Category: Writing Workshop

Vigalondo pills

Nacho Vigalondo, the acclaimed director of The Time-Crimes (Cronocrímenes), is already promoting his forthcoming flick Extraterrestre. Luckily, instead of just telling us how nice everbybody in the team was and how much fun they had over the hard, hard shooting, he shares his expertise through these 5 pills of writer-director’s wisdom:

In a nutshell:

  1. Know what you’re telling. Each story tells one thing.
  2. Know what you’re not telling. Focus.
  3. Know the size of your project. Take into account the budget and possibilities that you will actually have when carrying out what’s written.
  4. Don’t try to show off your influences, or you risk making your movie an impersonal collection of unconnected moments.
  5. Don’t try to impress your family, friends, competitors or even the audience. Rather aim to satisfy yourself.

Everybody can write

Raise your hand if you think you can write!

I said it yesterday: everybody thinks they can write. Those who can move a camera. Those who can hold a pencil. Those woh can direct their actors. Those who can program a computer. If they can do all those complex technical things, what else do they need to write a movie, a comic, a play, a game? As Brenda Ueland used to say, everybody hsa something to tell!

I’ll admit that there are many creators who are capable of doing all that and writing their own stories. We can all think up names of movie directors and comic authors so I won’t make a list. The problem is that everybody wants to be one of those auteurs… which is another reason why there are so many mediocre pieces out there. If you intend to write for an audio-visual format, that’s one of the challenges you’ll have to face: the disdain of some “professionals” in the sector who’ll think that writing may as well get done by monkeys.

This topic, among many others, came up in conversation with our first guest ever, a renowned Spanish comic author whose words will cover these pages in the next few days.

But with this we’re already going away from the topic of videogames, back into the general themes of this multi-faceted blog. I hope this light introduction to the issue captured your interest, as we’ll find more chances to delve deeper into its complexities. In the next few days we’ll catch up with news that have been popping up on the interwebs in the last few days and then we’ll pass the mike to our first interviewee. Stay tuned!

The value of ideas

Ideas are worth nothing. Half the people you ask will say they’d never ever be able to come up with a movie, a book or a game. The other half are brimming with ideas… and half the humanity is a lot of people. If gold or diamonds are so valuable because of their scarcity, by the same rule ideas are worthless – there are too many.

And you’ll say, if there are so many presumably good ideas, why are there so many bad movies, so much mediocre literature, such clichéd videogames? Because the tricky part is to turn a good idea into a good finished product. How many promising trailers hide boring movies? How many interesting back covers sell out bad literature? A good synopsis does not guarantee a good story. Walking the walk is more difficult than talking the talk.

When one wants to prove themselves good writers they must prove their worth through a good novel or story collection – sometimes only one is not even enough. That’s also why so many aspiring scriptwriters film their own shorts. The same rule applies if you want to write videogames. by making games you’ll prove that not only have you good ideas but also know what to do with them, how to integrate them in a playable environment, how to engage the player, how to use interactivity, how to define a whole coherent world.

In theory, many of these tasks are for programmers, graphic designers and the lot, and indeed in practice, in a professional environment, tasks will be apropriately distributed. But in order to enter that market, you’ll have to show insiders that you know how to integrate your work with the rest of the team, in a word – that you know the format.

The only way to make it is to learn other abilities that allow you, if not to make the whole game yourself, at least to develop a part of the technical requirements of the process. As we’ve been saying all week, all elements in a videogame are intimately related, and the more of them you explore, the better you’ll know how they relate to each other and the more coherent the result will be. And above all, the more work you can take in your hands, the more interesting it will be for others to work with you. If you want to surround yourself with a team of graphic artists, musicians and programmers that help you realize your project, you’ll need to offer them something beyond “an idea”. The more knowledge and abilities you bring in, the more chances you’ll have that serious people take you seriously and jump in a colaboration with you.

Take into account you don’t need to start from scratch. There are numerous engines desgined to help you create games. Here’s someone more knowledgeable on the topic, my friend David García “Xander“, to suggest a few:

Renpy, RPG Maker and GameMaker are the most famous (together with one for fighting games, but I don’t think we can tell stories with that ;-). Many people make games in Flash. Then there’s the possibility of building MODs for PC games. Some companies make theit games’ development kits available for users to modify or make completely new games. For example there’s Valve with their Source engine from “Half-Life” or Bioware with the tools from “Neverwinter Nights 2”. The latter is quite famous, easy to use and, coming for a Western RPG, applis well to storytelling. There’s also the recent “Dragon Age”, also by Bioware, with some capabilities for cinematics. For shooters there are the tools from games like “Gears of War”, “Crisis” or “FarCry 3”. Even “StarCraft 2” have released their kit and I hear it’s quite powerful, allowing you even to change the genre and build an action game, instead of strategy, for example. In a word, there’s a lot to choose from.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: one has to work hard. Many amateurs think it’s easy: I’ll write, he’ll draw, she’ll write the code… In practice, this never works, because illustrators and programmers will rather work on their own ideas and direct their own projects. And here goes one of those big truths that make the work of a professional scriptwriter on any audiovisual medium, so difficult:

Everybody thinks they can write.

And if you don’t believe me, I’ll tell you more next time.

When I grow old I will make games

Do it yourself

If I want to make games, what do I have to do?

Just as if you want to work on any other activity, there’s only one way: become a professional. That means you’ll have to work hard, to study and to practice.

As the industry grows (and they already say it moves more money than movies or music), more courses pop up that address videogames especifically. I cannot recommend any in particular as I don’t have any references, but some Google searches should offer results for your area. As in any new business model, you’ll come across amateurs wanting to make easy money by lack of competition and true professionals trying to consolidate the industry. Ask for references on the faculty and study the offers throughly before handing out your money.

The problem is that in most cases, companies will not know either if the course you’ve studied is worth anything or not. So in order to prove your worth, practice will be more useful. Cancel your suscription to the popular magazine that only copypastes the distributors’ press releases (by the way, it’s most of them) and find publications with a critical eye that not only sell titles but also analyze the industry. Find the odd book on the subject and dip in. Play all kinds of genres on all available platforms and analyze those games, their merits and flaws, the twists that work, the cheap tricks, how they came to be at all.

But above all, mingle with people with the same interests and make games. The best item in your CV for a company is a finished piece of work. Illustrators don’t get assignments through the promise of their sketches: you’ll want to present full games.

What are you talking about, full games? All I know is how to write! Ah, nobody said it was easy! You’ll have to learn more. Tomorrow I’ll tell you what, and more importantly why.

Who writes the game?

Yesterday we mentioned how teamwork imposes limitations on the videogame writer. Today we’ll explore the topic.

We can understand the issue by looking at how movies are made. A script needs many pairs of hands to make a writer’s ideas become real settings, costumes, sounds, colours, performances, camera angles, cuts, soundtrack and so on and so forth. Along that path, depending on time and budget costraints and the wishes of the director and producers, the result may largely depart from the original script. In fact, as we said yesterday, quite often a movie’s production is decided upon marketing reasons (remakes, franchises, etc.) and then the script is not so much the spark of the project anymore as just a cog in the machine. Do you remember that story about Kevin Smith being forced to include a giant spider in his script for Superman Returns? The video is long but worth every second.

Something similar happens with videogames, only worse, because the writer often works in parallel to the development team, or even joins the project in its later stages. There were cases when an author was approached with a fully-finished game (level 1 takes place in a mine and the final boss is a zombie, level 2 is on the moon and the final boss is a yellow octopus…) and then asked to write a story that brought it all together.

We must take into account that the game industry is so young that the figure of the writer didn’t even exist until rather recently. Stories and texts were written by the (small) development teams themselves. As the teams grow, tasks get specialized but still today, a small indie developer, say 3 to 8 people programming for iPhone or Wiiware, won’t have a writer in their ranks. The bigger the project, the more likely they’ll have some people devoted only to writing, but also the more tensions they’ll suffer regarding budget, schedule and even intentions. On the top of the scale you have the latest issues of sagas like Metroid, GTA, Metal Gear Solid or ScarCraft, which will have their big creative star on top and a small team of writers to fill in the gaps at his orders.

So if I want to write videogames, where do I fit in all of this? Let’s talk about it tomorrow.

What is “writing” in a game?

The people from Extra Credits offer an answer:

What is writing in a game? It’s what the characters say in cutscenes and dialogue boxes. It’s those voice tabs that characters shout out during combat. It’s also the background chatter that characters expell as the player passes by. It’s the words in the options menu, and the loading screens. It’s the flavour text describing guns or equipment or alien bases… OK, so it’s  alot of things. But I’ll tell you what it’s not. It’s notthe high concept. It’s not the idea behind the game. Few games ever start with a fully baked story that the developer is itching to tell, much less a complete script.

Writers don’t decide the concept of the game because in most cases, the game designer will be the person to think through and decide the setting, the mechanics and, surely, the most important traits of the story and its characters. That means the story is half-written before the writer jumps in (just like in Hollywood when a producer greenlights a remake, sequel or adaptation – the movie is already decided before the scriptwriter is hired). Thus the writer becomes part of a huge team – the video does actually review some of the difficulties of game writers’ within the cogs of the industry – but we’ll talk about teamwork tomorrow. The challenge that videogames face today is wider than that: they need to define how they can tell their stories.

Games can’t tell their story through disconnected segments of gameplay strung together by cutscenes. Games need to tell their story through the gameplay. Narrative should trip from every texture, and be integrated into every facet of the world. It should come through in the menus, in the interface, and in every loading screen. But most importantly of all it should come through in the mechanics of the game. The mechanics should teach us about the characters and reinforce the plotline. They should fundamentally attune the player to their character, and let them explore their character’s actions.

Doesn’t that contradict what they said at the beginning? If writers don’t decide the concept or mechanics of a game, how can they narrate through it?

Well that’s the big question isn’t it.

Happy birthday, Mario

Activities will surely last for the whole of the Christmas season, but it is today that Nintendo and the world celebrate Mario 25th anniversary. That makes it a good day to start discussing writing for videogames in our workshop, a new, unknown and exciting field.

Mario is proof that you don’t need great texts or great stories to make an exciting videogame: princess kidnapped by ugly monster plus hero to the rescue are enough excuse. It’s more than others offer: the basic Pong or the classic Tetris don’t even need that much.

But what happens when our game wants to tell a story? Or when we want to tell a story through a game? (I guess it’s not the same, is it?). The answer, my friends… we’re still working on it.

Cinema was born as a Carnivàle show, and took a while to find its own language. As the technical posibilites expanded (sound, colour… and now 3D), the grammer of that language grew richer. Videogames have followed a similar process, only faster: while techonology allows high quality sounds and graphics and all kinds of control systems, interactivity in narration is stillin its infancy. Indeed it’s the most fashionable topic among professionals in the industry. There are memorable cases of great novelists hired to script games who failed miserably because they didn’t know anything about the medium they were writing for.

During the next few days we’ll start our approach to the topic.