Night Ended

Ask Ben Schroder questions about game writing, games, writing etc

[talientravere]

He is done!! And I love him!! Very happy with how this came out.

If you haven't played Amarantus, go play it so you can appreciate him properly

[kyotocosmology]

augh....!

[kyotocosmology]

55

Soft launching the list of games that I would personally, obsessively, recommend to anyone interested in game writing & narrative design.

When I threatened to do this months ago I did commit to more detail (at least: time to play, mechanical complexity, etc., not so much describing what I find narratively significant about them) so I'll probably work on that **update: I have not lmao**

13 Sentinels (PS4, Switch, 2020) $$

80 Days (iOS, PC, Switch, 2014) $

Absolum (all, 2025) $$

Afterparty (all, 2019) $$

Asura’s Wrath (PS3, 360, 2012) $-$$

Alpha Centauri (PC, macOS, 1999) $

Analogue: A Hate Story (PC, macOS, 2012) $

Anthology of the Killer (PC, macOS, 2024) $

Amarantus (PC, macOS, 2023) $$

Amnesia: A Machine For Pigs (all, 2013) $

Black Book (all, 2021) $$

Cape Hideous (PC, 2024) $

Cart Life (PC, 2013) $

Children of Morta (all, 2019) $$

Cosmology of Kyoto (PC, macOS, 1993) -

Dragon’s Dogma (all, 2012) $

ECHO (PC, PS4, XB, 2017) $$

Fatale (PC, macOS, 2009) $

Flipnic (PS2, 2003) $-$$

Goblet Grotto (PC, macOS, 2012) free

Goodbye Volcano High (PC, PS4, XB, 2023) $$

HORSES (PC, 2025) $

Kentucky Route Zero episode 1 (all, 2013) $$

Killer7 (play w/ a GC controller if you can) (GC, PS2, PC, 2005) $$

Kill The Music (PC, 2025) $

Lumines (all, 2004) $

Mediterranea Inferno (PC, PS4, XB, 2023) $

Metal Gear Solid 2 (PS2, 360, PC, 2001) $

Mutazione (all, 2019) $$

Need For Speed: Heat (PS4, XB, PC, 2019) $$

Nier (PS3/360 western release w Father Nier) (PS3, 360, 2010) $

Parameters (web, 2012) free

Pokemon Snap (N64, 1999) $-$$

Portal (not the Valve one) (home computers, 1986) -

Pyre (PS4, PC, macOS, 2017) $

Resident Evil 7 (all, 2017) $$

Ridge Racer Type 4 (PS1, 1999) $

Riven (PC, macOS, PS1, 1997) $

Roadwarden (PC, macOS, 2022) $-$$

Saturnalia (all, 2022) $$

Silent Hill 3 (PS2, PC, 2003) $-$$

SOMA (all, 2015) $-$$

That Which Faith Demands (PC, macOS, 2021) $

Tharsis (all, 2016) $

The Fool's Errand (home computers, 1987) $

The Unfinished Swan (PS3, PS4, PC, Mac/iOS, 2012) $

The World Ends With You (DS, Switch, 2007) $-$$

Tokyo Jungle (PS3, 2012) $-$$

Tomodachi Life (DS, 2013) $

Until Dawn (PS4, 2015) $-$$

Vangers (PC, macOS, 1998) $

Void Stranger (PC, macOS, 2023) $$

Wheels of Aurelia (all, 2016) $

WORLD OF HORROR (PC, macOS, 2019) $$

Yakuza: Like A Dragon (PS4, PS5, XB, PC, 2020) $$

Zeno Clash (PC, 360, 2009) $

[kyotocosmology]

Up to 55 on the narrative game recommendation list now lmao. Will I find enough inscrutable reasons to get to the magic 100?? Maybe!!

[catboyattorney]

this is gonna be a long one bear with me lol. been percolating a lot of thoughts about the style of the game that started with the ui and then snowballed pretty rapidly…

so after i drew and cleaned up some sprites in a style i was happy with the next step for me was environments and figuring out a style for that. i am very rusty with drawing, environments especially, and wasn’t really happy with what i was doing even when i was trying to hasten the process by drawing over primitive blender models (as seen in earlier posts). so i took a break and decided to switch to the ui.

in a previous post, i mentioned the directions i was feeling for ui— namely stuff inspired by old alchemical illustrations, early typography and woodplates, venetian type, etc. i liked the idea of a deceptively simple frame with perhaps an accompanying illustration, maybe even something diegetic that represents the state of the game or the characters’ relationship with each other. i had fun exploring different possible motifs for it but stumbled onto a new problem: i now liked these explorations more than i liked the actual sprites i had decided were finished.

vns don’t need to be hyper-polished or even polished at all. there’re some phenomenal games out there with very simple styles— but as someone that isn’t entirely confident in the strength of my writing or my drawing alone, i am always aiming for a game i make to be more than the sum of its parts. so stylistic (art) decisions are as important as the plot beats to me, and i haven’t even really started _drafting_ the game yet. but that’s mostly because i also write for my day job so i don’t really wanna write in my free time rn lol.

anyway. i try bringing the sprites in with the ui, and i explore ideas of having spot illustrations or pop up panels for important beats and emphasis of dramatic moments— and, again, i like the sketches better than i like the finished art! i take the sprites and i start playing with them— desaturating them, running them through gradient maps, and eventually just saying fuck it and just sketchily drawing over them. the sketches always win, so i resign myself to accepting the fact that i am never going to be the one-man VN army that can churn out fully detailed background illustrations, character sprites, and bespoke ui that i want to. so that means i need to be strategic in my approach

when i go back to the drawing board, i identified 3 key priorities in what i want the look of the game to accomplish:

1. it has to be fun for me to draw

2. it has to be FAST for me to draw

3. i have to like how it looks when it’s done

which all feel very obvious to say, but i can’t have 2 and 3 without also having 1, and i never let myself settle for 1 and 2 without 3.

anyway, i saw angels egg for the first time in theaters and the hyper-minimalist compositions really made something click for me. in a lot of the darker scenes in the movie, the screen is mostly black save for very deliberate slivers of lighting, implying a more complex and dense environment than you would guess from spot blacks alone. really efficient usage of negative space. i figure, what the hell, let’s try that for backgrounds. at the same time, i am also attempting to figure out how to reuse all the lineart for the sprites that i did in a way to color them that feels both expressive and also cohesive with however i end up rendering backgrounds. i try to hasten the process by using gradient maps, but i don’t really like how they turn out.

in between the last two images, i explore a few different approaches to this cohesion of characters and environments.

the first one is the key idea that propelled me forward to the others; the second one here had the color scheme i really liked and less representational colors, and the third one was when i just gave in and did some lines over the background and character art. these ultimately led to me deciding to stick with the limited palette— shades of magenta for the apprentice and shades of cyan for the homunculus— and explore ways of doing minimalist compositions primarily made up of negative space, but with strategic uses of lines and gradients. i’m not totally sure where this leaves me on the character art front, so i explore different ways of using these limited palettes and potentially other styles as i also explore background styles (hence the last image that is wildly dense with drawings of the same 2 characters in a variety of styles)

i end up with this, and i am very happy with it. i am still undecided now on what i want the ui to look with— i had initially thought of having it switch between NVL mode and ADV mode, but i prefer the way sprites look while they’re framed, and i tend to be more of a prose writer in my personal projects than a script writer, so NVL mode generally appeals to me more. now the decision is between a long vertical ‘scroll’ that i think works well with the small framed portraits, or a wider and more square box that i think would pair nicely with unframed sprites

like this. i like the way it looks and i think it might play nicer with more environment compositions as i get to them, but in trying to move on to more places in the game i am not hitting it as easily the second time around (i hit the 10 image limit so i can’t post the failed attempt i most recently did, but that’s probably for the best lol). but my coworker gave me some good tips which is namely to focus on making the compositions, minimal as they may be, feel cramped. i think that strategy is going to lend itself well to some interesting framing but i also am wondering how easy it will be to draw a cramped space crowded with objects _fast_ which is again the whole crux of the issue that sent me here. but i am overall pretty happy with where these explorations have gone, so it’s not a loss

anyway, if you read all the way to the end here i am giving you a respectful but loving kiss on the forehead and gently admonishing you to go to bed. shoutout to my friends who have seen all 500000000 screenshots of OTHER variations of the above images, i am sorry but you will see 5000000000 more

[kyotocosmology]

A six is a good score in Edge

Wanted to share this piece from last week I'm still thinking about

On Being Interested in Stuff Almost No One is Interested in

I bought a CD the other day.

I think it's super important if you're a creative in any field but ESPECIALLY in games to regularly check out fringe weird flawed shit. When I wrote for Edge it used to break my heart when I'd see forum replies (remember those lmao) along the lines of "this 6/10 review reads like an 8". I'd want to tell them: if you like the experience I am describing, which is a 6, then play the game! Maybe it will nourish your soul! Maybe you will find a place to plant your freak flag & make a home in it.

I know - believe me at my advanced age I know - we have finite attention, money and time and it can seem counterproductive to not use that on the "best" media available to us. But the best are seldom made just for you and very few other people because bests don't work that way. & it's these ones that will remind you who you are & feed back into your own work in their own strange ways.

[rpgchoices]

100+ lgbtq+ videogames characters (228): MARIUS (Amarantus)

[kyotocosmology]

harpers gooning piece

There was a mainstream big pub title with a decently humanistic story & narrative for one of those. And there was a section of this game where it all comes to a head with some emotional heavy lifting. After release it's discovered one of the enviro artists has hidden a little diorama of their own in this area: a skeleton in a masturbating pose surrounded by balled-up tissues.

It's hastily patched out bc it's beyond the game's age rating, not because it's a repudiation of what the narrative was trying to do in that area or the game in general. It's just a joke after all. It's only a game.

Consider that actually it's the story that was the interloper in the enviro artist's realm. The wanking skeleton more purely connected to the studio's philosophy of game development & what any visual signifiers in their games are intended to mean. Stories come and go but the unknown gooning man, impossible in his locked tomb, was baked into the level.

[kyotocosmology]

The cover letter is a way for the universe to perceive itself

Upfront I appreciate in THIS economy the last thing on most game writers' minds is turning down a gig, any gig.

However...! There's a lot of 'why bother with a cover letter' sentiment (or worse, LML-written cover letters) at the moment & I wanted to give a defense of the cover letter particularly if you're going for game narrative jobs. I love cover letters as much as I love barks & for much the same reason. You get to pack the text with meaning.

Writing a cover letter should not be a drag. You should be psyched to write the cover letter. You should (re-)discover in the act of writing the cover letter why you're so good at the job you're applying for. Yes you are 'selling yourself' but the transaction is more complex: first you have to sell yourself TO yourself.

I've pulled out of an application while writing the cover letter on two occasions bc I could not convince myself I was enthusiastic about the job. Sometimes you can just divine that you will be a 'bad culture fit' and skip experiencing the slow death of it.

& a cover letter is also one of the rare opportunities you will get in the biz to be completely honest. You can constructively criticise the studio's work even if, especially if, you love it madly. If you worry 'but what if they reject me because I criticised them' my friend you will have dodged a bullet as you are not going to be working for a thin-skinned tyrant.

Here's a thing: I did not get the job that I wrote by far my best cover letter & my best writing test for. But I keep that letter like a talisman. I think years on I didn't get the job but I've got all this.

[kyotocosmology]

Advice for game writing

The writer Kaleb Horton died suddenly, unexpectedly, far too young yesterday & to deflect from my usual morbid internalisation on mortality bit I'm instead going to do my usual "everything is narrative design" bit. Here's some writing advice he passed on to a friend which is 1-1 great game writing advice. Don't squint I'll type it out below

more poetry. feel free to make the piece stop telling necessary facts to just have some lyricism. think about lonesome dove or something. how a protagonist in a lyrical novel would respond to the place you're at, the people you're seeing, the heat, whatever.

let the piece sing. give it a melody. I wrote a piece on Hell or High Water, which is slow, and I made the piece slow and then resolve on a sundowning ambiguity.

more funny. funny always works on people. and it can disguise an actual point you're making, and then when you stop doing funny and get to the point, it can surprise people.

oh, speaking of, sleight of hand. surprise is fun.

don't be afraid to say, wait a minute, I don't care if this piece succeeds at doing anything it wants to do. let's have it be fun for me and see if we can cram the stupid point of the stupid thing in here after.

Love to you all.

[kyotocosmology]

Bon appetit

I've tried for a while to firm up my thinking on how learning to cook also improved my game design, but ultimately: You can say anything on here!

So I do genuinely believe that you will be a better designer from becoming a better cook. Great in-depth cookbooks are great narrative design. Learning about the history of food is learning about the history of culture. Food as ritual, food as language, food as signifier - this all feeds (sorry) your world & system building. What does taste mean? Where does it come from? Who decides it?

& most importantly if you end up crashing out of games because it's a thankless gig that sucks ass, you'll still be a good cook.

[beachmilkshake]

Nobody's Coming

As Reagan’s descent into sadness, illness and despair was becoming obvious, I was beginning school in a dusty, mouldy inner city hot box of a classroom in Paris, France. My memories of those days are pretty hazy, I couldn’t have been much older than seven. I was supposed to become a bilingual child, but the French is largely gone now. 

One of my strongest childhood memories is of a summer’s day in this school, maybe two floors up a run-down building somewhere in the north of Paris. All four classes stood together in the biggest room, and we watched a speech by Ronald Reagan, with French subtitles capturing most of what was being said. I was supposed to read and not to listen, but my mind drifted. After a couple of minutes of Ronnie, we were shown the maps and the graphics. You can guess which maps and graphics I mean. With a pale green map and expanding yellow spheres. New York. Moscow. London. Berlin. Paris. Fallout spheres in half-shade followed. After the maps, a side-on animation of children in a classroom. In the animation, a bell goes off on the wall, and the children get underneath the desks on all fours. There’s a flash. Some of the children and desks vanish. Three others remain. They do a roll call for each other, the video explains. Call out your names from the front rows to the back. 

After the video, we go into our classroom and are told we’re practicing what we see in the video. The bell goes off. We duck underneath the tables. The teacher explains, or so my weak French imagines, that some kids are being taken out into the hall because they get their turn next. I realise later that they’re the ones killed in the initial blast. It’s just me and three other kids. Two at the front call out their names. I’m at the back, with the other kid from England. We call out our names. Nothing happens. After a couple of minutes, I ask “what now?”. The kid next to me is a little older, and he explains:

That’s it. Nobody’s coming after this. He tries it in French: personne ne vient. 

At least, that’s what I imagine he said. 

The fear of the nuclear bomb was different for everybody then, and depending on where you grew up, you got more or less of it. In retrospect, it’s hard to say whether people worried too much or too little. But only idiots can look back and cynically surmise that anti-nuclear work and protest changed nothing. The bombs got built, and are still being built, but the number of plants and turbines are lower than what they would be. A few fewer toxic sites. One or two fewer Fukushimas, at the very least. One or two more peninsulas or islands we’re still able to see. The tide rolled back in a few places. Now, as powerful as they are, the pro-nuclear lobby still scurries around doing weird TED talks about how they’re the only solution for the challenges ahead. 

Today, you can see a lot of right-wing commentary comparing the climate crisis to the hysteria about nuclear war throughout the 1960-1980s. That we overestimated the threat then and the culture of fear now follows the same pattern. This is the most pernicious lie of all the ones they’re using - far above blaming the Greens for land-clearing or the economic imperative for coal mining. This is the black beating heart. The lie that our fear is in and of itself, a lie. That reaction of any kind is an emotion. It has shifted very quickly from climate denial to disaster denial. You’re worrying too much. We’ve had this before. This pits conservative macho strength against the weakness and hysteria of, well, everything else. 

Nobody’s coming. We wait for elections because we want what they’ve got; the triumphant delights of shock victories, a brief play in the halls of power before being ejected again. Our values and emotions on the big whiteboards. Perhaps we should be learning that the victories are only for them, they’re not part of the system we’re all wishing could be fair and free. 

My pessimism peaked today as I choked leaving and entering work, tears streaming down my face as I reacted to eucalyptus ash gushing into town from hundreds of kilometres away. About everything; the climate, the future, the heat, politics, myself. Fear isn’t a lie, but it *does* lie to you in turn.  Fear makes you forget how you started. 

I have a very clear memory of a thought as I was underneath that desk, on all fours: if nobody’s coming, how will we know when the drill is over?

[kyotocosmology]

A/S/L

I read Jeanne Thornton's A/S/L cover to cover in one go - like marathoning a PS1 RPG when I was its characters' initial ages, give or take - & I could not add it faster to my list of books about game design but not really but really. Powerhouse display of the author reverse engineering how we make games from how we play them, about the power of communal lore, about trans experience & its close proximity to these things, & how the true formative 90s RPG was Who Are You Going To Be On The Internet?

Fair warning it's also rough! But life is!

Recently I was talking with a game writing student who helped me crystallise that great games are like travelling. You go somewhere new & you learn to fit in (or don't & experience it like a tourist); it becomes as real a place to you as it needs to be, complementing your reality like Tetris dreams; it asks or maybe even answers questions about how do we live? What if I saw things differently?

& perhaps you go further, look for the clues to what the people who made it were like, what was going on in their lives while this shared spell was being cast, what commonalities & differences you could have. To sense that across spaces and times and hardware limitations you found some shared connection. To ask: a/s/l?

[ub4q]

Save 50% on Amarantus on Steam

Roadtrip across the country. Confront a tyrant. The revolution will be messy—but the relationships will be messier.

Happy Amarantusversary!

I don't have any exciting ways to celebrate (accepting suggestions), but here it is for half off if you know somebody who would enjoy it.

[kyotocosmology]

Haha check out this guy

Look, if you like visual novels, if you like novels, if you like visual, if you like videogames, if you like coming of age stories that are road trip stories that are also revolutionary stories and also love affair stories - if I could get away with saying it hit me like Vagrant Story x Y tu mama tambien I would!! - Amarantus is a work of great subtlety often delivered in the register of a student flat party (complimentary), that understands the mythic significance of a haircut & the ways you can only tell a story in a videogame; it has a second playthrough that changes everything you know without ever feeling like a gotcha; it is a story about people falling short of their ideals, falling on their asses with their pants around their ankles⸻ but allowing them such grace to do it!

The writer Mike Harrison once said writing is "the attempt to celebrate being here" & that's exactly what this game encapsulates. It also has my favourite threesome scene in videogames... THUS FAR

[kyotocosmology]

The advice

If I could only give 1 bit of game writing advice it would be Always be wary of ppl giving you game writing advice. But if I could give 2!! the second would be Always remember story is a guest in gameplay's house

[kyotocosmology]

Bow wow

Wrote to a pal about barks recently & thought I'd tidy & post here too.

IMO bark/self-talk writing is a separate form to other game writing, I’d say it has more in common with poetry or song lyrics. If you're good at those you're good at barks

I also find cookbooks written by real food perverts useful ref, or sports commentary by sports perverts; anything that at its core is a description of rules attaining a mythic aspect from the writer or speaker’s love for it

Many of the great (voiced) barks fall somewhere between dialogue and sound effects. That is, what they’re saying doesn’t matter as much as how the player associates the sound with the action. (Think of how speech in 80s-90s games was often literally sampling & was deployed accordingly)

Much like poetry or lyrics sometimes you want to express sth in a way that’s amazing and has never been done before & sometimes it’s more powerful to just say the thing. Picking which is usually by feel

You have to pack the text with meaning, even more than usual. You’re setting the rhythm for how the character responds to the game - just like music is level design, combat barks are combat design, exploration barks are game design, etc

Shorter is usually better…

...except when it's not, lol

For instructive barks (a resource is low, taking too much damage, about to deal a lot of damage, I need healing!) always frontload. Players have to understand what they’re being told ASAP and making it characterful/writerly/flavourful comes next. Just don't forget that second pass

The old golden rule for barks was that they can’t be memorable or players will notice when they repeat. Well it’s actually OK & even desirable for players to notice repeating barks— they look forward to seeing or hearing them again!

BUT it can be a guess which lines repeat well and which lose their spark after the 50th time. This is where the ‘sound FXification’ I mentioned before can help if it’s voiced

[kyotocosmology]

How Do You Write?

Under duress or by magic. When I'm being paid to do it I use the former to find the latter

I always know how a conversation starts & usually don't know how it's going to end. Art imitates life etc

It's very woo-woo to say 'I hear my characters speak' and 'they have their own agency' but it's true. That's me in the corner

I steal liberally & often wholesale but never from other people's writing

I do try other writers' styles on. I've become a big fan of writing alt text for text screenshots to feel what it might be like to type this stuff

I've seen how using overheard conversation works for others & I do it sometimes but I prefer to transcribe vibes. A vibepire if u will

Surprisingly I've found game writing - which done right is not at all like other kinds of writing - affected my prose writing. I assume my first draft is shipping; I write wildly out of reading order; I will cut the shit out of my own stuff

Sorry but Posting (before the second-to-last Twitter char limit increase) immeasurably improved my work. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone now of course

Never take writing advice from someone you wouldn't take criticism from

edit: forgot one, if I can't write it fast I won't like it. I don't mean the whole - games take years, the novel is going to take years - but the act of writing has to be faster than the speed of my inner critic. I have to suspend my own disbelief

[draqul]

YouTube grammar isn't a problem in and of itself. It is absolutely fine to be "wrong" in English. The problem is what decreased fluency demonstrates about how too many of us engage with our own language - and language is the heart of and key to human knowledge.

You don't need to learn all the rules, because most of them are fake and inconsistent. Languages only have "rules" when they're dead, and English, unkillable, wriggles like a trout when you try to pin it down. For all the attempts to impose Latin grammar on the Norman layer, English is fundamentally not a romance language, and it has wantonly shucked most of its Germanic complexity too.

English said: what if we fuck off everything we possibly can from our nouns, pare our verb forms down to a minimum, and make a handful of particles signpost everything instead? Sure, native speakers now face a baffling difficulty curve when they need to understand concepts like "object" and "genitive" in order to learn any other language, but now we have SO much room in our panniers for words and words and words and words and words and words and words and words and words and words. Thank you we'll have that word. Thank you we want that one too. Thank you, great root there, we'll take that and mix it with a stem from somewhere else. Consistent spelling and pronunciation? No thank you, we need more space for words and words and words and words and words.

Think about the term lingua franca. It literally means French, which was once THE language for international communication, and has been thoroughly dethroned. The Academie tried to lock it down with rules, and it began to die. English would never. English has never had an authoritative rule book and none will ever exist. What we have are style guides: localised and specific for purpose. When they try to put rules on English it's out the window, down the drain pipe, through next door's window, rummaging in the silverware drawer looking for stuff to nick.

All this to say, you can let that misplaced apostrophe go. You can accept meme speak in Merriam Webster and drifting definitions. But that doesn't mean you stop studying your language, because the beauty and strength of English is in its capacity to express context, nuance and social grounding through word choice. There are entire anthropologies hidden in common turns of phrase (the equestrian influence on metaphors about ruling and control - free rein, give him his head, took the bit between his teeth - is the long shadow of the titled class system). When you ask why a writer or speaker didn't "just" use a simpler or more familiar word or phrase, you are admitting you don't understand the privilege you have as a passenger on one of the longest and most unstoppable trains in the history of human communication.

You must be curious, hungry, devouring. When you encounter a new word or phrase, you should question it, delight in it, and file it away. Eat everything. Read, watch, push outside your borders constantly, encounter, roll over and engulf new sources of information. Consume and add to your glory. Celebrate novelty and enfold it in your loving embrace. Be gluttonous and show your receipts. Be English, in the only sense of the word that retains any pride.

[kyotocosmology]

You can watch the angel and the wires

A pal was doing an open call for "What makes game worlds interesting to you outside of gameplay?" & I said "the sense of artificiality" because - say the line Ben!! - everything is narrative design includes the artifice of being a videogame.

A stretched texture that's good enough. Polygon seams glittering in the dark. Tilesets repeating. A landscape that escaped the environment artist's shadow: pure topography, blurry as a rushed watercolour, studded with billboard trees. The edge of the map. The skybox folding into itself on the edge of the map. The idea of 'the skybox' or 'the edge of the map'.

The magic is that even if you can see the Matrix & your internal voice says "geometry outside the playable area" some older urge inside you still wonders how they live out there.