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One of me is cute, but two though? Give it to me, baby!

My experiences so far of writing for an actual video game and not just a fake one

By Caleb Dougherty - Lead Writer/Narrative Designer/Producer of Rockin’ Racket 

What they don’t tell you about coming onto a project and taking over the existing story, is how much work you are going to be doing to get in line with the original idea. And even when you do, there’s always something you ended up missing, meaning you need to go back and fix what you’ve already done. Revision is a constant factor when it comes to writing, and writers know that. And it’s not fun.

By now, I’ve adapted to the story of our game when I came onto the team, and now I’ve expanded on it and made it more of my own work. I mean, we’re pretty much less than 2 months away from launching so it’d be really bad if I didn’t know what I was writing about.

Now since I’m primarily working on the writing of the story and dialogue, I’ve been working with one of our teams’ programmers to get my work into the game, Ken. To do this nicely, I’ve been using a nice little writing program called Ink from Inkle Studios. I can write dialogue, dialogue options, variables, tags, etc… all in there and then send it to him so he can use a Unity plugin to process the Ink files and use them within Unity. There are plenty of other steps in that process, but that’s the gist of it.

Now here’s where the revising comes into play. As the game progresses, so do parts of the story, meaning that I have to go back into all of the dialogue files and make sure they reflect that change if they need to. So if a character dies, then I don’t want a bit of dialogue after their death to be mentioning the dead character walking the streets. Now our game doesn’t have anything like that going on, but that’s the general idea. The revision process is also used a lot to go back through and correct spelling and grammar mistakes, things that I do often enough for me to need to triple check my writing from now on. 

And most recently in my revision process are tags! They basically track who is speaking within Ink using a certain name so that whenever Unity sees those tags, it can update art assets to match it. That way, when Harvey speaks to Ace, Harvey’s sprite looks like it’s talking while Ace looks like he’s listening. Before, we just had neutral art assets so I was using some generic tags for all the characters. But now we have emotions portrayed by the characters, which means that I get to go back into all of my dialogue files soon to update the tags to have those emotions.

Reorganization of dialogue files also comes into play with the revision process. For us, basically every conversation needed to be in an Ink file all on its own instead of all of them being in a single file. This was pretty annoying early on because I had all of my writing in one file. So I spent a good amount of time separating it all out into different files. It’s all good now, but boy was that a mess to deal with.