The work of the writer in video games

Hi, Habr! This is Larian Studios again. We were very touched by the warm welcome and the interest shown by the inhabitants of Habr of our previous publication, and therefore, without wasting time, we decided to write something else.

This time the word will be taken by our holy saints in our studios - the department of writers and scriptwriters. Since in Russian they speak still not very well, I will serve as a translator of an article written specifically for Habr by our writer Charlene Putney alphachar .

Charlene described what the life of a screenwriter in a game studio consists of, and why they are needed at all and what they do.
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Since this is a text about writers, there will be few pictures, and many letters.

“Writing is actually very simple. You just sit in front of the typewriter and start bleeding. ”
Ernest Hemingway

Hi, Habr! My name is Charlene and I am a member of the writers team at Larian Studios. We are currently working on a storyline, characters and dialogue in Divinity: Original Sin 2. Yes, this is the best work in the world! Today I will talk a little about what we do, how we do it, and why writers are an important part of any serious game development team.

Who are we?

So who becomes a writer / screenwriter in a game studio? In Larian, we, the writers, are a small but diverse team. We all have very different professions in the past, including the historian, the writer for films and those. the manager. We are united by only three things: a passion for the printed word, a love for the RPG and a total desire to dominate word games .


We read a lot . We share books, comic books, and movie recommendations with all four offices around the world, which helps shape a unique meta culture. Last year, our interests lie in the field of fantasy, science fiction and Russian literature. This influenced the formation of a very black sense of humor in the whole team.

What are we doing?

I have been at Larian for two years now and not a single day was like the previous one. Hell, even two hours were not similar to each other! I try very hard to allocate time to the tasks with the highest priority were done first daily, but it is not always easy. Our team of writers constantly juggles with so many tasks that it is quite difficult to find all the time. This is chaos, but it works!

Over the years of working together, we, if I may say so, have become something of a collective unconscious , working most effectively as a tireless and soul-fed Frankenstein monster, rather than a group of individuals. We mix and check our work constantly to achieve the best result.

Here are just a few areas of our daily work:

Main story

We are working on writing and balancing the main narrative , taking into account comments from all the teams. Teams of artists, designers and marketers - all work with what we write, and we must be sure that our texts are as descriptive and detailed as possible, and that any major changes can be understood without difficulty. Any plot is developed from the general to the specific, i.e. organically from the main mood, gradually expanding and forming through a long series of meetings at the blackboard, shouts at each other, a sea of ​​coffee and laughter.

Of course, like all writers, we believe that history is the main thing. But by the end of the day you realize that the main thing is the gameplay (gameplay). No matter how beautiful our prose is, if it is not combined with the game, everything will be torn to shreds and thrown into the basket. So it takes several iterations to create a really good story that will be a good game.

Characters

We describe the characters of all the characters in the game, starting from their bright births and ending with hard and cruel deaths. This refers to the characters of the players and their companions and to each NPC in the game.

For important characters, we create a page by page history of their personalities. What drives them? What hurt them so much that it shaped their approach to the world and other people, how did they act in danger? And in love? In friendship? How is the thread of their story woven into the canvas of the whole plot? Then, in order to see how similar they are to real people, we sit down at the table and play out their every answer depending on different situations. After this, quite strong personalities who undergo our “cleansing” are often found to be very different from their original versions.

As for the less important characters, we still try to give them a highlight. Even if it's just a trader from the road with one replica. We are trying to give each creature in our world a certain touch that will make it unique in comparison with the other characters.

Of course, in the process of creating characters, we are inspired by the world around us. So if you see some kind of freak in the corner of the bar, looking at you intently, this could be one of us, studying, for example, your unique way of smoothing your hair back. I scoop a lot of ideas for the characters, watching the passengers of the bus on which I am going to work.

Quests and situations

Together with a team of designers and scripters, we ponder and write down all possible situations in the game, relating each game area to a plot twist or themes developed in the main story. In this way, we participate in each task from the NPC, the riddle and the award received, in each swirling move that will be opened further in the story.

Each individual quest or situation is assigned to a specific writer and script for joint implementation. We work closely together, working together as a couple, how the situation will be structured and how to breathe life into it. We discuss on Skype how everything will be played, then the script developer recreates the whole situation on our game engine from scratch, then allowing the writer to start creating dialogues. In the end, it turns out a glorious little creature from a writer and a scripter, something that can only be the fruit of these two minds working in unison. When the process is well coordinated, it feels like a real triumph of teamwork.

Dialogues

Using our dialog editor, we create cues for each character in the game. Very, very many times . Writing a dialogue is an iterative process, and after the next review a lot of text should be edited, rewritten or cut out completely. Depending on how you feel the passing game, the characters can change the names, gender, profession, in general, everything. Sometimes a character that you truly love doesn’t go live as a review, and then the old advice of one writer “kill all pets” comes in handy. So hard to stab a knife when your pets have faces!

Inside our team, we conduct small reviews of each other's texts every day to make them as perfect as possible. Sometimes one of us gets stuck in a dialogue, just can't find the right words - and this is the moment when being part of the team is great, we can just change the dialogues and look at everything with a fresh look. Our goal is to make each dialogue sound realistic, focus on the player and improve some aspect of our world without destroying its integrity ! That's an order!

Description of the world

Speaking of integrity ... but how do dwarves communicate with each other? What are the ritual rules of elven cannibalism? What exactly is a religion in the Holy Order? About such questions we receive from the design team every Monday morning. The picture of most of our world already exists in our imagination and in our documents, but there are always these small strokes that need to be added - and we are the ones who have brushes in their hands.

Other

When we do not work on the above, we deal with magazines, tool types, battle cries, write texts for marketing, etc.

Despite the fact that we all deal with different areas in the game, each of us has our own area of ​​responsibility. For example, mine is the names and descriptions of each item in the game. One of my colleagues is responsible for the styles and their grammatical correspondences.

In addition, each of the player’s characters is assigned to the writer so that he maintains a consistent style in his lines (I’m a bit in love with my own: Ifan ben-Mezd). Distributing areas of responsibility in this way, we are always sure that there is a pair of eyes that is the final quality control for each word that appears in the game.

It is also worth noting that it is very likely that there is not a single word in the game that one of us can recognize as an achievement. This is a team achievement . Everything that goes through numerous iterations and checks, as a result, turns out to be a product consisting of parts of the soul of each of us.

In a studio

Most of the team of writers (five of seven) are in our studio in Dublin. However, the studios are not divided. All day we keep in touch with colleagues via Slack and Skype. There are so many of these conversations that I rather communicate with my fellow scriptwriters from St. Petersburg, Ghent and Quebec, than with a fellow writer who sits next to the Dublin office!


Why it happens? As already mentioned above, each situation in the game is assigned to a writer and a collaboration script. Writers in Dublin and Ghent, scripters in all four offices - we are constantly mixed to create a variety of game situations.

And we need to mix. Now, when we have already comprehended the “Larian Way”, we, the writers, cannot be left alone for a long time, otherwise we will go astray. If you are a writer who is used to sitting in a dark room in the company of one muse, then most likely in Larian you will be hard. We are more like Borg or an ant colony (why do all these comparisons sound so negative ?!) working in common documents , where everything is revealed, commented, developed and constantly edited. And with such a distributed team, good documentation is key to ensuring that everyone is working on the same wavelength.

In the end, after all this fuss, what happens when we are finally satisfied with our character or storyline, or phrase, or dialogue? At this point, the rest of the studio shares its ruthlessly honest reviews. And this is good, because the next stage is our players . We want them to love and appreciate our work. Criticism is hard. When you spend the night on the passage, reviving and creating characters and dialogues, it’s hard not to take the criticism personally. But it is necessary. Everything we do, we do for the sake of the game , creating the best possible experience for the players. And our method of producing this best practice consists of constant partnership, criticism, and new iterations. And it works!

Does your game need a writer?

If your game uses at least some amount of text, then I would say “Yes!”.

Writing as a discipline often suffers from the idea that if everyone can type, then everyone can write. If you need a smooth storyline, engaging dialogues, interesting quests and entertaining marketing content, investing in at least one writer will help you make significant progress for your project.

Even where there are few words, it is the writer who understands and can connect storylines, character motivations and find the right words for menus, commands, etc.

If you are not in a position to hire a writer on an ongoing basis, even small consultations of a freelance writer can work a miracle so that your game looks more polished and professional, and so that your stories are more complete and sparkle with catchy phrases that will return players over and over.