Everything's on Fire and No One Knows What to Do (In Game Writing)

[Music] so welcome to everything's on fire and no one knows what to do this panel was born largely out of the same ideas that tom was expressing the idea that we often feel as game writers especially if we're working at a smaller company or working on our own stuff that we struggle alone and we fight oh learn and I wanted to go into some of the challenges that we can face as game writers together to give you some hope that maybe when you're going through something similar to the things we're describing here you will know you're not alone and everything is on fire but it's gonna be ok so we'll start with some introductions hello so I'm Gavin Jergens fury I'm a lead writer at in exile entertainment my past projects include Diablo 3 torment tides of numenera wasteland 3 which we were working on right now and horizon zero dawn hi there my name is Colin McComb I'm the creative lead for a torment tides of numenera I have also worked on Planescape torment fallout 2 and wasteland 2 as long as well as some

other games from my own company I'm Leanne Taylor Giles I've been in the industry for 10 years and I have a muscles and branching dialogue systems that you can read if you would like to I'm Chris Avalon and I'm very old I recently worked on 'pray and was part of the system shock reboot and also I'm working with the FTL guys subset games on into the breach I'm George Seitz writer and lead designer at in exile entertainment just finished up torment tides of numenera now working on wasteland 3 I worked at a bunch of other RPGs at obsidian and then a bunch of mmo's before that so we all between us have a lot of experience and a lot of experience in different fields ranging from tabletop indie mid to triple-a basically if you have a question afterward we're going to have the Q&A at the standing mics in either of the aisles that we will also be at the wrap-up room off to the panel if you would like to come and ask us something in person please do okay so just a quick

question for the audience we know how many of you are here for the first time but I would like to get a gauge of how many people have been in the industry for how long so we can tailor our approach so here's been in the industry for 1/2 ideas hands up great five to ten nice ten to fifteen whoa 15 plus very nice okay so we have a broad range and we can talk about it from many different angles we're going to start off with identifying some games writing related terms that we find very important when we're communicating to other departments especially so not just between writers which is always a delight but when we need to talk to people who maybe have a different understanding of how they express story sure so my big thing is collaborative storytelling we are just one part of a team and obviously we're the most important part of the team but what we do we need we can only do with

the help of the programmers with the artists with QA and it is our job to bring them into the story to make them feel like they own it with us so that they feel empowered so they feel some ownership and so that they want to be a part of the project and so they love it as much as we do because god I love personally I love stories I love writing stories I love telling stories and I want all of these people to feel that same sort of love for this thing as I do there is nothing more disheartening than talking to something they're like oh it's a paycheck like oh but this is my baby so it's important to bring people in it's important to have them discuss the game with you it's important to have them provide their feedback and it's important that they feel that they are a part of this process with you if they are not involved we might as well just be writing novels and that's a lot less fun thank you so the term I wanted to discuss today

sorry I'm trying to master this microphone I don't think I have it figured out yet is so every single place I've worked out except in exile someone has cornered me right around the first day or so and pushed me into a corner and said I don't like games story I don't like writing was it Colin yeah it's generally Colin he follows me everywhere but usually at night and so what people usually mean in this case is they don't like cinematics and I think because you guys are here you know that there's more to game writing than cinematics so a lot of the time what I try to establish on a team that I've come into that there's a difference between cinematics and game writing and what I like to say the game writing is is sort of a bridge it's a bridge between what the designers intended and what the put stories the players are telling themselves as writers were there to empower the players to make them feel like their choices have meaning even though the designers have something very definite in mind for what the writers will are what the players will experience okay

I'm gonna take that a step further the time that I would like to define is emergent narrative which has several different meanings depending on who you talk to you my favorite is that you know 50% of the story is told in the players head so part of writing for games is leaving their silences where the player can talk to themselves without even realizing and say oh that's what this means this is what it means to me because they're going to tell themselves a formal personal story then we can ever tell them since we're writing for a max audience and that was one of my favorite things about working on tides of numenera was the ability to have that ambiguity and present the players with the option to interpret what was going on and react accordingly so remembering that the player is telling the story with you even though you'll fire a pod in time or in space there's still a part of that story and what they create out of what you have given them is very very exciting so in my ever-increasing effort to make sure LeAnn never invites me on to panels again when I initially got this question I went through a range of

emotions much like dialog responses I went from the angry well--there's terms I never liked to hear like the word impossible if you ever tell me the word impossible I'm gonna kill you until you quantify it all so the words sorry offends me and also we need to be on the same page when I ask for something by the end of the day I need to confirm with you what end of the day means but from a narrative standpoint I like to invent a term when talking with QA because I feel quality assurance has been trained it never to report a story based bug they always treat it as a deep priority suggestion or may you know this is kind of confusing to me but I'm kind of afraid to bring it up because stories kind of nebulous for me a narrative bug is a very very real thing if there is some story point you don't get if you don't understand how a character like arrived at a certain location or even how you as a player got to a location and it's never explained anywhere else in the game those are things that QA should be trained to write up along with really bad vo lines of the QA Department will laugh about consistently walk through your QA

Department listen see where your bad vo is and either delete it or get it recorded so the the term I guess it's less of a term and it's more of a distinction is a story versus setting and I probably don't really need to define these for this room but I'll kind of give my shorthand story is the plot it's the sequence of events with a beginning a middle and an end it's usually driven by the player or it's about the player the setting on the other hand is the backdrop it's the place in the time it's all the details about the world it's basically the stuff that would be there even if the player didn't exist and as writers we need setting because it helps us to create a coherent and consistent game but the important point to keep in mind is just because you have a setting doesn't mean you have a story and that's a distinction that has been lost on a number of teams that I've worked on not so much the teams with these guys but sometimes in the MMO space that's been that's been misunderstood so we're going

to jump into the first question which is relevant to that so the setting versus the story how do you balance input from other disciplines with the story requirements go ahead wow that's that that bleeds directly from what I was saying earlier so as Chris was saying about QA we want to request input from other departments we we want to make sure as I said that they are feeling ownership of this because they have perspectives on the story that we don't have I know you're all writers here we all know what it is to get too close to a story it is almost impossible to have a good overview of it when you're down in the weeds and you're writing because you're just seeing tree tree tree and somebody was new to it is seeing forests or trash or trash yeah or a fire so what we want is we want to get their input we want we want people to come in and say okay so

here's here's what I think this is here's a cool idea that I have artists for instance George said this in an interview just the other day artists can provide us with insights and to characters and ideas that we never knew that we were lacking we can ask we can just say okay make something cool and new manera and they will create something that is so awesome and neat that we're gonna like oh you know what we are going to reorient this entire level to make something really cool about this we want input from other teams at the same time at the same time we don't want them to feel so much ownership that they're pushing us out and they're like you just put the words on the page writer boy you just take the script to the dialogue person that's how I can exactly so so basically you know we want to we want to get their input but then you've got to filter it and decide okay does this actually match with the themes of the game does this match with what we're trying to do and is this going to be a valuable piece of

input moving forward and it's your job as writers to figure out where their input plugs in exactly it's a it is a question of picking your battles which is something that I think a lot of writers struggle with the first when they get into the into game writing you have to decide what is crucial to the story you have to decide what's crucial to the game and you have to be willing and aware that when you shut someone down you are stopping them possibly from ever coming to you with an idea again and you will possibly lose something very precious so I would say once again pick your battles make sure that if you're going to say if you're going to tell someone that their idea won't work and I would advise against that tell them why make them feel part ownership of the project make them understand it's an education or is educating one and it can be an ego thing if you've worked really hot on an idea and someone comes in and says you know I don't understand it and you try to explain it to them and they still don't get it that's the point where you need to say okay but this person is representative of my audience just as I am representative of my own

audience things that resonate with me weren't necessarily resonate with everyone else and so finding that medium between what they are looking for in the story that you're telling and how you're telling the story is a delicate balance although I would add that I did get input from somebody once and they're like well you know what I don't I don't like the direction the story's going and you know here's some ideas that I would have to fix it's like well that's good but this is a philosophical RPG yeah we used up the the three critique rule like it's okay if one person brings it up it's good to digest that but then it takes like two more people to bring up the same subject you're like yeah that's definitely got to change yeah yeah okay our next question is how do you stay flexible but still do your work when gameplay and level design decisions I get to be made or keep changing George would you like to start off sure so in my opinion flexibility can really be a mindset think of especially when you're writing a story think of everything that you're writing is early on in the project as not complete so when you're

actually this is this is a little goofy but almost think of a story like a sculpture there's at least what I do when I'm coming up with a story for a game initially you've got a big block of stone it's completely shapeless it can be anything then as you're starting to write the initial drafts of the story it's kind of taking shape and you can kind of see what it's going to be but you've still got a lot of wiggle room so when new ideas come up you can still go in a number of different directions and it's only toward the very end of the project when you've basically got like David in front of you and you and you're you're you've got a fully formed statue that you it's very difficult to make significant changes at that point now having said all that also don't be afraid to push back especially late in the project against changes that you feel are too extreme but do it in the language of the producers which means do it in terms of time estimates if you think some of you're close to the end of a project and someone says oh man we really want to completely change the beginning of the game at that point

instead of going crazy sit down and figure out exactly what the impacts of that is going to be in terms of days so okay we have to rewrite these 20 dialogues that's 80 days we have to change these levels that's another 20 whatever it is and then get say it's a hundred days it's going to take to do this to make this change bring that to the producer they will so appreciate that you've done it in terms that they can understand and you may get the answer of well okay a hundred extra days we can do that it's in the budget but at least you will have a reasonable amount of time to do the thing that you need to do to make the change and the producer will expect a reasonable outcome from you on the other hand they might say oh my god we can't take 100 100 extra days and then you might even not have to make the change so push back but do it in the language of the producers numbers are really helpful when you're working with something that is normally quantitative versus qualitative if you can put it in terms that as George has said very well that producers can understand then you're going to have a lot more support to say we need to do this X amount of

work because people can look at writing and say oh but you just need to redo the script that's five minutes you know it's gonna be fun it's just the time it takes to type it in that's it it's really just you don't have to search the letters out individually and put them on the screen you're not making a ransom note here so you they tend to think of it in terms of that and they don't tend to think of it in terms of oh well if I had to read you my level from the start okay that's three months worth of work right so having that ability to talk to producers is an excellent skill I'm glad that you're a student Chris would you like to oh yeah so yeah I'd be the third person to say that you know metrics will win a lot of arguments for you with production and getting the game done on time however I've often found that when level level design and systems design is still in flux there's still a number of core elements that can always still count on so I gear a lot of my writing efforts to making sure that at least the writing of supporting that and that's very unlikely to change what George was saying about

pushback when certain things are in flux I think it's also important to ask why things are changing because sometimes I've been on projects where people have been looking at it too long and they start getting bored with it and they feel it has to change before a player has ever seen the gameplay experience at all and that's the absolute wrong thing to do you that's the when you bring a focus test and to show them that people are really excited about what they're doing and show them these things don't need a change simply for the sake of boredom but to actually give some helpful advice when doing writing for RPGs especially what I try and do is create critical paths and quest lines that involve floating NPCs and these are NPCs that you can move to just about any map anywhere and the quest will still work so even if the level design is changing even if systems might be different you can place these NPCs anywhere and still maintain a coherent quest line now removing the narrative from the actual level flow can sometimes be helpful reintegrating it is also very useful

though you need to have consistency between the narrative and the level otherwise that's complicated we'll move on to the next one so when what do you do when the game's story gets researched during the latter part of production and how do you integrate the necessary changes continuing on same thing well as Chris was saying you know it's it's very useful to develop a critical path document with the floating NPCs who can move places because chances are good your game will get Rhys coked I we're all very ambitious storytellers and ambition is frequently the enemy of reality so you need to if you have a if you have a critical path document with your flowchart and you're essentially figuring out what it is that you need to accomplish in the story you can start pushing things toward the front because your game will get Rhys coked unless you have done just such a masterful job of you know early production which you know

if you have please introduce me to your producer but this is actually a good opportunity for you because it allows you to re-examine the story it allows you to re-examine the structure of the whole thing and you can start repai Singh and you can start Rhys coping and pushing everything into a more compact more easily digestible story because let's face it we are writers and we tend to write long sometimes edits make a script so much better and you didn't even know that you needed to do that actually like Rhys coping for that reason sometimes it allows you to go oh I didn't need that to begin with Chris did you have something to say on this yeah with with Rhys coping so it's a lot of what we discussed before but generally whenever doing a narrative work for a game I usually prioritize everything into a critical path B this would be nice to have and the player would certainly probably slightly miss it if it wasn't there and C priority it's just like gravy stuff that the player would probably love but they

wouldn't miss it if it wasn't there so I break all the tasks into those elements and then as things need to get down scoped I dropped the C elements and the B elements hopefully not to be elements but but I keep that that that priority system in mind when Rhys coping I also asked why it's being Rhys capped because I need to understand like what material has already been done what I can count on and what I shouldn't drop from the story that actually is already done and I can make use of generally whenever anything's being reached go p-- initial that in addition to that floating and PC idea I mentioned before about halfway through production writers aren't you know blind to the fact that you know environment or it might not be getting done for examples so I actually start making a secret list of all the environments that we already have done for the game and how we can change them slightly and still maintain new gameplay spaces like hey you know we can still use roam that'll be roam at night that will help you want it and the story goes on but

yeah just a few techniques I use yeah some of the some of the story stuff is actually pretty easy to adjust as well and you can throw little bits of dialogue in it it's important to know what bits of the story are important to be delivered when and so if you can just move that or even just quickly adjust a small bit of dialogue that really helps in in the whole Rhys cope process but Chris's process is actually better but he did raise a really good point that so you need to know why it's being Rhys coped because you need to tell you that the story to what the Rhys coping means there is nothing better than like a environment arts behind like okay well I can fix this oh they do fifty new levels there like that doesn't help us at all but you can put an amazing story in there this so much hmm but in terms of that we are normally talking with producers when we're talking about reefs coping and it's very important to have a producer who understands the needs of narrative versus the needs of other departments and so we I think we all have an opinion

on what qualities writers need and their producers casual burger well okay so I've had a lot of producers I think I've been lucky and that I've had pretty much all good ones but I could say that there's been a few that were absolutely stellar and I think the thing that that made them stand apart was a shared passion they are the ones that get mad on your behalf so if I when an understanding of design does help to so if you are out there and looking to be a producer a writer's producer care about what they had are what they have definitely give them feedback on the story and that doesn't that doesn't necessarily mean stop them from brainstorming for example but definitely if they're seeking feedback get them feedback if they have design questions get there get them answers get passionate on their behalf

and help them solve the problems that are stopping them from moving forward so I'm going to answer this one from a couple of different perspectives of the first perspective is from an indie a small team what you want most from a producer there is flexibility and range you want somebody who knows how to do art you want somebody who knows how to do programming you want somebody who knows how to do sound so that they are able to reach out and get into each discipline and communicate with people effectively and step in to fill the gaps that are necessary if you're talking a larger scale game though what you need is somebody who understands scope budget and you know basically all the metrics that go into keeping a game on time and on track somebody who knows how to communicate both with upper management and with the lower ranks that is crucial because if there is a blockage in any one of those things you're headed and those Chris said being able to put

things by priority and having a producer who understands writing priority as opposed to you know level up priority makes a really big difference when you're able to say okay but I really really really need to do this conversation that seems like it's not important at all because otherwise the whole narrative falls down having a producer who goes okay we're going to make this work and being the person who fights for you and advocates for the things that you want to do with the story versus the creative direction and everything like that they're normally a mediator if they're working with you and for you they're mediating between all the other inputs that are coming in and in fact they're hoping you talk to the other departments as well and I wanted to say that the saying it's a person who gets mad on your behalf is a really excellent way to look at the best producers that I've worked with they're the ones who allow me to sit in the room and be the cool calm quiet collected writer who's like oh yes I see what you're doing there and they're the one who's going no this is unacceptable we're not doing this it's a waste of time and I just get to sit down great this is fantastic so having someone who can fight for you and there's a bit of an assumption that writers tend to be

dramatic whether that's true or not so being able to be calm and collected is a real privilege when working with a good producer it tends to get your point across much more frequently than it might otherwise what's the question what qualities two writers need in their producers oh I'm part of this question too alright so wow I'm gonna be really undermining I actually don't like it when a producer gets emotional I actually like it when they firmly defend a position and they use metrics to defend it because I've often found that if a producer gets too emotional about something sometimes people are afraid to bring up problems with them because they're afraid of the reaction so whenever I work with producers I'm always like you know just pretend like you're in dragnet and just you know be be the guy who just wants the facts and spout some facts back to me and I'll reach a compromise that will usually involve me cutting my work and I will understand that because you're not being emotional right now so I'm going to say

ability to know your people a good producer at least in my opinion has an ability to know each writers strengths weaknesses and what they need to do their best work and probably the best producer I've ever worked with guy named Kevin Saunders who just about all of us know or I think all of us know he on the first project I worked with him on made it his business to observe me and figure out what he could do to make me my most productive and one of the things about me is I am super distractible so if I'm sitting in a room there's like a bunch of people talking yeah it's like that I guess so people coming in and out lots of noise I will get very little done so he observed that about me and then he behind the scenes worked to get me my own little private office and it was not like some spectacular office but I loved it because I could shut the door and I could focus and I got so much done according to Kevin's metrics my productivity doubled just as a result of

that one change so and and I I am certain that that game the writing on that game would not have gotten done and certainly would not have gotten done at that quality level if he had not done that so that's a big argument for producers who can understand their people and know what is going to make them do their best work that's an excellent say great George in terms of getting to know new people how do you go about mentoring new writers what's the best way to instruct a veteran writer to vent into mental and you writer you owe me your Chris first okay so a couple people on this panel will know these things about me but so first thing I would do is make sure that you are giving writers a lot of feedback in the initial the initial dialogues that are coming in when you've got a new writer that you've hired on make sure that you're giving a ton of feedback what I will do actually Gavin experienced this

from me he's he knows what I'm talking about the first couple the first couple dialogues that come in I will read every word I will read every single node and I will give feedback if necessary on every single note of dialogue I'm somewhat notorious for my multi-page reviews of people's dialogues but it's really important on those first those first few dialogues that come and because it sort of sets the standard for the rest of the person's work so like if you can get them to that level of quality that you need very early on then they're gonna continue with that and then I'll dial it back once the writer know or has a pretty good sense of what they need to do I'll dial it back a little bit although I still do try to read just about everything that comes in another thing another thing to keep in mind is try to stagger the introduction of new writers so if you have any control over how many people are coming onto the project six writers at once like if you're trying to review dialogues in depth from six different new writers on a project you're gonna die so what you want to do instead is

try to get like one or two dialogues at a time or one or two writers at a time review their dialogues in detail and then once those guys are up to speed then bring in another one or two titers after that which will help you out a lot I used to do post mortems for my managers without their knowledge and I would take those things to heart and go you know what if I'm ever in that position I will not do any of these things and one favorite thing was a fun technique called give a person a lack of expectations and then also get them negative reinforcement so what I like to do with new writers is quite clearly lay out the expectations that I have for them for the position also I try and make sure those are already a standards guide and a style guide setup for writing for the project and then car buy and actually had a really cool technique for bringing in their new level designers and world builders where they'd give them a series of very small simple tasks here's how you implement a small dialogue into the game here's how you implement an inventory item here's

the right description for it and these are all very small tasks but help build up the person's knowledge of the pipeline in terms of how to get narrative into the game for veteran writers that are mentoring new writers we had an unusual system where sometimes veteran writers would forget that they were once new writers and then they would never want to accept new writers or give them a chance because they couldn't see how that person could ever possibly get to their level which is a bunch of a bunch of crap and so what I like to do is like when you assign someone to a mentorship position you remind them that look you know what you got to level you were by taking it in stages so please approach in the same way with a new writer here and also don't be afraid to think you might be insulting them by giving them too much information give them everything that you think even the most basic technique about narrative design and make sure you're explaining that them to death them explaining to them thoroughly why

you're telling them about this particular technique and then I also tell the the new writers that hey you know what they might cross the line there might be over explaining stuff but they're doing it in your best interest and what George was saying about feedback generally I try and give feedback very very rapidly at the outset and then I start backing off over the course the project once I see that one particular narrative element or aesthetic is actually seems pretty solid like I might be like a daily review then a weekly review that a monthly review until I feel I can count on that person to deliver to expectations I actually Chris just reminded me I got another one early on in the project if you can have some example dialogues that you can give to new writers at exactly the level of quality that you want them to be that is super helpful because a lot of other writers will writers are very good at sort of hitting the mark that you give them early on yeah actually examples are better than technical standards documents ideally you want to have both I think it's very important to have that

feedback very early on as you say it can be pretty confronting if you're in you writer coming into a studio to get pages and pages of feedback but in the end it's fine balance between relearning your ego at the beginning of a project versus eventually coming to the place where you can fight the battles that you want to fight and that's what I enjoy about mentoring writers is seeing them at the beginning and saying okay here are the things that need to change and here is why I'm not gonna tell you how to change them but I want you to change them and come back to me and then tell me why you think we needed to do that and tell me what you think this brought to your writing so that they can start examining their own process and then they can turn that inward the whole time and as both George and Chris have said then you move forward and give feedback listen less frequently until you get to the point where you're mentoring someone and you say I think they should change and they say no you go okay and that's a wonderful moment okay and then when we want to a very similar question and you Rida is assigned to your project but the first question they have is to question the premise of the

game how do you mitigate this we all want to jump in so I you know you may have gathered that I enjoy getting feedback from other people so I would say you want to gather the feedback from these new writers you listen carefully to them and you try and figure out what it is exactly that they are trying to tell you but on the other hand you know Stephen King once said if you give 10 people you know a piece of work and they all comment on the same thing then you know you've got a problem with that thing but if they all comment on ten different things then you're probably good to go so the important thing is to listen carefully you get their feedback because a new set of eyes is always useful it's always going to help you hone what the message of your story is or what it is you're trying to convey at the same time if this new writer is unwilling to see the direction of the game and the game is already well into production and they are unable to get on board then you've got to get your

producer involved and you've got to start talking to the producer and it's a sad thing this game has fundamental flaws that's right please identify them okay those are not flaws those are intentional will not fix because you're a spaceship outside yeah it's just a building tour crescendo I think it landed we're good okay good but no I bring bringing on new writers is always fun it's always exciting and when new writers you know I mean I would hope that they would I would hope that they would question you know the premise of the game because it's in questioning that we learn and if they are not questioning then they're just collecting a paycheck and I want people to be involved in the process and invested and if they're not actually asking questions that doesn't mean they're not asking them to themselves exam it's always better to expose the questions they have and then you can work with them to solve it rather than letting them go and work on their own and then perhaps being uncomfortable or even worse going and working on their own and not actually getting the game yes okay you're asked to write for an existing

franchise how do you go about inheriting it and how do you do justice while retaining your own voice so flipside you love the new right up so we have this challenge with the other system shock reboot and then other franchises ever worked with whether it's like you know South Park or Star Wars so the process we used with System Shock was first off put it put away your preconceived notions for where you should you think it should go instinctually just just shelve that for a little while the best way to approach it we found wasn't just could go talk to the original creators see what their intentions were for the project what they were thinking about the time during the creation of the project get their feedback go through all their podcasts or any sort of Let's Plays they may have done get a sense for any commentary they had about the original game try and figure out if there's any ways you can incorporate any of that and even though system shock isn't the best example for this the Star Wars was where you basically want to make sure you know as much as possible about the

franchise just so you know what's already been done within the confines of that franchise and you're not just recycling some some theme or some quest or even some storyline that you know maybe Dark Horse may have used or their video game may have used it's important that you you know as much as possible about that franchise during that process my experience has been that you're going to be left with a lot of questions and a lot of thoughts and a lot of inspiration for where you think things should go and that's the moment you sort of find your voice in the franchise after you've established what the foundation is and what the parameters for the game is man I don't know how to follow then well I'd say and the only thing I could possibly add is definitely look for where you fit within the franchise you were talking about Star Wars I did a lot of you know Blizzard stuff and you want to have an idea of what your style is and you want to be able to apply that style to whatever your is you're working on because as as writers and as creators

you need to stay passionate to do your best work and if you're if you feel like you have no voice of your own you're you really are because everything you turn out it's going to be garbage so take your style find out where it fits find the story you want to tell find the way you want to tell it and have fun have lots of fun I would say it's important to find the voice of the project and then as you say see how your style fits and so I have found it very valuable to look at things that I enjoy see the voice that they've written and replicate that see that it doesn't really work because it's not my style and then merge the two together I actually really enjoy working on established properties for that reason that the challenge of finding the voice and how to contribute to it in a way that is new yet at the same time consistent is something that I personally really enjoy and sometimes that research can get pretty specific like I didn't realize exactly how many vowels George Lucas uses when actually describing planets or characters and embarrassingly enough I was halfway through a night so public too before I realized whoopee is spelled with two E's and I'm like George really all those

vowels man was just bringing it in but like the but you have to you have to adhere to it deuk-gu god what a name dude naming thing maybe things is a skill yes I don't have it just a wookie language even have Kaizen it anybody know now we're going deep that or did someone else cool than that like you never hear Chewie go wrong it's true you don't know he does roll as ours the name of their planet is a hairball bit of a segue when it comes to fixing bugs what's the best skill a writer for a game can cultivate George I would say attention to detail you as the writer of the game and actually Chris was talking a little bit about of bugs earlier you as the writer of the game are in the absolute best position to find inconsistencies in the narrative problems with character voices

information flow that's bad if you go down a certain path you don't get the same information all that stuff QA as much as we want them to find it is probably not going to find that stuff so if you have to it to the extent that you have the attention to detail and the fortitude to go through the entire all of your work read through the read through your stuff play your game pay attention to those narrative bugs because chances are nobody else is going to find that stuff you really need to think of yourself not only as the writer but also as the continuity director on your game so I'm not actually supposed to be answering this part of the question but I'm going to very quickly how do you when you are testing your dialogues make sure you're testing for the sub optimal path of going through the dialogue because you know how your dialogue is going to flow you know exactly what you want the player to get out of it so you're going to be like yeah okay test test test yep it works as designed but a lot of players are not going to follow your optimal path and you need to follow sub optimal paths through your dialogues and

through your stories to make sure those stories still make sense if followed in that way because if they don't you've got a big game bug I'd say be excited be very excited by fixing bugs and if that sounds strange I really do believe that they're like little crunchy treats honestly because they always come near the end they fixing them does a tangible are gives you tangible progress it feels great to squash a bug finally and then occasionally comes back and you can crush it again and it just feels wonderful and you could say thank you you're a person thank you for finding this bug I feel good about it plus you get a big list of things in JIRA and you can tick them off and you get these tiny packages it's so good because you work on a game for so long you know you're what kind of for two or three years and you're like okay I think this is good and with bugs you can just go yes I win I do however like a will not fix in this right place working NASM

tended on that nerd will open up for audience Q&A yeah [Music] don't be shy hello thank you for starting us off so strong two questions one how do you guys go about when you're early on in a project and you have the fortune to be actually on a project early in a narrative capacity and they're still settling a lot of the gameplay stuff how much I there's some questions about how much setting work you do versus how much story work you do like literally if you're still doing like prototype work and you don't even know exactly what the game's gonna be but you're still working on the side it's like and how far do you think it's good to go with like setting

stuff the other question I have is have you ever been to the Golden Gate Tap Room you know room is a great place for writers to meet say around Union Square something like that you know it's a great place that's a good public service announcement I appreciate that in terms of establishing setting if you happen to be on a project very early you normally have quite a small team which I enjoy and for me the way that I go about creating this setting is I go and I talk to each of the people on the team about what is important for them in this game so what do they want to say what do they want to experience what do they want the player to experience and then I look at all of those and see where they connect and that's where I start with sitting so most of most of the projects I've worked on have been you know have been an established setting so like a Planescape Planescape torment you know obviously we had the whole Planescape campaign setting to work on fallout we had you know the world of fallout wasteland we had wasteland one to work on torment

tides of numenera we had the numenera campaign setting so it's you know I the when the setting is pre-built for you you can focus mainly on the story if you are building both the world and the story at the same time then I would say you probably want the setting to inform the story rather than the other I'm making sure that you have a setting that's very versatile is really important because you potentially are creating a new IP and you want to be able to create lots of stories in the settings so creating a setting around a story is generally not a great idea I agree with Colin I can add nothing else except request the next question I agree thank you Thanks hi I have a quick question about skipping dialogue because nobody likes to read things so how do you guys deal with skipping dialogue especially for things like tutorials like the ability to skip dialogue well if a player skips

dialogue right and it causes some inconsistencies in story because they just never read what you intended it does really vary from game to game of course I think you have to know as a writer what kind of game you're writing some games are much more action-oriented and so if you have long dialogue that the player isn't picking up almost automatically you've written too much and we luckily with tormund we had what was it a five hundred character limit people love to read oh yeah we had to make different nerds if we wanted to keep talking so I mean that that what that was a glorious project for a writer to work on but definitely I'd say and feel free to jump in guys know the kind of game you're writing for and don't try to over write because players naturally and you when you're testing will want to skip right through that and back to what Colin said before about testing the least optimal path you can also test the optimal path so the number one choice and a dialogue you can just go through one one-on-one okay what did I get out of that yeah some of the tutorial is a

shin should be coming through a game play anyway so some of that is going to be on the systems designers to make sure that that is communicated properly but if if players are going to be skipping dialogue then there's not a lot you can do about it except to try to build in proper tutorial is Asian just throughout the game so as to reinforce these points that you're trying to hit the other thing that you can do if you're playing a game that has a journal is you can lean on the journal we do that a lot so if players if you put something important in a I'll always make sure it's in the journal too because even if you've got to write a player who's reading through everything carefully something could happen the cat jumps on the keyboard whatever it is and they somehow miss like whatever that a critical line is so lean on the journal so the player can always go back to the critical stuff after watching numerous Let's Plays of my games and seeing people skip through everything I realize that the gameplay choice that use its support and I also I find tutorials very offensive so I always suggest that if you can if you have to do a tutorial either you do

half-life 2's excellent silent tutorial where they set up a lot of stuff visually how to teach you to do certain things the environment and also if you don't have that available then have the tutorial levels something separate you can play off the main menus they can always go back to it if they are genuinely confused about the game like I like let me have one more thing because that's an excellent point like Legend of Zelda for instance Twilight Princess you know you're constantly redoing these things over and over again every time you get a new item it's like banned or you got to go practice this thing multiple times and then when you finally run into the boss you've mastered it so you know it's it's really just a question of you know constantly reiterating through gameplay because if they're skipping words then you don't want to throw more words out thanks guys thank you when it comes to designing sort of branching narratives how would you do you have any advice around balancing kind of meaningful decisions and branching paths weird sort of fear of missing out and

like players of just ways they files laughters they thought after save files the C players are very smart they're going to realize pretty quickly if the choices don't mean anything so knowing what endings you can have that are actually going to affect something later in the game is the starting point for me I need to know where I'm going so that I can take the player on a journey rather than designing from getting and going oh that would be so cool wait I can't do it and neither can the play on two things one is try to be strategic about the choices that you offer to players so make sure that the choices you do offer have a lot of reactivity so if that means like if based on your budget if that means you can only afford to do like four big choices in the game figure out what those four choices are but pay heck off on them like really pay off as much as you possibly can't have a lot of things that react to whatever those each of those choices is the other thing is make sure as players are playing through your game draw attention to the fact that oh this was this is happening because you made that choice like

literally you can say in a dialogue well because you killed that guy now I'm after you right whatever it is like draw attention to that because a lot of times players won't even realize that they've had a choice that they've made that actually has a big impact on the game unless you're drawing attention to it multiple times and that's more likely to get them to come back and play through it again and see your different choices yeah there's three things you can do usually a narrative even if it branches always comes back to a certain choke point and you know and you don't do that too frequently but use those choke points to your advantage like that's the moment you can use all the reactivity that George is describing in a very efficient way to other things you can do as one is if you can ever have the the reactivity be systemic but still narrative involved one thing we did with the original Planescape torment is no matter what player response you would shoes would affect your alignment that's a really easy thing on the narrative side to juggle but yet still have a big consequence at the end of the game in terms of what your final alignment is for your character and also like the original design for the tyranny RPG we

took that one step further and said you know what no matter what you do in the world it's going to increment this counter as you become more and more famous and then the storyline will come to you and that was a really easy thing to do hi I'm gonna preface this by saying that this talk is my favorite eight-letter word producer because I'm a producer and I'm in from an indie company and we've never actually hired a dedicated writer in a small startup company and my question for you is what are your tips for someone in a production role that has never actually brought on a dedicated writer so we're bringing on a first writer what are your tips for working with that person lots of wimps that's a bad producer and I guess depending on the writers style I first off if you're bringing on a new writer and you have not actually made the hiring decision yet make sure you like their writing you know it seems like an

important step sometimes it is miss yeah I mean some some people miss that and they they they're like oh man the writing on this sucks yeah that's my fault I'm sorry this guy is so experienced but he's an yeah also watch out for that yes wait so I'm sorry you're gonna become a narrative producer is that what you said I'm just a general producer I'm not that fancy okay I I would actually say no whips because I found the worst producers are the ones that they think their sole job is to go around and beat the numbers and tasks estimates out of you rather than trying to help you so I think the first question should always ask with any sort of task or project is if someone's having trouble or you're uncertain about something see what it is you can do to help them because then they will what they will be more forthcoming with information for you and that's important because usually when you're starting on a project you don't have any metrics to work with so the more data you can start getting from people and the more free that data flow is then you can start establishing your own pipelines and taos estimates you're like well you know what they say that

Campania will be done in three weeks but really you know after doing the first one we discover that's more like five or six weeks to do it so now let's make that part of our estimates and realize maybe these other two campaigns aren't important and we'll move it off to a sequel or a DLC and generally I find that's a better way to approach it show how you're making yourself useful and helpful and you're there to help them out with their tasks second what George said before exactly saying getting to know your people hiring process is a process so getting to know your writer even off to you've hired them that's really the best thing if if you were able to find a gathering of writers of some kind you should probably maybe show up and like talk to a bunch of writers and just see who you get along with really well like that's super critical yeah or any of the in exile people from the new orleans studio by any chance there are some here but they're at the vr summit right okay because I'm from Louisiana uh-huh well talk to me afterward thank you I think one more all right I saw you mentioned being your own Kentucky I come

hang out with us after I mentioned being your own continuity director because QA won't find all the continuity bugs that might exist how do you you can help QA to get better at finding those things because obviously as big games get bigger you can't do it all yourself right so how we can help QA find the story bugs that they might not know to look for is that the question exact to you okay sir having a short summary of the game would be incredibly helpful I imagine the main thing being you start off with a summary and then you write the game and at the end you go where's my summary and does it still match sir I would recommend that one thing we would give is we'd make sure that QA had at a list of all the different ways every single quest could pay it could play out and the reason for that is because sometimes quests could play out incorrectly but it seemed like they were correct to a player so we make sure that we always Specht out here's actually how this quest flow is supposed to go so for any stages are missing from it that's about the biggest thing in my opinion is just make sure that you have at least a couple QA people who are

actually reading the dialogue and actually like paying attention to the narrative because I can't tell you how many times is like QA people have been playing the game for months and I'm like what did you think of such and such a dialogue duh and and because they're just going through it really fast so have a few people who are assigned to actually play through the narrative and make sure they understand what's going on make sure they're looking at the dialogues understanding like what is being written here and if they are confused at any point write it up like even if they're like oh man I'm sure there's something I'm just missing write it up anyway because if they're confused that means like a thousand other people are going to be confused true Thanks okay that's it for us as you can see we're going to be in the wrap-up room which is actually just outside in the Overlook and we would like to mention that tomorrow is they launch of torment tides of numenera on which we were all riders [Applause]