Game Narrative Summit: It's Not in the Writer's Manual: A Q&A Session for New Writers

Okay. Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to It's Not in the Writer's Manual, a Q&A session for new writers. Before we begin, a couple of reminders. If you could fill out your evaluations, that would be super helpful. And if you don't have your phones muted, uh please go ahead and do that so we don't have any extra sounds. We are so glad that you are here because if you were not here, we would not have this session. This is completely crowdsourced. We're going to be talking about what you want to be talking about, whether you are already in the industry, you're looking to get in, or maybe you want to work with narrative designers and game writers. So, in a few minutes, I'm going to invite you to come up to either mic and ask your questions, but before that, my esteemed panelists and I are going to introduce ourselves, and I will start. My name is Toiya Kristen Finney. I am a

writer and editor in general. I have been a freelancer my entire adult life in video games. I wear a lot of narrative hats. I am a game writer, a narrative designer, an editor, and a consultant. I am also a game designer. I have worked on everything from AAA to mobile to indie to kids games. I have recently worked on Destiny 2, the mobile game Insecure: The Come Up Game, as well as the indie game Slave Zero X. I have also published several books, including The Game Narrative Toolbox, which I co-authored, Freelance Video Game Writing: The Life and Business of the Digital Mercenary for Hire, and Branching Story: Unlock Dialogue, Designing and Writing Visual Novels. Oh, me. Next. Uh I I guess I will go next. Uh hi, my name is Michelle Clough. I am a a game writer, editor, and narrative designer with the narrative co-op uh Tail

Spinner. So, we do uh narrative outsourcing for various uh clients and companies and games. Um I've been working as a freelancer in the game industry for I want to say 10 years, but about only like the since 2019 I've been doing it full-time. Uh I have also worked on you know, everything from like AAA to mobile to uh indie games. I also actually did editing work for Destiny 2. Um I also talk a lot about romance and sex in video games. Um and I uh yay. Uh and I end up giving a lot of talks at GDCs about the topic, and I wrote a book about the topic about sex and gay sex designing sex in games. Um and run a few organizations to do with that. And other than that, I basically just show up and be like, "Wow, Toiya's awesome. I should I should like be like Toiya I want Toiya when I grow up." Is it Is it my turn now? Sorry. Uh sorry, I'm really Oh, there's like a lot

of people in there out there. Like I had a panel this morning, and seemingly the attendance at GDC doubled in that time. Um anyway, hello. My name is Evan Narcisse. I'm currently the senior writer at Brass Lion Entertainment, where I'm working on a thing I can't talk about. Um what am I allowed to say? Uh what's up? If that's a colleague, thank you. What am I allowed to say? We're an anime-influenced uh third-person action RPG. Um what else? How did I get here? Um I I I like to call myself a journalist in recovery. Um uh I transitioned to writing comics, which led to uh working in games and animation. I've written Rise of the Black Panther for Marvel Comics. Um for DC, I've done a number of projects, including the Milestone Media 30th anniversary special, um Batman: Gotham Knights Gilded City. Um in games, I've worked on the Miles Morales game with the folks at Insomniac. Um I contributed to the uh War for Wakanda expansion for Marvel's Avengers. And um did some

consulting on Gotham Knights. And I think that's everything you all need to know. Yeah. Let's start the panel. Uh I'm Emily Short. I'm a freelance narrative designer at the moment working on a AAA project. Uh immediately previous to that, I spent several years as a creative director at Failbetter Games, which does indie, very narrative-focused, very British um games such as Fallen London, Sunless Skies, and Sunless Sea. And uh before that, I've done a number of things uh kind of with experimental AI projects to not not sort of in the current mode of generative AI, but sort of older forms of AI to drive character interaction. So, I'm very interested in not only kind of how are we writing characters, how are we designing our sort of moment-to-moment gameplay, but also narrative systems and the underlying engineering and tech.

Hi. Hi, my name is Nessa Cannon. I'm a games writer and narrative designer. I've been in the industry for about 4 years-ish. I work primarily on indie projects such as Waves of Steel and Endoparasitic and OnlyCans and StarTrucker, which is coming out soon. Um Oh, thanks. Um I uh I work primarily in the indie space, but I've done some stuff in AAA that I can't talk about. And uh I really have a passion for branching narrative. I really cut my teeth on Twine. I'm doing a talk on branching narrative later. But yeah, freelance branching indie. Woo. Hello, my name is Adanna Ned. I am a games writer and narrative designer. I've been in the industry for about 3-ish years. I'm currently writing for Spirit Swap Lofi Beats to Match 3 2, which you can wishlist on Steam right now. Wink wink, nudge nudge. And I've also worked on some other AAA projects I can't talk about. And I've also done some games research, specifically looking on how players of color interact in virtual environments. And I'm also

doing a fun talk on creating love interest after this. So, if you want to add a hot vampire to your game, come to my talk. And uh please come up and ask your questions. Hi. Okay. Just wanted to make sure I was a good distance from the mic. Um I transitioned from being an English creative writing major to into my last semester and realizing that I wanted to write for games. Um were there any elements that y'all find coming from writing prose to writing games that any rules or um elements of writing prose that should be kind of thrown away when try when trying to write for games? Yeah, I can talk a little bit about this. Um uh I talked about it in my previous talk. Um you know, games are different than prose media um with

respect to the fact that people are showing up for a different kind of experiential texture. Um you know, when you're reading a novel or um even a graphic novel, um the it's well, comics are different because the text and the pictures are supposed to work together when it's well done. But um in games, people are showing up from mostly mechanical um experiences, right? So, like what does this button press do? What does this Where does this jump take me, right? And your words can kind of support and undergird all of that, but they are not the star of the show. Like when you come from a prose writing background, um you know, for me it was journalism. Um you know, but if you're like a novelist or you know, somebody who writes with text as your primary delivery platform, like your text is going to have to be short, tight, impactful. Um and depending on the the design of your game, like um you you you might have to reckon with the fact that um players are skipping past dialogue boxes or not reading all the

lore that drops. So, all this stuff where you're like, "Yeah, I'm getting my words in here." And they're like, "Yeah, next." So, one of the things that you need to really think about when you're doing narrative design in games is one, uh thinking about a multi- multi-disciplinary approach, right? So, uh the words that you might want to get, the ideas and plot beats that you might want to get through character dialogue, you might have to embed somewhere else, right? Maybe there's ambient NPCs reacting to state changes, and that's how you That's a storytelling vector. The the the set decoration that your um artist will put on the walls or whatever. Like we all laugh about environ- environmental storytelling where it's like dead inside, don't open graffiti on a door. But like that's, you know, a storytelling vector. And you as a narrative designer should not be backing away from those opportunities. You should be leaning into them. So, that's going to mean talking with your level designers, your art team, your audio team about, "Hey, what are the different tools that we're going to have at our disposal to tell this story?" It's not going to just be like, "And then he said this to her." Um it might

just be like uh overhearing a conversation and catching snatches like that. You're going to have to modulate your approach um when you're writing for games. I'm sorry if I just talked too long, everybody. No, it was great. I think the the one thing that I would add to that is that um because the prose in games is so load-bearing, the players are really looking to it to give them a lot of clues about what to do next and how to interact with it, you can accidentally make promises to players or say things that they think are going to be promises, something that might, you know, if you're writing a fantasy novel, you might include these sort of cool little offhand details that you think, you know, that just sounds great. I'm just going to throw that in there. If you're not careful in a game context, that players can read those things as I'm definitely going to meet this character, this thing that you just referred to is definitely going to happen down the line. So, you've got to be a lot more sort of careful and precise about like, "What am I committing to by putting this in here?" Um hi. I'm a college dropout. I'm sorry that you're college. Um uh the biggest thing that I found when I was transitioning from

prose interactive fiction writing, uh, that I think gets left behind in a lot of teaching courses about it is, uh, how important pacing is and how writing prose, the sense of pacing is just so different to anything that you'll write in games, in my opinion. Even interactive fiction, even like text-based, the the amount of text that a player can handle at once is so much lower than a prose page or or a blog post or anything like that. And so I think really finding, uh, not necessarily leaving what you've left behind about pacing in prose, but really understanding what it means within the interactive medium and how much you can throw at a player, like what bite-sized portions of your work fits at once as opposed to be like, you know, writing a book all at once or or whatever. That's one of the things that I put out there all the time is that pacing is everything, so. I am also a creative writing major who

wrote prose fiction and came to games and still do the prose fiction. But the most important thing and how you're going to have to rethink your role as a writer is that when you are writing prose, when you are telling a story, the audience is coming to you because they are interested in the story that you have to tell. When you're writing for a game or doing the narrative design for the game, they don't care about your story. They're telling their story. And you are a facilitator to help them tell their story. And Evan talked about all of the things that we don't usually traditionally think of as story, like the environment and the ambiance and the sound design and all of that. All of that is also story. But so is the gameplay itself and what players can do in the game. So the story itself is undergirding all of that. And so that's how you really have to kind of retwink ret- retwink and think about who you are as a writer. It's I have an audience versus I am helping

the player. Can I And apparently the word of this panel is going to be undergirded, so write that down. Um, I just wanted to add on to to things both Evan and Toya said, um, that for me the two main differences, um, well, there are many differences, but one of them is, um, the aspect of player agency and the player being the hero. Like when you're writing prose, you can just put and say, "The hero does this because of blah blah blah character development or or blah blah blah, you know, reasoning." Um, in the game you have to give, you know, the player may not want to do that. The player is the one who decides to like walk across the room and just sort of wrestling control from them and making them do it is not always, you know, feasible or desirable. Um, so you have to think almost in terms of not just what is my character's motivation, but like what is the player's motivation to do things. Uh, and secondly, um, building specifically on what Evan was saying about it being interdisciplinary, um, if I'm writing prose, I can say, "Uh, she looked out over a crowd of 10,000 people." And cool, that group of

10,000 people now exist. If I write, "She wrote looks out over a crowd of 10,000 people" for a video game, I'm going to get a very angry angry message from uh, various departments being like, "Do you know how much extra work you've just made for us?" Um, so there's very much an element of, um, and and things that we take for that, you know, you can take for granted in prose or even in film that, you know, oh, who was the person who was talking about the for the purse example? Um, that somebody like put something like wrote put something in her purse and like 15 departments blew up and was like, "Oh my god." You know. Um, and so having an an understanding that the things that you write visually, um, can actually make for a lot of work and be a a lot more difficult to do than you might expect. Um, I want to add on similar to Michelle's point, when you're writing for games, you often have to keep in mind like the other the necessities that other teams have, like the artist can't make 10,000, but it's also going to also

come back on you where it's like, "We only have space for one boss fight in this game and you need to do all of the narrative climactic stuff in this one boss fight." So being aware of all the different constraints you'll have to do and even if it doesn't serve the story the way you want it, it still needs to serve the player in the game. I think there's there is also one other thing that I sort of feel is quite well, maybe not exactly unique, but imagine writing prose when suddenly your editor comes in and is like, "For budget reasons, we have cut chapters two to five. You've got like a day to make the rewrites and make chapters like one to six actually connect with each other and still make sense. Go." Awesome. Thank y'all so much. You're welcome. Uh, hello. Um, a question I have is what is either the most unexpected skill or thing you had to do that you would have never expected going into being a game writer. So either something you had to

learn that you just never thought would be in your toolbox or just something really, I don't know, either incredible or uh, hilarious that you had to end up facing in this profession. Uh, I'll jump on that one first. Understanding the people you're working with, their communication and reading styles. Because all brains learn differently. And you sometimes have to tweak how you're communicating with people so that they can understand you. Um, and I've had to do that on several different projects. I worked with an artist who didn't like certain types of references because it messed with the way they were able to conceptualize certain things. And so I had to learn don't give him those types of references. And one of the very first things that I like to do when I'm first sending off like a major thing of documentation is I ask specifically, "Please let me know if anything does not make sense." Also, like in one-on-one conversations,

I want to make sure that we're on the same page. Because if you are not, things can fester, things could be misunderstood for months. That's not unusual. So when you're working with people, really understand how they like to learn. Um, understand that all brains are different and that's okay. Yeah, I'll just add to what Toya just said, you know, um, I I work with designers who, hey, guess what? My ministry is flow charts and you're about to get baptized baptized in that ministry. Like here's a flow chart for this, here's a flow chart for that. Um, so, uh, you know, especially because games are such, um, an intensely visual medium, you you often wind up working with designers who think, okay, in terms of like, uh, graphical design uh, rather than like, you know, big old chunks of text like probably most of us do. Um, you know, my more direct answer to your question is like, uh, spreadsheets. Like I never thought I was going to spend so much time in Excel or equivalent programs in

my life, but yes, it's like the the the the the kind of a software engagement I avoided my whole life has now showed up. It's like, "Guess what you're going about to learn today?" Um, that's what Excel sounds like by the way when Um, but yeah, so like, you know, uh, charting out a player's arc across different state changes across, you know, different plot beats, then how does the world react? Like you're going to have to visually map that out some way, um, for for, um, your collaborators, you know, like, uh, my talk today was about comics to games adaptations and one thing that's common about both media is that like you as the writer, like we've been saying, like writing can be a support role depending on, you know, the paradigms that you're working in. Like certain projects will be, "Hey, we we're going to give you you're going to give us the ideas and we're going to execute and we're going to collaborate and figure out what the scope is." And other projects will be like, "Hey, guess what? We have all the ideas and you're going to polish them and shine them up and create narrative

connective tissue." So the paradigms are different. And I say all that to say as preamble to, um, a quote that uh, Kieron Gillen, comics writer, game maker, overall overall good guy, good taste in shoes. He said, um, a long time ago that uh, a comic script is basically a document to uh, excite the artist, right? You have when you're writing, you have to get everything aligned in such a way, the scene descriptions, facial expressions, descriptions, like, you know, the flow of events on a page. All that is is hit here, you give this to the artist, now you make it come to life, right? And um, narrative design is very much the same way, right? You know, sometimes you're already getting the building blocks and being asked to um, energize them, but sometimes you have to come up with the building blocks. So like knowing that your documentation is part of a collaborative process, I'll probably wind up repeating this over and over again, but like it's really key. Like you're not working alone here and other people are implementing whatever you're putting on the page and the

screen, flow chart, Microsoft Excel, whatever. So for me, one of the things I did that I had no idea I would be doing in games writing was voice direction and making voice briefs for voice actors because for Spiritfarer, we did have a voice director, but they also needed someone to explain them what are the story, what are the characters and like help advise actors during recording sessions. So as a games writer, you're going to be the source of truth for all the narrative stuff and it's not just the voice acting team that might reach out to you. It might be the design team because they're trying to figure out what's the best way that this level should look to fit the story. So being being able to like know the ins and outs of your story and how that's going to affect other disciplines is really really important. I think for me the thing is, uh, because a lot of interesting narrative work happens in the indie space in very small studios, I also needed to learn a whole bunch of extra business things that I had never anticipated. They're not related in my mind to games writing at all. So, you

pitching, talking to investors, writing marketing content, um just kind of dealing with the realities of potentially helping to run a company. And those are things that depending on kind of the direction of your game writing career might not be relevant at all. But if you're going into the indie space, often you find, you know, you're partly doing your game job and you're partly doing the job of just keeping this whole project going and making it happen. And that kind of can entail a lot of extra external skills that aren't necessarily obvious. So. Um I just want to piggyback off of what everybody said about soft skills and how uh for me um one of the most one of the things that I've used the most is uh this is going to sound weird. I used to work with kids as a youth chess coach. And uh which was a very weird job. But sometimes I remember certain skills uh in the way of speaking to especially freelance clients who come in and are like, I played Baldur's Gate 3 last night. I have some ideas. It's like, well, hang on. Hang on. And getting to

the bottom of like, okay, what did you like about it? What did you What do you really want to pull from this? Because you don't want to make Baldur's Gate 4. I'm telling you. That's not what we're doing. But like getting to the bottom of what people want in a way that feels very collaborative and very kind is something that I find myself doing way more than I thought I would do. Um but my fun answer is that I'm fluent in CB radio speak and I never thought I'd have to do that. So. Um and for me I guess there's there's sort of two short ones. Uh one of one of them I always knew going into the industry that like brevity was going to be an issue and that's still a work in progress. Um but more specifically what I didn't realize how much of it was actually things like character length of a line. Cuz that's a very specific one cuz you've got to work out like what will fit in text boxes. And luckily I had some experience doing close captioning and subtitling. So um that was a reasonably easy adjustment. But that is something I think a lot of writers uh you know, maybe new writers might not

think of in terms of you know, that like not just being brief, but also making sure things fit in the dialogue box. The other is uh I guess really sort of having to dig down into the into our creative ability to ask like, what if? And specifically turn it to, what if the player does this? Um because very many times I've had a thing where it's like, oh, it's a cut, you know, it's it's a sort of a game player sequence. And then the player will do this and I've had to be like, no, no, no, no, no. They might not do that. They might try and shoot this thing or do this other thing. And having to talk with clients about you know, how do we handle those edge cases? Is there a different way we could tell the story? Is there a way we could you know, redirect or you know, does this need to be a cutscene rather than gameplay? Things like that. Um I think like you spend a lot of time doing that I think as a as a game writer as well. Perfect. Uh good afternoon. I was wondering if you can share strategies to structure and organize personal uh uh personal narrative design pipeline

to support high agency emergent narrative uh via aggregate meaning where story is a dynamic property of the game mechanics rather than pre-authored content. Um if I'm understanding your question correctly, uh you're you're talking about So, how do you structure your personal narrative design pipeline in order to effectively deliver in the high agency system that infers from the player intent rather than through embedded meaning where you ask the player to branch the narrative at specific points. Yeah, no. I mean, I I think I understand your question. And you know, my first, you know, gut reaction to the question is that like the tools aren't there yet, right? Um you know, I personally am skeptical about how the integration of LM um systems are going to work in with authoring narratives. Um I know Ubisoft just announced something this morning. I haven't watched it. So, um congrats to them, I guess. But you know, I think one of the things

that is probably going to still be true um for human writers um typing with their human fingers on keyboards is that um we're going to need to be the people to figure out what the buckets are, right? When you're thinking about um you know, choice-heavy narratives and things that have a lot of branching um you're going to need to think about what the possibility spaces are how to connect through the rest of your narratives and you know, um I guess the people who are looking to implement these systems in game creation um pipelines will have to figure out if what can be automated, what not. I personally hope none of it gets automated, but whatever. I'll call me naive. But um you know, I think the thing is like you're still going to need human agency and human interaction and design um and and intuition most importantly about what the story is, right? Like I think one of the things that is distressing about you know, the encroachment of AI and LLMs um in in creative industries is that like, hey,

human-to-human communication is still a very like specific skill that you develop. Just cuz we can all talk and read doesn't mean like we can all tell stories. And um determining what your story is I think it's still going to be uh need to be a human-centric paradigm. But you know, Thank you. So, I I absolutely do not disagree with the the sort of core point of telling stories is a really important human endeavor. Um and it's something, you know, this is this is like cultural work that we are doing um as well as product creation. Um so I I agree with all of that. Um and if it's okay to kind of pivot to a much more technical answer. Um if I've understood kind of what you're getting at, you're talking about sort of situations where you want the story to be um the story of the game to be adapting very strongly to the player's indications of what parts of the story are they interested in? What do they want their

character to do in this space? And so on. And so from my point of view, that is very much um sort of starting from how do we understand the world state of what's possible in this game? So, we're not just like if we're creating that kind of game, we're not just creating here's a linear narrative or here's even a branching narrative, but we're creating an entire sort of world story space in which things can happen. So, I tend to approach that by thinking about let me kind of map out the space the state space that matters, like the kinds of stats that might matter, the kinds of possibilities that might matter. That maybe it's relationships between characters, maybe I'm looking at, you know, the strength of a particular kingdom, whatever it is that I'm dealing with there. And then start to think about what kinds of story moments that fit this kind of game could map to those different world states. Um and kind of build out that mapping and start to identify like, which bits like which moments here in this world space map are interesting? And how can we kind of encourage the player to play towards those and experience those? And which

are actually kind of boring? And how do we kind of steer people away? And there's a whole lot else that goes into that. But a lot of it is about that very kind of um space-oriented rather than linear-oriented um approach to to graphing and thinking about it. Right, exactly what I was having in mind. Thank you. Yeah. Hello. Um thank you for being here today. I currently work at a studio that is uh focused and has a big talent pool of uh writers that specialize in non-narrative comedy writing. Um and both myself from a career standpoint and the studio are looking into branching into narrative. The thing is we don't know where to start. We don't even know where to begin to even where the industry is, what what we need to do. Um so I was wondering if there was just like individual like good first steps for people who are trying like have games experience, but are trying to start that

game narrative career. Man, uh wow. Good first steps. You know, I there's been a couple of times where I've um been asked to submit um for projects that are in development. And you know, there's been one or two times where like here's our character art. Write something. What do you think this character is all about? Um you got 150 words, go. Um so you know, depending Well, I think one of the things that undergirds all our um uh you know, insights about this industry is like it depends on the project for us, right? Like if this is this a hero shooter where you're going to be writing one of multiple characters, then what's the whole cast, right? Like uh what's the breakdown in terms of their socio-economic statuses? Like their backgrounds, do they interlace or not? Are they all separate? Like um is it an open world thing? Is it just a linear story? Is it a visual novel? So like you know, knowing what you're going to need to bring to the

table um about the kind of games that uh a studio or a team might be making like is is the first step, right? So then the work you can do by yourself is like, okay, it's a hero shooter. Let me come up with like character profiles for like five or six characters, you know? Like um uh that's work you can be doing to um workshop your own skills outside of any potential assignments, right? But I think, you know, figuring out, hey, if I'm going to jump into this this discipline, like what are the things I'm going to need to know project to project? And and how can I work on my own skills um aside from any kind of potential work so that you're ready, right? You know, again, I keep on making these um metaphors to comics cuz that's another um medium that I work in, but like at the big comics publishers, they don't they're not going to train you up. They want to know that you can do the job already, right? Like they want to know that you know how to tell a story and they're not going to have to hold

your hand because they have other production schedules that they need to, um, think about. And I think the same thing is probably much very true for games. Like working on your craft, um, so like we've all been talking about bite-sized information delivery, right? You know, how do you sketch out character, um, texture like in succinct ways, right? You know, sometimes all you may get to deliver, um, insight into who a character is of like is like two lines of dialogue. Can you do that, right? Is it memorable? Um, and then thinking about the other storytelling vectors in games as a multi no multi-disciplinary, um, craft, right? So like, hey, if I'm not necessarily writing long reams of text, how else can I help my collaborative partners tell the story? Y'all really got to stop me from talking. Like just be like, okay, you're I'm going to jump in over here. Seconding what Evan mentioned about how figuring out what type of game you want first and what type of mechanics, because I heard you mention that it's a lot of comedy writers that aren't in games and I actually know of a game, cannot remember the name, but it's about a clam that does stand-up and depending

on what the player responds with, that affects the mood of the crowd, how much tips they make, whether they can progress onto the next part of the story. So knowing like what's your team's skill set is and how that's going to relate to the mechanics that you can make in the game is very important in addition to learning all the other wonderful wonderful things about making games. But for other resources, I have a games narrative resource sheet and I definitely recommend Emily's blog on narrative design. It's really really good. It's what I use when I started. Highly recommend it. Uh, everybody has given such great answers. I think on an individual level, if you have a handful of comedy writers who have never written games, um, the recommendation that I give to anybody who has written before, but hasn't written games is to open up Twine and mess around. And, uh, and that's what I would recommend especially for comedy writers because comedy I I hate to like be like pacing again, but comedy is really good pacing, right? And so if they can get into a,

uh, a game engine where they can see immediate input and see, you know, how they can do little branching and how they can do little pacing and stuff. That's really really vital to building confidence and also introducing the idea of like here are the ways that we can make outcomes and uh, giving a feel for like having to write the same thing twice or the same outcome of things. And it's just really good like that's where I would start. If I had like a room full of comedy writers, I'd be like, okay, here's Twine. Uh, go have fun for a couple days. So that's what I would do. I would just say, um, they just need to understand foundational storytelling before even, you know, trying to write a story. Doesn't matter what medium you're working in. What makes for good characters? What makes a good story? What makes good world building? Because all of that is going to end up in a game in some way. So just start there. What are the foundations of good storytelling?

And I'll jump in again, uh, with one where, uh, don't be afraid that if you're really struggling or or, you know, maybe need that extra narrative support at the beginning, like there are often options where you can, say, bring in a more experienced uh, narrative designer or game writer as a consultant to help like help you build some of that foundational, uh, setting and and foundational, uh, work. Uh, it's uh, like for example, with Talespinners, we've had clients where we do workshops and it will basically they'll, you know, clients will come with a like it's kind of this world and we sort of have this idea for a hero and something cool happens and then there's a betrayal and we'll be like, okay, let's take these like individual ideas you have and see if we can pull theme out of it, see if we can pull structure out of it. Um, so there are going to be people you can reach out to that like or or or, um, consultants you can contract that can sometimes help you with that initial development phase and get your your writing team on the right track. I just want to interject one last thing.

Start small. Do not make Baldur's Gate 4. You will be miserable. And I'd also recommend maybe checking out specifically the Jackbox games because there are a lot of funny That's where I WORK. OH. LOT OF FUN. OH. GREAT INTUITION ME, but like looking at like the different games and I like that's a great starting point. Thank you. Thank you so much. Who scripted that? That was amazing. Comedy. Um, I was wondering if there were any daily activities or like environmental factors that can help you come up or generate like creative ideas? Like I find I get a lot of my good ideas when I'm running and listening to music. Do y'all ever have anything like that? Help you become more creative? Um, I was about to ask you how your brain works. Um, I mentioned that before. And I realized a few years ago that I'm an audio-visual thinker.

I literally see and hear things in my head like I'm directing scenes. And I also use music because it's like the soundtrack to the story I'm telling in my head. Um, so my best way of being when I'm generating ideas, and this is writing and I didn't know this at first, is I like it completely dark late at night where I can pace back and forth listening to music and I'm just going over scenes over and over again to the point that I'm even memorizing the dialogue of the characters. And I can go back like weeks later and then write things down, have like, um, a mini summary of a scene. Maybe I'm not ready to write it yet. I think it's very important unless you're on a deadline. Deadlines I don't have a problem coming up with stuff oddly. But if I'm working on something myself, I can't try to physically force myself to write. And like I said, there's the visual writing in my head and there's the physical writing. And I found that if I'm trying to physically write something when I'm not

ready, it is both emotionally and physically draining for me. So I think really understanding how your brain works, it seems like music is a really good start, but you might explore a little bit more with that. I don't know if you're audio-visual or not. It seems like you're audio. That's where I'd begin. So for me, I don't know if anyone else does this, but I need like my floor time where I like lay down in complete silence and just think about like the stories I'm trying to like make. But for finding inspiration also, I watch a lot of anime and it's like watching think watch things that inspire you and also watch things that are completely new. Because one of the most important things I've learned within like games writing and writing in general is that the more stories that you see and consume, the more ways you know and learn how to tell stories. Because if you just watch the same thing over and over, you'll be used to one specific type of story. But if you start expanding your horizons more, you'll see, oh, they did something really unique with the music or they did something unique with the dialogue. So just seeing different ways things can be

done can be really helpful for inspiring. Yeah. I tend to have a very sort of analytical and verbal approach, so I tend to do a lot of background readings. So if I have a project that's in a particular setting, I'll do a lot of research about that setting or about sort of people who lived in that time or whatever that is and that tends to kind of provide a whole bunch of material for me to recombine. And then often, you know, when I'm trying to come up with an idea, it's not just I want some idea. It's I want an idea to fix this particular problem. Right? Like I'm looking for a specific type of idea. And so the other thing that I find really useful in that case is to actually write down as though I were as though I were briefing myself as a consultant, right? Like if I were hiring me and telling myself what the problem is that I'm trying to solve, write that down. And once I've got it like clearly expressed, then suddenly becomes much more easy for me to think about. I'm going to do plus one to everybody suggesting music and go one step further and say, uh, ambient YouTube videos.

Like anything where I can sort of particularly if there's a particular theme for what it is I'm writing, I'll be like medieval lo-fi to chill out to, uh, you know, like, uh, ambient Elven castle. Uh, and I'll or, you know, like Chrono Trigger lo-fi and I'll just have that in the background, uh, and listen to it over and over until my brain melts. Um, another thing I've been doing recently, it's actually less a creative process and more a trying to keep myself productive and keep myself focused is that I've been getting into virtual body doubling through things like Focusmate. Um, in a shocking twist that surprises no one, I have ADHD and sometimes getting started on writing is like pushing a boulder made of molasses uphill. Um, whereas when you have some a bit more structure where it's like, hey, we're going to be doing a thing for an hour and at the end of the hour, there will be a low-stakes check-in with my buddy to be like, hey, did you do the thing or did you work on the thing? Sometimes that that helps push me through the the sort of wall of awful.

And sometimes what I'm coming up with is not like amazing, you know, Shakespearean stuff, but it doesn't always have to be. It's sort of it's actually encouraging me to just get something down to sort of go through the iterative process. Um, and even if I don't finish my particular goal in a session, I'm like, oh, but I made progress. That was better than like 5 hours on Twitter and YouTube like I normally do. Um, this is definitely not a this definitely won't apply to everybody. It totally depends on like what Toya said, how your brain works. Um, I write everything down. Like everything. Like I look like like that meme of Charlie Day with all the with all the papers behind him. I have these all stick post-it notes that are everywhere. I have notebooks and everything. I have little notes on my phone. I have a dream journal. Like when I got into the habit of writing everything down, I remembered everything better. And when you like like I'm sure that a lot of people have experienced this. Have you ever like woken up and you have an idea and you're like, "Oh, I have an idea." And then you don't

remember it like 10 seconds later or you're driving the car and you think of a really like banger line and then you don't remember it when you get home. I hate that. It actually really irritates me. And so when I got into the process of writing everything down, it was really really easy to come up with ideas because I was so used to documenting everything. Does that make sense? Like when you write everything down, I feel like you have a better grasp on how your brain works and where to go for sources of inspiration. And so yeah, this is definitely not like a catchall. This probably won't work for everybody. But for me, really documenting how my brain works helps me do the stuff that I want it to do cuz sometimes it's very resistant. So that's my tip is just be insane about it. Thank you. Um so I have a story-based game that I'm working on and it has, you know, a like small branching narratives or branching paths and then now like a fork in the road in the middle where the story

splits. I'm wondering how do you write this story cuz like I I tried doing it like a movie script at first and then I'm like, "Okay, the branching paths are like um you know, it's really hard to write it in one script." And then I used Twine. That seems like the way to go, but do you do you use Twine exclusively or do you have multiple sources where you have the script? Um I write directly into Twine and some people think that that's crazy. But I really like it. I really like how tactile it feels, especially if you're writing really small little branches. Um I think that you could get away with like a Microsoft table or like when we start to get into really really big things, we start looking into spreadsheets. Um spreadsheets don't feel very intuitive for me. I do them a lot when I'm working with clients, but when I'm working alone, um Twine like bare-bones Twine is definitely the way that I go for tracking inputs and outputs, especially on small stuff.

Yeah, there are a number of other tools that also do this. Another one that I'm quite fond of is Ink. So that's a really nice one for writing fluidly, creating choices, and then re-branching things together and that is available for free. So you can just go out there and get that. Um my favorite tool of choice is Articy Draft. I use Articy Draft 3 and that one I find really good for dealing with branching or even with linear because it is it's very visual like Twine. You know, it's got nodes and things like that. But it also has the capacity to sort of like do the CSI zoom enhance and like you can nest nodes inside of each other. So you can you know, you can start off plotting your story of just like, you know, choice A, choice B and then you can go inside that node and then actually have like the scripts or maybe like the minor choices within it. So it is a little bit complicated to use and sometimes it's it's, you know, a little overpowered. And but I do find it very useful for

plotting out branching narrative and sometimes even linear narrative where I need to worry about like, "Well, what if the player talks to this character before X plot has happened?" Um the only thing I'll add to, you know, everybody's kind of expert tool-based device is like a larger craft consideration, which is like reverse engineer your story from the back to the front. So especially when you're dealing with something that has a lot of potential branches and pivot points and inflections, like you got to know where you're going to end up to figure out how you get there, right? And I'm sorry if that sounds like basic 101 ask type of advice, but like um yeah, like starting back from the ending or endings and figuring out, "Okay, how do I set up the dominoes in across these pathways so that when the player flicks one, it brings them to any number one of these points?" I think, you know, figuring out the old Chekhov's gun

theory, right? Like, you know, you put the gun in the first act and it has to go off in the third. Like think about that third act first, right? Like not to talk about guns, but who's pointing at why, who's pulling the trigger, and then you can think backwards about like, "Okay, here are the choices that brought us to this moment." So I second Ink and Twine. They're both very useful, but even before you want to start coding, one thing I like to use is PowerPoint because I'm a very visual learner and it's also good to like start from the end to see how you get there. But PowerPoint's also useful because it's good to check good to check what variables you will be using in your branching narratives to see like, "Okay, how will I track that the player made this choice and is there any time later up that this can be brought up to say, 'Oh, I remember you made that choice. So now this happens.'" So having like Articy Draft, like also like the different types of like Jira Jira, what's the other one? Asana's also good and Miro? Yes, Miro. That one. So being able to see like all the branches

visually and like the different ways branches interact is also really helpful and it will also make it easier on your programmers. Take care of your programmers. Yeah. I am the programmer, too. So Thank you. All right. Uh so obviously narrative is not a huge field and a lot of specialty stuff is even more narrow. Um so for someone who's just starting out, how do you sort of balance like developing a specialty versus like being generally employable? I mean play to your strengths, right? And I I think part of your question is figuring out what your strengths are and you know, um again, the kind of skill development that you can do on your own before you get an assignment or a gig is like, "Hey, what am I good at? You know, do I like writing character dialogue and and and figuring out how to sketch their personalities that way? Do um I think of

you know, plot scenarios easily? Like, you know, every kind of writer is different in every kind of thing, right? So, you know, you know, I'm currently in the middle of a personal writing project and I have no idea how the hell I'm going to get to where I want to go. But you know, when I do sit down and it's like, "Okay, one kind of rubric I've been telling myself is like um answer a question about one of these characters every time you sit down." So it's like, "Okay, what was what was this character's childhood like?" And it's me feeling around the kind of pathways of the story and figuring out what I want to do. Like, you know, I'm not one of these rigorous write every day kind of dudes, unfortunately. But um you know, despite that, you know, limitation in my mind, you can still kind of figure out, "Okay, experiment with what feels good and think about it whether that's one something you you can specialize in."

Um in terms of being figuring what figuring out what you like and also being employable, Evan has a really good point of, you know, doing working on what you like and figuring out what you like. Um I think in terms of the being employable part is the I like I like Sorry, I'm forming my thoughts. Um Uh one of the biggest pieces of advice that I give to folks who are just starting out is having a finished game, like a finished Twine game or an Ink game or something, will do more for you than having like the most polished resume. Like if you have something done, even if it's small, even if it's like teeny tiny, it's it's picking a vision and then following it and then finishing it and then being like, "Hey, I'm okay with other people reading this." Because that's a big part of it. Um and so that's like the biggest piece of advice that I could ever give you is put up an itch.io page, put up two Twine games that are super super teeny tiny, like 5 minutes or less,

and you would be surprised at what resonates with people, but also just how much people appreciate like being able to see your finished work, like what you consider to be something that you can show to other people. To follow what Nessa said, I also recommend doing game jams because A, you're going to get that nice finished game you can put on your portfolio and B, you're going to work with a team in a very tight constraint constraints, which is what you're going to need for whenever you're working in games writing. And every game every game jam game is going to be different. As a writer, you may need to advise artists on, "Okay, this is what this character looks like." Or maybe you're going to get an already completed character and you're going to be, "Okay, what am I going to write? What's the backstory? What's their childhood like?" etc. So working with teams and realizing and learning what different disciplines need from you as a games writer and narrative designer is super duper helpful. And then the the thing that I would add to that is if you're putting up a portfolio piece, I really love it if there's also a

little bit of a kind of artist brief of, "Here's what I was trying to do with this. Here's why. Here's what I was interested in achieving. These are the choices I made." And being able to to talk about that kind of thing and speak about it in an interview is actually a really good sign of how well you're going to be able to communicate with the team later about what you're doing and why you're making the choices that you're making in a larger game and that's really critical. And then as you go into those situations, the other thing is kind of developing your career over time being really conscious of, "Okay, I'm on a new team. We're doing something that plays to some of my strengths and in some ways doesn't. Like there are some things that this project is demanding of me that I'm not the best at or that are new to me. And be really conscious about your learning. Like what can I get out of doing this project? What can I learn and improve? What does this project have to offer me? Who on this team is going to be teaching me those things? And be really open to that. And that will kind of naturally grow you and your career in

a direction that is not only continues to be useful and continues to be employable, has good relationships with your colleagues as well, but is kind of following and and exploring new possibilities you might not have thought of at the outset. I'm just going to really quickly add, also know what you don't like to do. And don't feel like you are forced to show so much versatility in your portfolio. If you don't like horror, don't have horror samples. You don't have to do that. Thank you. Hello. Um so speaking of writers not liking to do things. Um if you so I work with a multimedia team that includes a lot of people who've come from legacy media like film and television and pros and in some cases very limited experience to interactive media as either creators or players. And I was wondering if you could speak to sort of any advice as far as like onboarding people into that world with you know respect for their talent while sort of you know helping them understand the ways in which this medium works especially if for whatever reason they're not necessarily interested in you know playing games themselves. Thank you.

Um I'll jump in. I think one of the things that's probably going to be the most helpful is you know um getting the these people that you're working with used to the idea that um in video games the first thing that players are going to do is try and break your story. Like they don't respect you. They're not showing up for you. They might not even know your name. So um you know and I'm guilty of that too, right? You pick up a controller, you're running around this crafted environment and you're trying to like okay, where are the seams? Where are the breaks? Where are the fractures? So like knowing that the way a writer operates in this medium is vastly different than other mediums, right? Where they might be the one in the seat of power, that's not the case. But there's also a lot of freedom in that because you can world build um in games in ways that are very different, right? Like player agency is the main differentiator in this in this form of writing. And like everything else is subordinate to that. But but like I said, you you can then

learn to write in different ways. Yeah. I sometimes find it helpful to actually kind of like briefly present a small project. Like here's a small interactive plot or something, you know, some some piece that I've worked on before or something along those lines. It kind of gives me an opportunity to walk them through, you know, here's here's where we're leaning on some kind of gameplay system. Here is where we're using some variables. Here's where the plot is branching a bit. And because I'm speaking to you know my artistic process and what I was doing and why it hopefully, I mean I haven't been on the receiving end of this, but hopefully it does not feel condescending, right? I'm not sort of saying, well, let me tell you about variables. Buckle up. Um but you know, it's it's something where you kind of like steps them through all of those elements in a way that they might then be able to start to think about all right, well, what how does this map against what I do? What looks different? And then that I mean that leads into a kind of Q&A and conversation kind of process. Um of you know, all right, what are we going to do with that? Like what bits of this resonate with me and seem

like they would be really cool? Which bits do I still not understand and so on. I definitely recommend either trying to play or if like the game if the team isn't like all in person, maybe watching streams of games that are similar to the ones you're going for because I think one of the most important things is like seeing being able to see the whole experience of a game not just the writing. Like what's the music like? What's the environment like? What's the camera focusing on? And seeing how those people like focus and see, oh, I noticed this. I noticed that to see like this is how you can slowly shift them into writing to games and it would also help showing, okay, they noticed this a lot of stuff about the camera work. So writing a lot of that would be really helpful for the project. Uh here's a really weird idea that just popped into my head. Uh play an escape room together. Um let them interact in the space. See like all the different variables of what people are doing. After you're done, come together, analyze what happened. Because a lot of that sense of play and freedom is what players will be doing in games. And they'll probably have fun and

maybe it'll give them a little bit more insight into what players are experiencing in games. I I have a follow-up to that because that's a great idea. Um I like to when I meet people who don't play video games but are really interested in stories. I'm going to use my dad as as an example. He's 74. He doesn't know what Pac-Man is. And if I'm speaking to him and I'm trying to explain to him what I do, he loves The Sopranos. And so I go, well, you know, what if you could play as Tony Soprano? And he's like, well, that sounds fun. And so if you're talking to people, right? Like So if you're talking to people who like do engage in media, you can ask them like, well, what would you want to do if you were the main character in that? They will they will have answers. Like I assure you they will answer so fast. And that's a way that you can get them invested and be like, well, there is a game where you can do that. It's called GTA V. Like it's it's it and I that's how I would get people who you know may not be interested cuz I'm

sure that there's something out there that they would like. We are at the 5-minute mark. So what we're going to do is like a speed run and try to get in as many people as possible. If we can get like one person to answer. Um so we'll start with you. I first of all thank you so much for the panel. It's been amazing. Um my question was about as somebody who writes mostly or at least enjoys writing a lot of queer focused fiction. Um I'm curious how when you sort of are in teams, you stay unapologetic in your writing and any strategies that you employ to like sort of maintain the confidence in your writing. So let me repeat the question. You're writing queer stories specifically? Yeah. I I I enjoy writing a lot of queer focused stories and I find that when I work in teams, sometimes I I feel like I have to hold myself back. Um so I'm sort of there's curious if there's any strategies that you all employ to sort of stay unapologetic even when you're on teams. So for as another queer games writer, one of the most important things is like maybe you want to pull aside and lead and ensure that you feel

comfortable telling the stories that you want to tell because you're going to be limiting yourself if you don't feel that you can tell the full story that you do and show like your full capabilities. So maybe it's maybe reaching out to a lead, maybe like setting up a separate meeting to explain, hey, this is the story I pulled from a lot of personal things. This is something important to me so that way can be handled with care. Yes. Thank you so much. Uh hi. Um so when you're working with uh teams of multiple disciplines, um especially with uh non with non-designers or non-writers, um what are the biggest what are the most common sources of friction or misunderstanding and how have you overcome the overcome them? Um sources of friction between different disciplines, is that what I heard? Yes. Yeah. So I think understanding scope um is probably the biggest one, right? As writers, we just can come up with an idea with words with with uh plot lines. Um knowing what it takes to actually implement those uh ideas and plot lines and what all else like is crucial, you

know? Like, hey, you just wrote down a boss character a new boss character is going to uh face down our hero in this arena. Guess what? How long does it take uh to design a boss character? It could be weeks, months, years. Like if you don't know that, then you're you're actively harming your other team members and collaborators in terms of their workflows, right? So like knowing what it takes to implement your ideas um foundationally is a key key uh component of learning how to collaborate across different disciplines. There you go. Okay, so one thing I've heard TV writers say is always take the job, always take the money because when you're starting out what you really need on your resume is something on your resume. Is there anything any condition where you would say maybe you don't like a game or you think a game would badly represent that you like you don't like the the job? If you are offered a job, what's the reason you might turn it down? Or would you always just take the money? Um I can do this as someone who's worked on some hot mess games. I think the most important thing is less about like the content of the game specifically but

more in looking like how is this team function previously? Have they created a game before? Have they created a game before outside of just a demo? Do they know how to market it? Do they know how to get everything ready for launch? So I think with content, that's more of like a personal preference, but the most important thing is to see, is this team functional and do I want to be is this something that I want to be stuck with in case it doesn't work out at first or do I want to look for another job that may be a better fit? Got you. Thank you. Hello. Uh first thanks. You guys are all amazing. This is wonderful. Um as someone who is transitioning from another industry adjacent from theater and journalism, also fellow recovering journalist. How how would you suggest somebody think about their portfolio if they haven't shipped a game? Um there's a fair amount of transferable skills. What do you wish people would put into their portfolios or think about them if they're not coming from another game writing job?

Uh I think two things. One, if I'm a hiring manager and looking at a portfolio, I want it to be really easy for me to access the material that you personally worked on. Whatever that is. And if that's a piece of a game, fine. If it's not, if it's something else, I want that to be, you know, don't make it difficult for me to get to. Don't make it difficult for me to understand what it is. And then again, if you like either within the portfolio with an author's note or an artist's note or in your cover letter or in some other fashion, help to communicate, you know, what was I doing here? How do I feel that uh my skills are demonstrated in this piece and how is that relevant to the project that I'm applying to? Is it like I'm working in a game with a particular setting and I've worked on films in that setting before? Is it I'm really interested in the gameplay of this in the following way and I feel like that hooks up with something I did on a TV program. Anything like that that gives me a route into understanding where you're coming from and how much you know about games and how much you know about the kinds of

things that I need on this particular game is very helpful. Thank you. That's very helpful. Hi there. Uh so, how do you uh do you have any advice for how to create an interesting or compelling narrative whenever you're working within a genre that normally doesn't have a very strong narrative like a fighting game or a shoot 'em up? Um yeah, you you have a massive possibility space there, right? Like, you know, um you can subvert or defy expectations there depending on the genre and, you know, like all these genres are waiting to be filled up with different textures, right? You know, so like um you know, what is the expectation when you when you boot up a fighting game and you just select your character and you're fighting off game? Well, are there going to be taunts? Are there going to be am I going to yell out the the name of my move? Like, what are the things the characters how the characters are going to communicate who they are to you, right? And then you can like either play to it those expectations or defy them, right? So, you know, if a

character says something about, you know, his freaking stock price instead of like a taunt to you like, "Hey!" That tells me something else, right? Like, the thing about all these genres is that they all have kind of um contemporary canonical expectations about how okay, it's a fighting game, so I'm going to get this. Like, you don't have to play by those rules, right? You should know them so you can figure out which ones you should stick to and or not, but like there's there's opportunity to like mold the genre to your storytelling goals and not necessarily vice versa. I hope that makes sense. It does. Thank you. You're welcome. It is now 1:00. I'm sorry if we didn't get to your questions, but we will be hanging around. Thank you so much everyone for being here. Again, please fill out your evaluations and have a wonderful rest of your GDC. Thanks for being here.