put a dungeon in it

[kdollarhyde]

Anyway, I'm answering asks here again, so send them if you've got them. I only request that you don't ask me how to get into games or what to put in your portfolio, because the information is out there and my previous answers, which live on this blog, haven't changed. Godspeed, gamers. 🫡

[kdollarhyde]

Super banal question. I'm 27, I have background in tech copy writing, that's all.. well.. and a shit ton of gaming behind my back. I know, "it's never too late," but for real tho is there chances for such a newbie in the industry of narrative design/game writing?

I was 29 when I started working in games. I'd already had a whole life! It's really not too late for you. But I won't pretend junior roles aren't thin on the ground right now, and I know how hard it is to live on a junior's salary in your late 20s and into your 30s. And money aside, psychologically, it can be humbling. I wanted to feel like a pro who had my shit together when I transitioned to games, but I had to accept that even if I was good at my non-games work, I didn't really know that much about game development. I just knew how to write.

So, I'll say there's always a chance. And while there might be a good number of people in their early 20s applying for the same roles as you, remember that you've got five years of life experience on them. That's not nothing. Use your cover letter and interview to talk about what you were doing during those years, and how what you learned in that time makes you a more sure bet for the job. Because really, when I'm looking to hire junior and mid-level designers, I care about skill, drive, and disposition, as I mentioned in a previous ask. There's no age restriction on any of that.

[kdollarhyde]

Was there any particular game by Obsidian that inspired you to work for them?

Fallout: New Vegas, Pillars of Eternity. I'm an RPG sicko at heart. The more weird, branching, and simulative, the better.

[kdollarhyde]

In terms of narrative design and writing roles at studios, do you think localization writing (as in, translated and rewritten text) can be pitched successfully as experience that would prepare someone for those kinds of roles? It still encompasses the same kinds of writing as it seems most studios want to see in portfolios and gives the writer experience with it, but I'm curious if hiring folks would see eye-to-eye with that view.

Sure, I think there's some merit to that. I certainly wouldn't look askance at a resume with localization writing on it. If anything, that's interesting. But at the same time, that kind of writing probably isn't much like the writing we do (as far as I know), so you might have to accept starting at a lower level of seniority than you had achieved in your localization career, at least initially.

[kdollarhyde]

a few months ago there was a conversation making the rounds on twitter that amounted to: aspiring nds should never put mods, rpg maker games, games that only use free assets, and even twine games in their portfolios, bc they're not professional enough and will harm your chances. I personally found this discouraging, but I noticed that both you and Paul Kirsch have recommended Twine so I'm curious: how do you feel about this advice?

I think it's wack. I don't expect people looking for their first job in games to have made professional games before. That would make no sense. All I care about is 1. you know how to write 2. you can finish things 3. you are teachable, collaborative, and curious about the world. I can teach you how to write branching narrative RPGs. That part's easy. It's skill, drive, and disposition that's on you.

[kdollarhyde]

I've often heard narrative designers give cautious warnings to people interested in going into the field, making points that (to me) boil down to "the job isn't like you think it is." Do you think people romanticize your job? What's your experience been like compared to what you thought it would be like?

certainly there are people who romanticize game writing, or working in games generally, but i can’t say i really blame them for having a rosy outlook on the work. game development is a secretive industry bound up in restrictive non-disclosure agreements, and the player base can be quite hostile, so there’s little incentive (and sometimes a lot of risk) in speaking openly about the nature of the job. without accessible, honest discussion, people are going to draw their conclusions.

still, i do feel like i came to game writing with open eyes. i credit that to the research i did in the many years i spent trying to find a job in the industry. i sought out developer blogs, industry news sites, and free craft talks and absorbed what i could. i applied for sponsorships to attend developer conferences, indie showcases, writing workshops. this gave me a reasonable idea of what a game developer’s day-to-day is like.

but i don’t think that’s quite the answer you were hoping for. for one thing, it’s boring, and for another, it side-steps honesty for description of a process, which feels sort of like honesty, but isn’t.

someone asked me about my time in the industry not too long ago. here’s an excerpt of what i told them:

Sometimes the work is great, fulfilling and exciting and meaningful, and sometimes it's hard, draining and defeating and miserable. I worked in several other industries before coming to games, and while my previous jobs had their emotional and intellectual challenges, my personal experience has been that the "highs" in game development are especially high but comparatively rare, and "lows" are especially low and unfortunately frequent.

I wish I could say that the challenges don't weigh on me, but sometimes they do, and I've thought more than once of leaving the industry in the past four years. Yet, I'm still here because of the tremendous support and care I’ve received from many of my colleagues. I've made the best friends of my life in this work and have been able to grow a lot as a person and a writer as a result.

As frustrating as games can sometimes be, the people I make them with have made the challenges bearable, and they're ultimately why I stick around.

[kdollarhyde]

Hi Kate! Every narrative design listing always asks that you mention what games you’re currently playing. But I never put what I’m actually playing, bc I assume each team is looking for proof that you’ve played recent games in their genre but can appreciate what the classics have to teach. What kind of answer would you personally hope to see there?

I can’t speak for anyone else, but I don’t really care how recent the games are or even that they’re all narrative-focused games. What I most like to see is variety: big AAA titles, little indie titles, tabletop systems, narrative-driven games, gameplay-driven games, old games, new ones. I get excited when I see that someone’s design interests are omnivorous.

RPGs are what I think of a “kitchen sink” genre in that they borrow elements from a ton of different genres, perhaps more than they even need. A designer who has a broad curiosity across games and who can articulate the unique features of those games to their team is invaluable.

[kdollarhyde]

APPARENTLY tumblr doesn’t let you click to expand images in a text post, so here are the images from the previous post in an expandable format.

[kdollarhyde]

Hi Kate. My question is, for an amateur writer looking to develop skills for narrative design in the game industry, what are some formats or examples of writing I can make to be relevant?

the skills you need for professional narrative design work will depend on the type of game you’re interested in writing, imo, though there’s certainly a lot of overlap, and it can’t hurt to be proficient in all or most of it.

if you’re gunning for a naughty dog-style production, where the story is told primarily through cutscenes and set-piece events, you’ll probably want to practice writing screenplays. work on constructing scenes with tension and conflict that develop through short, punchy dialogue. for linear games, narrative design is similar (or even identical to) screenwriting.

if you’ve never tried any screenwriting at all, maybe pull up some of your favorite scenes in television and film and try to recreate the script based on what you see on screen, then google around for the shooting script and see how your effort matches up. that might help you get a feel for the form. (and if you’re stumped for good examples, BARRY, bill hader’s hitman comedy on HBO, manages to do an astonishing amount of really effective storytelling in 25 minutes.)

there are a ton of screenwriting resources out there, and since it’s something i do very rarely, please don’t take my word for the best way to learn how to do it! let someone more experienced teach you!

outside of screenplays, barks are a staple of game writing that you’ll want some familiarity with. there, i’ll defer to katie chironis, a designer at riot, who wrote a tidy tweet thread about barks a couple days ago. the only thing i’ll add to her thread is that barks often need to give the player information that is easily understood and internalized in addition to being flavorful and punchy.

the kind of information conveyed depends on the event being triggered. like here, parvati is letting the player know that the enemy they’re targeting is immune to plasma damage:

some barks are really just opportunities for the game to pat the player on the back and tell them they did a good job, like here, where parvati congratulates the player on making it through an encounter without taking any damage:

you’ll notice this is not particularly deep writing. i certainly wouldn’t call it my finest work. in fact, i chafe against all the pure ego-stroke barks, and i wish i didn’t have to write them. but that’s the job, so write them i do, and so will you. so put some barks in your portfolio.

that’s scenes and barks. what’s left? if you’re writing for an rpg, you know it’s gotta be branching conversations. i can’t speak for my colleagues, but the way i learned how to write branching conversations was:

play a lot of rpgs, and play the ones i liked several times through (s/o to dragon age: origins)

try to chart a single conversation tree from one of your favorite quests to see how it’s constructed (s/o to the dwarf commoner origin)

start writing your own conversation trees to apply what you’ve learned (in twine, renpy, flowchart software, a big piece of butcher paper, whatever (i used a big piece of butcher and later twine, but i also need to be able to see my entire conversation structure at once, so ymmv.))

regarding point #2, check out this flowchart that a player on the outer worlds subreddit made a few months after the game’s release. here, poster warkipine did their damnedest to reconstruct parvati’s entire bar conversation in flowchart software, and they got pretty damned close. here’s their take on the intro:

here’s what that same intro looks like in obsidian’s conversation software:

this is the best way (in my opinion!!!) to learn how to write branching conversations, because while the player only sees the dialogue, they feel the conversation flow, and learning how to construct a satisfying, engaging, reactive conversation that’s within your wordcount budget is at least 50% of the work of branching narrative design. shit, maybe even more than 50%. what i’m saying is, dialogue is the easy part!

that’s cutscenes, barks, and branching conversations covered. what’s left? LORE. by which i mean, everything else: item descriptions, examinables, lore books, ui text, journal text, etc. what a studio calls all this prose writing will be unique to them and their projects, but it all exists to fill the game world with information. some of it’s useful, some of it’s entertaining, (almost) all of it’s written by a human being, and you probably want some of it in your portfolio, too.

if you need help getting a handle on the form, read through tabletop rpg rulebooks or lore books from games you loved. i have copies of destiny’s grimoire and dishonored’s lore books at my desk, for example, as well as fiction anthologies, historical travelogues, collections of world mythology, nature writing, etc. all within reach to flip through when i’m feeling stuck.

having examples of screenplays, barks, branching narratives, and lore books in your portfolio will go a long way toward making you look relevant for a game writing position. you might also consider short stories, solo game projects, and collaborative game projects. i wish i could tell you there was short-cut that didn’t require all this labor, but there isn’t one. you just have to do the work, and keep doing it, maybe for nothing, for as long as you can. it took me seven years.

i hope that was helpful. i have about twenty variations on this question in my inbox, and it’s a big, complex topic, so any of you are welcome to ask follow-up or clarifying questions here, and i’ll get to them when i can.

[apparently tumblr doesn’t let you click to expand images, so you can find clickable versions of the images in this post HERE.]

[kdollarhyde]

read your first post about where ideas come from — how would you describe your process for taking an idea and turning it into a story? for example, your idea that you reference (about watching a child and looking away at the wrong moment) is definitely a compelling one, but it's not a story with a beginning, middle, and end. What's the next step after "idea"?

the way someone moves from idea to story is going to be unique to them, and the process will probably change over the course of that writer’s life as they practice their craft. i try to be deliberate in how i move from idea to story, but i mostly fail, and understanding why -- and how to fail less -- has only come with time.

the idea i posted about did eventually become a short story, which was published in a small sff magazine called lackington’s. it’s been several years since i worked on it, but i think my process at the time was to ask a lot of questions of the idea that lead me to building out the story and world, like:

what would happen to a woman who let a child drown?

who is the child, and what if the child were important? what if she were the hope of her family after a time of loss and tragedy?

who is the woman, and what if the woman were not important? what if she refused to accommodate her family’s desires in a way that made their post-tragedy situation a little more desperate than it needed to be and they resented her for it?

the answers came from what i was already thinking about at the time: fantasy stories with systems of government that didn’t include a monarchy, understanding of crime and punishment in a culture without a codified criminal justice system, cultural milieus that viewed children primarily as a pool of physical/intellectual/political labor. that gave me little bits of detail and tension i could string together to create a story with something like a beginning, middle, and end.

along with questions of story content, i also needed to consider my basic storytelling tools, like: who my point of view character would be (generally, the person with the most to lose), how many point of view characters i needed to tell the story (in this case, just one), what point of view and verb tense i was writing in (third person past, i.e. “Biyya ran down the pier...”) and why i was using them (comfort, mostly), and any structural flourishes i wanted to employ (in this case, something of a frame story).

once i had content and structure locked down, i had my story frame and could start building my story... house, and then it was mostly a matter of typing until it was done.

but that sounds a lot more structured and galaxy-brained than the process felt. i wasn’t then (and still am not) a great or even good short story writer, so even in asking and answering those questions, i was fumbling around in the dark and working mostly on instinct. and that instinct can take you pretty cool places. i’ve published several short stories that i wrote with my gut, and i even like a couple of them. however, when i was writing purely on instinct, i often felt like the story was out of my hands. my subconscious or whatever was steering the ship. and that made it hard to craft and execute on whatever effect i wanted to create in the reader (horror, wonder, empathy, etc.), and harder still to diagnose and fix story elements that weren’t working.

moving from an instinctive writing mode to a deliberate one hasn’t been a sudden switch. i didn’t wake up one day and think, oh shit, i should make carefully considered choices about how i construct my stories. it was more like... learning to see the moments when i was making a choice without thinking about it and then consciously choosing to follow or reconsider that instinct. learning to recognize those moments came from practice, reading stories with an eye toward “how’d they do that?”, and talking to other writers.

frankly, moving from idea to story is something i still struggle with. what’s been most valuable for me in this process has been patience -- both with myself and with my ideas. understanding and accepting that i couldn’t force myself to get better faster than my brain was able to learn meant that i didn’t have to stress so much about the rate at which i improved in my craft. mastery would come at its own pace, and so long as i continued to practice, continued to read, continued to learn, i could let go of the outcome and find joy in the work.

[kdollarhyde]

Where do ideas come from

living in the world and observing it with intention. engaging with other people’s ideas and internalizing the bits that interest you. experiences. dreams.

i’m jealous of writers who seem to manifest a new idea with every breath, because that’s not me. i have an obsessive hook down in my psyche somewhere -- my brain snags on two or three things and won’t let them go until it’s pulled them apart and digested every bit there is to eat. when i’m done with my ideas, usually there’s just bones left.

the idea for the book i’m revising now started with an afternoon beside the russian river in guerneville, california. the part of the river where we were swimming wound through a shallow canyon, and the arch of the 116 highway passed overhead beside a trestle bridge. swimmers’ shouts bounced off the undersides of the bridges and made the whole place echo. it felt like being in a cave.

i was watching a little girl, probably three or four, chase some ducks in the shallows. she slipped and went under for a second, but her guardian was there to grab her up. disaster averted.

around that time, i was in grad school and working as a nanny to a couple of dramaturgy academics who lived in my neighborhood. their daughter was about the same age as the girl in the river. she was a sweet kid, and taking care of her brought me joy during a difficult time in my life.

that day on the river, i wondered what it would feel like to be that little girl’s guardian, but to have looked away at precisely the wrong moment. i’ve been dining on that feeling for four years.