game works and other technical-writing needs. When I was making adventure games for Sierra On-Line, I wrote the game book that came with the game. The book gave backstory and other general information about the game and interface. I also wrote the “hint book,” a separate book that the players could consult for hints when they felt stuck or unable to progress.

You could be asked to write other game-related material that falls outside the game—such as compiling a list of quest objects and where they’re found, a chronology of quests, a walkthrough, and so on.

Web Site and Promotional Materials

Most games have a Web site to help promote the game and create a sense of community for it. You could be hired to write material—of either a technical nature or purely promotional—for the Web site, or you could be hired to write marketing material for other media.

For example, for The Matrix Online, I was hired to take the brief descriptions of the many skills and abilities the player could learn in the game and “Matrix-ize” them, meaning rewrite them in a way that would fit with how data are downloaded into someone’s brain in the Matrix movies. Those descriptions were intended as additional material for the game’s Web site. On another game, I was asked to recraft the game bible into a shorter version that could be used by the marketing people in PR releases.

Beyond the Basics (Advice, Tips, and Tricks)

Some writers who have expressed an interest in writing for games have worried about what level of technical skill they need to have, in terms of knowing programming or special software. Because each company can have its own approach, there isn’t any particular software to learn ahead of time, but—and this is a big but—you should be technically inclined and able to quickly learn new pieces of software. Obviously, you’ll need to know one of the major word-processing programs, such as Microsoft Word. Microsoft Excel is another program that is heavily used in the business, and though it doesn’t relate directly to writing, it would be useful to have some familiarity with Excel.

You don’t need to know programming or be able to write code. However, you could potentially be asked to incorporate bits of code, so it doesn’t hurt to pick up whatever basics you can along the way. If you can write some basic HTML or use Flash, you have taken a good step toward proving that you can handle a basic scripting language. If a company wants you to incorporate bits of code, they’ll provide you with the necessary training or instructions. They won’t expect you to come in the door knowing it.

Version Control

You need to have good organizational skills and the means to track the many versions and variations of the work you do. It will be vital to have good communication with the producer, product manager, or senior/lead designer (whoever the point person is) on how to name your narrative or dialogue game files. If you’re writing only a game bible, this may not be as crucial. But if you’re writing numerous files, such as dialogue for lots of NPCs or a large batch of missions, it is absolutely crucial.

Either they or you need to establish precisely what identifiers will quickly and easily tell anyone working on the game what that file is about, what it attaches to, what NPC or zone it belongs to, and so forth. Additionally, there must be an identifier (such as a date) that will immediately indicate which is the most current, latest, and/or approved version of the file.

Without careful version control, you end up in the hell of version confusion, with no one quite sure which is the latest or approved version, or what goes where in the game. Some companies have “data wranglers,” whose job it is to oversee such assets and make sure there’s a workable system of asset identification and version control.

Once you plunge into a game-writing project, make sure to find out whom to deal with and what system they want to use for version control.

Recording Dialogue

If you write game dialogue that will be recorded by actors, the chance is slim, though not impossible, that you’ll be asked to attend the recording sessions. If you do get the chance to attend, you should go for it. As the writer, your input to the voice director and actors could be invaluable, because you will know better than anyone else what the context is and what the emotional tone of the dialogue should be. Plus, it’s a good way for you to learn what works or doesn’t work in spoken dialogue.

Because that is rare, you should be aware that the overwhelming majority of the time, actors will record their lines alone, not in the presence of other actors. A game that has a superbig budget and uses big-name movie actors might go the extra step (and considerable expense) of getting their big names together at the same time in a recording studio so they deliver their lines to one another in a more natural way. That would be the exception.

Instead, what you have are actors with sheets of paper that usually show only their lines. If they’re really lucky, the actors might be given a full script so they can see what other characters are saying, but you can’t count on that. A voice director will feed other lines to the actors (if it’s back-and-forth dialogue), so that the actors at least have something to respond to. And hopefully, above the line of dialogue, there will be a line or two of additional information that gives some idea of the situation or circumstance in which the line is delivered. Though if you look at the sample presented earlier in this chapter, the descriptions of the game variables may not provide the actors with much help. A good actor will draw the meaning out of the lines, but some lines may not by themselves clue the actor in to how the dialogue should be delivered.

For that reason, I recommend the free use of parentheticals when writing audio game dialogue. If you’ve read the Animation chapters or are familiar with scriptwriting, you know what this means. For those who don’t, parentheticals are one or two words in parentheses beneath the character’s name, indicating the emotional tone or attitude for the line.

Consider this line:

NPC

You don’t want to go there.

Imagine how many different ways a line like that could be delivered, if the actor had no indication of what to do with it. If you include a parenthetical, you greatly increase the odds that the line will be recorded in the emotional tone you intended.

Here are some possibilities:

NPC

(friendly concern)

You don’t want to go there.

NPC

(condescending)

You don’t want to go there.

NPC

(afraid)

You don’t want to go there.

NPC

(impatient)

You don’t want to go there.

NPC

(angry, stern)

You don’t want to go there.

NPC

(cool, indifferent)

You don’t want to go there.

This is not to say that you should overdo the use of parenthenticals. Limit them to the pieces of dialogue that could be interpreted in more than one way.

One more item that is tremendously useful for a recording session is to include along with the recording script a paragraph or two of background information about each character. That way, if the actors haven’t been provided with other information beforehand, they will at least have something that fills them in on the nature of the characters they’re portraying.

Game Bible, Game Story, and Cinematic Samples

You will find the game bible, game story, and examples of cinematics that I wrote for a PS2 action RPG titled The Legend of Alon D’ar available to read and study at www.christymarx.info. The developer was Stormfront Studios, and the publisher was Ubisoft.