Hello everyone! 

I have a question for game writers and in particular how you got started and found people to collaborate with. I am a theatre graduate specialising in playwriting but I would really like to write for games as well, and because of my background I think it would make me a very good fit since I have good knowledge of dramatic dialogue, plotting story arches and information release, making characters' speech feel realistic and so forth. 

Like in many other fields, I found that people require a lot of experience before they even consider your application which is understandable - but of course makes beginners lives much more difficult. Producing my own game isn't really an option as I 

1. can't draw 

2. I like playing games but have no coding experience

How did you guys get started? 

I wrote three levels of dialogue for a game, which was a lot of fun, but just happened because I was in essentially a low-level producer role, the lead game designer left, and the studio head was unhappy with the dialogue and wanted it rewritten three hours before submitting the build to the publisher.

So that sounds like just blind luck, but aside from collaborating on indie projects here, if you want to get into professional game writing, similar to game design, it helps to start out in a game studio any way you can, e.g. many start out in QA then work their way into game design or producer positions. And game writing has its own requirements, constraints and conventions (the person responsible recording the voices wanted me to list the dialogue in a spreadsheet in a certain way), so you can learn a lot from just seeing a real project develop.

I also recommend this book from a friend of mine (he was a producer at a publisher of a game I worked on)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/26207943-slay-the-dragon

Hi, nice to hear your story :) I'm in more or less the same boat but I started out writing short stories, occasionally selling them to publishers for very small sums (you'll have heard of Yappy the Happy Squirrel, obviously? What do you mean "no"?). I then self-published a choose-your-own-adventure game for kindle, which got nominated for an indie book award, and that helped give me the confidence, and will, to make a video game from it.

Like you, I can't draw or code, so I tried to find ways around these problems.

I started a thread on Kongregate and found a guy who was willing to collab on the coding. After over 6 months of inactivity, though, we agreed he'd be too busy. Fortunately, an old workmate who was improving at Unity offered to help for an equal share of any profits. Our graphics are currently a mixture of Deviant Art stock models, photographs, and actual props all edited on Gimp (this looks better than it sounds- honestly!). This is a good option if you've got a fair grasp of graphics programs. I'm now commissioning an artist for our next game who responded to a notice I placed in my work's intranet.

You mention 'application' so, this might not be the advice you need and I can't offer any help with applying for professional companies but I'd certainly imagine being able to show them video games you've already made would be a massive plus- and don't think you can't do this. Ren'py for visual novels and RPG Maker for traditional Zelda style games are programs for people who have no coding experience and could be worth checking out.

Good luck!

If you just want to make story-heavy games without programming or (making) art, you can do it, you just need to find the right tool.

I'm not a writer myself (and I like to program my own games), so I don't have much experience with these tools, but you could look into:

(1) Twine (free and open source: https://twinery.org/ )

(2) RPG Maker (not free, but it allows for easily creating story heavy games and comes with a lot of ready-to-use art)

Just build your portfolio, maybe join some game jams (there are story focused jams here on itch.io), and see where that takes you...

In addition to twine and ren'py for narrative games, there's also ink https://www.inklestudios.com/ink/ which I played with a little bit and, related, I just noticed this https://www.inklewriter.com/