MikeJesus's picture
MikeJesus from Nowhere in particular is reading This Side of Paradise, Fitzgerald April 8, 2015 - 1:27pm

I'm not much of a gamer but story-driven adventure games totally suck me in. Anything that TellTale Games produces these days scratches me right behind the ear till I'm the happiest pup around.

I used to make point and click games a while back. The games weren't doing too hot, a week of effort would result in fifty or so views and very little feedback for the audience. In an attempt to increase views I added in some poorly drawn breasts and I went from 50 views to somewhere in the 20K ballpark. The operation ended up turning into a satire porngame production where I would trick people looking for pornography into playing games that heavily revolved around reminding the player of his or her mortality and the pointlessness of existence. There's nothing funnier to me than misleading people who think they're getting porn into getting a healthy dose of nihilism. 

I remember that one of the biggest challenges when putting together the games was organizing the script. These games had multiple endings and choices and all that noise which simply didn't work with the usual script structure.

Playing the TellTale's Tales From The Borderlands made me think about the writing process behind adventure games and how much I miss being a part of it. Missing being a part of the writing process automatically made me hover over here.

So here's what I'm curious about:
Anyone have any experience in writing for videogames? Any idea if there's an industry standard format like with screenplays? Any books to recommend on writing for videogames?

jyh's picture
jyh from VA is reading whatever he feels like April 9, 2015 - 7:53am

I started a StoryNexus (http://www.storynexus.com) game. (It isn't published.) I didn't get far, didn't really care for the mechanics, but it was still kind of fun. Once I knew I wasn't going to go very far with it, I just turned it into a hellish loop: you either lose or keep playing, no winning allowed.

Can't help you with your more specific questions. I imagine a script for a game would have to be tailored somewhat to the project, depending on how scenes & levels are designed, so it probably couldn't be but so standardized.

MikeJesus's picture
MikeJesus from Nowhere in particular is reading This Side of Paradise, Fitzgerald April 9, 2015 - 12:20pm

They're all super simple point and click adventure games. No other mechanics than quiz type of stuff or choosing a dialogue option to progress the story.

Thuggish's picture
Thuggish from Vegas is reading Day of the Jackal April 9, 2015 - 7:29pm

For what it's worth, my understanding is that most video games' writing is done by one of the programmers who has a modicum of writing (plotting?) chops.