Posted June 02, 2014
high rated
With more and more cottage game development studios springing up, and much of the professional development pipeline being bypassed, I thought it might be useful to have a discussion about what you think new developers really need to pay attention to that they aren't. (Such as run-on sentences like that one...)
With games being made by smaller teams, and by people without the industry experience of how to manage game development, one often encounters a game in which a key role seems to have been overlooked. So I would like you to have a go at filling in the [blank] of this thread title with one of the game development jobs that too often doesn't get filled the way it should. I will kick it off with:
Dear developers, please hire a WRITER
Writing is one of those things that is harder to do well than it first appears. It is also something at which people can excel partially. One can be great with descriptive language, for example, yet terrible at dialogue. In some games there is very little writing to be done, so there this lack is not critical. But in a story-driven game, or one with a lot of information and character detail to relay, the lack of a good writer can be fatal.
The game which prompted me to bring this topic up is Lone Survivor. I started playing it the other night and overall I enjoy the game mechanics. But the writing does the game no favours, and indeed works against it. It's not the worst writing I've encountered in the game, but it is unbelievably trite. The whole style is of that "teen horror genre" pattern, where it tries to be cool and conversational, and also play up the weirdness and horror. But it is written so artlessly that it detracts from the experience. Worse, there is a lot of it, in a Silent Hill type setting where dialogue should be minimal, and when it does occur it should add to the horror. Instead we get inanities like the character talking to himself about how big and scary a monster he just saw was, in spite of the fact that you just saw it yourself. Either the developer doesn't have faith enough in his game to deliver these impressions on its own, or he is mistaken in thinking all this verbal chaff enhances the experience.
This game is not alone in the sin of not involving a decent writer. Indeed, most indie games seem to suffer from auteur syndrome, in which one developer carries the lion's share of the duties. This can work when you are developing a basic shmup or platformer, but once you get into interactive fiction, you need to be sure your writing can do what it needs to.
With games being made by smaller teams, and by people without the industry experience of how to manage game development, one often encounters a game in which a key role seems to have been overlooked. So I would like you to have a go at filling in the [blank] of this thread title with one of the game development jobs that too often doesn't get filled the way it should. I will kick it off with:
Dear developers, please hire a WRITER
Writing is one of those things that is harder to do well than it first appears. It is also something at which people can excel partially. One can be great with descriptive language, for example, yet terrible at dialogue. In some games there is very little writing to be done, so there this lack is not critical. But in a story-driven game, or one with a lot of information and character detail to relay, the lack of a good writer can be fatal.
The game which prompted me to bring this topic up is Lone Survivor. I started playing it the other night and overall I enjoy the game mechanics. But the writing does the game no favours, and indeed works against it. It's not the worst writing I've encountered in the game, but it is unbelievably trite. The whole style is of that "teen horror genre" pattern, where it tries to be cool and conversational, and also play up the weirdness and horror. But it is written so artlessly that it detracts from the experience. Worse, there is a lot of it, in a Silent Hill type setting where dialogue should be minimal, and when it does occur it should add to the horror. Instead we get inanities like the character talking to himself about how big and scary a monster he just saw was, in spite of the fact that you just saw it yourself. Either the developer doesn't have faith enough in his game to deliver these impressions on its own, or he is mistaken in thinking all this verbal chaff enhances the experience.
This game is not alone in the sin of not involving a decent writer. Indeed, most indie games seem to suffer from auteur syndrome, in which one developer carries the lion's share of the duties. This can work when you are developing a basic shmup or platformer, but once you get into interactive fiction, you need to be sure your writing can do what it needs to.
