Posted May 02, 2022 by SnakeF8
#Devlog #Game Design
Hey, it’s SnakeF8!
I would like to give the heads up that I am not a professional writer, but these are my experiences applying what I’ve learned about writing from peers, myself, and classes. I also asked co-designer Sirdiesalot to weigh in his techniques as well, so there are more methods to the madness. Writing is an art, so my process and the techniques included may not work for others.
Although I don’t have much to show, most of my time last month has been delegated to writing and refining the Soldiers’ Descent story. Originally, I wrote the entire demo on a flowchart then converted it to a Google Doc as a novel format, but I wasn’t too happy with how the dialogue turned out. It at least helped me figure out how this demo should flow story-wise. With this in mind, I bullet-pointed key events I wanted to happen similar to a story beat, and then I deleted all of the original document to restart. Success in this context could mean anything, but success here is comfort and a solid workflow.
For some people like Sirdiesalot, writing the story in a novel format works best, but he’s been experimenting with that awhile. That’s when I started using Twine as a medium to design the game’s script (You can get it here at https://twinery.org/). For games, it’s different from novels because too much reading without a break may cause the player to skip, and I’ll admit I have done that before with RPGs. For Soldiers’ Descent, I’ve set a few ground rules for the script:
Dialogue Considerations:
Overall, these are all part of a revision process which I’ve adopted while taking my Gen Ed writing courses in college, yet these techniques work because they helped me feel a lot more comfortable with the writing process. Although I’ve used these techniques academically, each also works for me when writing fiction. Revision can be divided into two types: Global and Local. The difference between the two is that global revision handles your writing’s ideas and how the entire writing flows between each paragraph or chunk. Local revision fixes the contents inside each paragraph or chunk on a very minute level. Global is general, and local is specific.
Note: Whenever you see the word “paragraph,” I mean anything from a literal paragraph, a chunk of a story like a chapter or a set of dialogues, or even quests. I couldn’t think of a better word to summarize chunks in a story because you can do this in so many ways.
Global revision looks at the whole of your work, and I can best compare it to looking at a continent and the countries that take up that land. It’s stuff like your main ideas and structure.
Local revision picks apart the weeds in each paragraph. This is pretty much your standard revision that goes on such as cleaning up grammatical errors, trimming fat, improving flow, and more. Also keep in mind, there are edge cases for everything because writing is an artform. Even though it’s mostly self-explanatory, here’s a checklist that might help out:
At this point, your story may look a little different, so you might need to go back and globally revise. Until you are satisfied, keep globally and locally revising. At least for Soldiers’ Descent, I’ve been going back and globally revising the surrounding paragraphs for each local revision I made. There is no “cookie-cutter” way to revise because everyone does it differently. Sometimes, I even go out of my way to locally revise as I go.
If you think my experiences and what I’ve shared are helpful, feel free to bookmark this page or save it in any way you see fit! There’s a lot of writing resources you can find through Google, and I wouldn’t mind helping people with the peer review process. Any feedback on this post is much appreciated, so I'd be more than happy to see extra advice in the comments! I'd like this guide to be a valuable tool for anyone needing that push.