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enbycrip · 2 months

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Thing to remember if you are writing anything involving class and working class people, including game design: poverty is a major cause of AND a major result of disability and chronic illness.

If you write something where every working class person, every person who comes from a working class background, or every poor person, is healthy and physically strong, and just as much or more so if you bake that into a game system by giving people from those backgrounds high Health or Strength stats, you are making an active *choice* to erase a substantial part of the experience of and results of poverty.

Disabled people exist *everywhere*. In every setting - even when there’s magical healing or nanobots or whatever, frankly, erasure of disabled people and the experience of disability is an active narrative choice to erase us. So we *certainly* exist in *every* real world present-day and historical setting, and the fact that you don’t think so is due to active cultural erasure of disabled people and the experience of disability.

While disability is *absolutely* present in every strata of society, the experiences of disability and poverty are deeply and inherently entwined. Given that the vast majority of people are workers, and primarily physical workers throughout history - and if you don’t think disability massively impairs your ability to do call centre work, let alone food service, care work, retail work, or most of the other low-paid jobs in our current service economy, even if they are not habitually classified as heavy physical work, you need to massively expand your understanding of what disability actually is.

Poverty is generational in all sorts of ways, but one of them is that gestational and childhood poverty affects a person for their entire life. There are so many illnesses that one is predisposed to by inadequate nutrition during gestation and childhood, or by environmental pollution during those times (most likely in poverty-stricken areas). Disability and illness in parents and family members so often sees young children go without essentials and older ones forced into forgoing education and opportunities so they can care for family members or enter paid work. It’s a generational cycle that has held depressingly true in urban and rural areas, and that’s before even considering the impact of genetic illnesses and predisposition to illnesses.

Not to mention that a great deal of neurodivergence is incredibly disabling in every strata of society - yes, bits of it can be very advantageous in certain places, jobs, roles and positions, but the *universality* of punishment for not intuiting the subtle social rules of place and social environment again and again means most ND folk end up with a massive burden of trauma by adulthood. On top of the poverty that means in loss of access to paid work and other opportunities, trauma is incredibly shitty for your health.

Yeah; it might not be “fun” to write about or depict. But by failing to do so you are actively perpetuating the idea that the class system, whatever it is, is “just”. That poorest people do the jobs they do because they are “best suited for them” instead of because of societal inequality and sheer *bad fortune* without safety nets to catch people. It is very much worth doing the work to put it in.

#disabled #disability #disableism #chronic illness #chronic pain #chronic fatigue #neurodivergence #child poverty #poverty #class #classism #history #writing #game writing #game design #generational poverty

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sareisnot · 3 months

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Lord Gwyn: The Perfect Anticlimax

"Dark Souls is a hard game"

To anyone who's even a little bit familiar with the franchise, this is an obnoxiously obvious statement. The game has held the title of THE "hard game" for so long, that not only has the statement "X is the Dark Souls of Y" become a cliche, but so has every subsequent mocking subversion of that comparison. To even acknowledge its obviousness, as I did, is territory so well-worn, that I'm at risk of falling through, into the hackneyed void. But it's still worth mentioning. It's a well-earned reputation. Not only is Dark Souls, on a purely technical level, difficult to beat, but its entire identity is based around its difficulty, if the name of the "Prepare to Die" edition is any indication. Its world is a punishing one, seeking to beat the player character down at every single opportunity, until they can't stand to move another step forward, lest they get thwacked by a swinging axe, skewered by a demon, swept off a cliff, or obliterated by a dragon with teeth where its torso should be. It's a game that crushes you down, intending to make very clear just how easy your character can die, and, importantly, just how unimportant your death will be. To these bosses, these titans, these near-gods, you are nothing but an annoyance. Many of these fights feel like climactic struggles against an ancient, near-unbeatable foe, who existed long before you were born, and has a pretty solid chance of existing after you've expired. When you enter the arena of Ornstein and Smough, the music swells, and the two knights flex the skills that they're going to use to kill you over and over again. Many of the game's bosses, try to tap into that sense of scale, of importance, of grandiosity, each of their respective battles feeling like they could easily be the final one.

Then, after a long struggle, you make it to the end.

The game's final boss is Gwyn, a towering figure who's been hinted at throughout the game, through dialogue and item descriptions. Even if you didn't pay much attention to the little pieces of lore that the game hands you, you're able to put together that he's a pretty important guy: the mighty Lord of Cinder. The buildup to his fight hints at an even larger presence than the other bosses. You travel beneath Firelink Shrine, your home base for most of the game, where you find a massive expanse of land, cold and dark, a mysterious coliseum-like structure looming in the distance, which is impossibly large, even so far away. As you get closer, ghosts of old knights appear to attack you. They are easily dispatched, but still a shock. The structure towers over you, emphasizing just how much space is needed to house this mythologically strong figure, and the power that he holds. You enter, and find…….a hollowed old man. He's slightly taller than you, dressed in robes, and wielding a flaming greatsword, but he's nowhere near the scale of other bosses. However, he rushes at you all the same. When you begin the duel, it feels different from the others. There is no dramatic, sweeping music. All you get is a somber piano, like something that would play during a funeral, rather than a climactic duel. It feels like Gwyn's theme is actively pitying him. Granted, it's appropriate for the fight. All Gwyn can do is swing is flaming blade, which you can avoid with ease. There's been some easier bosses, but at least they didn't feel like they WANTED to die. Besides, this isn't the fragile Moonlight Butterfly, or the starting Asylum Demon, this is the final boss! He should be challenging you! Putting all the skills you've learned to the test! He's a fucking King! Why isn't he stronger? Fighting Gwyn after you've fought everyone else feels like walking into the home of an old, dilapidated hoarder, and kicking him while he's down. If you've been practicing your parrying, its like doing the same, except with cleats. He just seems………tired. As pathetically destitute as you were at the start. He might as well just keel over when you walk in the door. You beat him, naturally, and then the game just kinda….ends. If you got the ending I did, you just exit the area, look at all the nice snake friends you just made, and then roll credits. For all the work you've put into getting here, and all the struggles you've had to overcome, it feels like a severe anticlimax, like the game is playing a prank on you.

But if you know anything about the setting of Dark Souls, you'd know that there's really no other way this could end.

"The world of Dark Souls is dying"

This is a phrase that, while not as oft repeated as the above, is also pretty common knowledge at this point. Lodran, the game's setting, is a desolate place, long past its glory years. Once a powerful kingdom, teeming with life and magic, it is now in ruin, every citizen either dead, hollowed, or left to survive amongst the numerous deadly creatures that now roam the land. Everyone who's still around at the start of the game is either destined for misery, or already there (Unless you're Andre. He seems to be doing pretty well, all things considered). Somewhere around the time Lordran has reached the end of its life cycle, is when the player character enters the story, albeit with a rather unenviable role. Your job is to essentially be the world's janitor, cleaning out the world's former main characters, most of whom are insane, and all of whom are well past their useful days (or, if you have the DLC, you get to see Artorias right as he passes this point). Unfortunately, most of them would like to keep being alive, so they're going to make that difficult for you, by turning you into red mist until you stop trying to kill them. Even the grandiose presentation some of them have can't entirely hide the fact that this is a rather sad state of affairs for everyone, especially for those who haven't really done anything wrong (I nearly cried at having to kill Sif, and I will never fight Priscilla). Fortunately, some of these bastards contributed to the world's current bleakness, so killing them provides at least a twinge of catharsis, albeit one that will certainly be gone by the time you move onto the next bastard. The goal of this whole clean-up process, is to prepare the world to either continue with the age of fire with you as the catalyst, hopefully without those brutes who were clogging the power vacuums, or plunge the world into a new age of darkness, now that it has been cleansed of its polluting influences.

The only mean to either of these ends, is to kill Gwyn, the Lord of Cinder, former ruler of Lordran, and one of the primary reasons that this world is such a goddamn mess. To sum up his actions without getting too deep into the lore's intricacies; Gwyn knew that his kingdom was destined to fall, due to the world's oncoming transition from the age of fire into the age of shadow. This transition was represented by the dwindling light of the first flame, the lifeblood of the kingdom. After utterly failing to rekindle it, Gwyn entered a final gambit to prolong the life of his empire, linking himself with the first flame, but burning himself, and many of his knights, away in the process. This left him as a hollow, doomed to languish in his kiln, until another unfortunate soul took his place, linking the flame to further prolong the changeover. In doing this, Gwyn went against the natural laws of his world, which didn't react well to having its transitionary cycle interrupted. The world fell into a sharp decline, becoming a desolate, unhappy place, festering with demons and monsters (many of whom were the result of the last time someone tried to rekindle the first flame), making life hell for anyone unlucky enough to still be around afterwards. Gwyn wanted to prolong the inevitable, prevent the death of his kingdom, and continue its prosperity, so he sacrificed everything. His realm has persisted, but in a state of undeath, having stuck around long past its natural expiration date, just like him. Gwyn's story can be properly summarized as what happens when someone is psychotically obsessed with preserving their power, even when that preservation only serves to make the world a substantially worse place. Gwyn, in his hollow state, is a symbol of Lordran's persistent deterioration.

None of this information is directly handed to the player. Some bits are alluded to through snippets of dialogue and item descriptions, and the opening cutscene depicts one of the major inciting events of the narrative, but for the most part, it's a sprawling, multi-phased story, that is dolled out non-linearly, and piecemeal.

Now, with that context, let's cast a new lens on that fight…

After delving underneath Firelink Shrine for the final time, you come upon a desolate landscape, the Kiln of the First Flame looming in the distance. It's clearly well past its glory days, looking decrepit and sad. It is home of the world's lifeblood, but in name only. Now, it holds the last remnant of an age long past. As you approach, the spirits of old knights come to attack you, but they aren't much of a challenge, being just shadows of their former selves. They're victims, really; their loyalty has bound them to a sorry task, but they're in the way, and they weren't really living much of a life anyway. When you get closer to the kiln, it feels impossibly large, but also cold, and surprisingly dark, for something that's supposed to house an eternal flame. When you can see more details, it becomes clear just how long it's been falling into ruin. It feels abandoned, but you know its not. After all, you're here to end the life of its only resident. You enter, and find…. Lord Gwyn, a king who destroyed himself and cast the world into ruin, just to hold on to a formerly prosperous time. Lord Gwyn, whose refusal to let the fire die is the reason why you had to struggle through this entire journey. Lord Gwyn, whose death will mark the end of a era, no matter what you do afterwards. He charges at you, barely even conscious anymore, having been locked in this tomb for unknowable amounts of time. But he can't really fight you, at least not well. His strength isn't nearly what it used to be, now that he's a hollow, tired and worn-down, just like you were at the start. He's a pitiable figure, and the music knows. That sorrowful piano fades in, almost like something that would play at a funeral. But this isn't a funeral. This is a mercy killing. Spiritually, Gwyn died a long time ago. You're just putting his body to rest. When he's finally dispatched, it feels like an anticlimax. But of course it is. Gwyn is the embodiment of the world you've spent so much time exploring. Lordran has been denied a proper climax for so long, because he extended the story long past where it should have ended. He's been waiting to be killed for ages now. It feels only right that Gwyn be an easy, anticlimactic boss, because how could such a destitute figure be anything else?

"Dark Souls is a hard game for a reason"

The above statement is a simplified summation of why Dark Souls is one of my favorite games that I’ve ever played. It's set in a dying, hostile world, that's been brought to ruin by the violation of its natural laws. Thus, the game is insistent on making the player struggle at every turn, to make them feel just as downtrodden as the world they explore. Lord Gwyn is a example of just how thoroughly holding onto power can corrupt someone, leaving them as a husk, the scraps of their former glory existing only the in the memory of the people who are still forced to cope with the consequences of their selfish actions. Thus, his boss fight is an intentionally easy anticlimax, to emphasize just how far he's fallen, to the point that he can't even put up a good point. It's the themes of his character, perfectly melding with the gameplay. It's a perfect encapsulation of the game's best quality, how the experience of playing the game, reflects the themes and tone of its story. The reasons why the fight with Gwyn is the perfect anticlimax, and why Dark Souls is a near-perfect game, are one and the same.

#video games #gaming #dark souls #dark souls 1 #fromsoftware #fromsoft games #Gwyn #game writing #game analysis #boss fight #videogame #game #long post

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jesawyer · 3 months

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Pentiment Word Count?

couldn't find anything about this online, do you have an estimate for the total word count in Pentiment? or any related metric, e.g. page count equivalent, lines of dialogue, etc.

346,351 words total. 325,884 words of dialogue. 33,300 lines of dialogue.

#pentiment #game design #game writing

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legendaryvermin · 5 months

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Thinking about how Sea of Stars has probably the most adept economy of storytelling of any game I have played, maybe ever? The core script feels like it can't be longer than a novella but nothing that gets brought up in the 30 hour runtime is a throwaway. I've read books by experienced authors that don't plant ideas and pay them off this deftly. And like, sometimes that payoff is multi-tiered? You play along for a few hours and you say "oh, this new thing, I remember that being talked about ages ago" and think that's that, but they get brought around with incredible finesse each time! And! AND! If you think you know what I'm talking about, I HOT BET that we could be thinking of several COMPLETELY DIFFERENT ELEMENTS! JFKLDASJFLKJIOEFNKJENVKJDS Good game, probably my GOTY.

#sea of stars #rpg #jrpg #game design #game writing

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wanderways-official · 6 months

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Thinking desperately about Gardener in Citizen Sleeper.

That ending, the offer they made, was the most heartbreaking, understanding “no” I’ve ever given in an RPG

My Sleeper touched peace. Touched a way of being among the green and the mycorrhizal networks that was beyond pain, beyond exploration, beyond a sense of self. You were holding the crown in your hands that could take you there. You *earned* that crown and the audience it granted you. You saw peace and touched a serenity that wasn’t untethered from the space station but instead *grew* from it, growing food and drugs out of nothing but love.

The Gardener was removed, but caring. An intelligence fashioned from the awareness, the *souls* of plants grown for beauty and survival in the hard vacuum of space.

You found all this because you and your scientist friend were curious. You had no agenda beyond wonder and bloody-mindedness.

You touched something new and different and grounded and safe. And it invited you in. No threat, just an extended hand. A way to stop the pain.

And I said no.

And it hurt.

You have to go back to The Eye. Half-derelict. Torn apart by corporate machinations. Stinking of desperation. Your refugee prison. Your safe haven. You have friends and enemies and rivals and bosses and lovers on this station and they’re all exploiting or exploring or running or hiding or

I chose to be a sick person. On the run.

I chose pain.

It wasn’t noble. I didn’t like it.

But my Sleeper had fought and bled to define themself. They had a few connections. A few dear friends. Unfinished business

And those don’t translate to the greenweave of the Gardener’s secret world.

And when the game asked. Told me to choose. Peace or pain.

I got up from the table. And it hurt.

#citizen sleeper #citizensleeper #sleeper citizen #indie games #rpg #game writing #this game is so good #call me m

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hpowellsmith · 1 year

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coming to the realisation that I need to make a detailed chronological timeline

#project hotsprings #game writing #writing

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andreablythe · 28 days

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Among the multitude of amazing talks at GDC 2024 , one of my faves is a talk by Jordan Magnuson about how poetry can help designers make better games. It was incredibly insightful, so I wrote up some of the lessons I took away from his talk.

#gdc #gdc 2024 #games industry #indie games #games writing #game writing #game design #game dev #writing #games #game development #indiegame #game developers #poetry #writers and poets #poets on tumblr #games poetry

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milesluna · 10 months

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If you see a big, loud American dressed like this at tonight’s WGGB Game Writing Event, that’s me*! Please say hi! I’d love to meet new people here in England.

*If it’s not me, RUN. THE CLONES HAVE ESCAPED.

#wggb #game writing #milesluna #narrative design

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amaiguri · 13 days

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The WIP Questionaire

Thanks so so much from @verba-writing for the tag! I had such a fun time reading your answers too and I'm very excited for paranormal romance 😍

I feel like I wanna flag that a lot of my answers are very anime/gaming-sphere oriented and I hope I'm not totally alienating my mutuals by revealing just HOW MUCH I'm not a book person lololol But this is with what we're working:

The Questions are:

1. What was the first part of your wip that you created?

The very first thing I made was the high premise: It was synthesized from the Overly Sarcastic Productions question "What if all the Kings Under the Mountain came back...?" and then I added the context "...in a Nuclear Crisis to discuss piece?" And in my head, it was this HBO-style modern fantasy Game of Thrones meets West Wing type deal. But then... I didn't want to write the modern piece. (The modern piece should be written by people in countries from all over Europe about what it means to be a hero in various cultures.)

So I set it in 1800s fantasy world instead!

2. If your story was a TV show, what would the theme song/intro be?

The first arc would be Dance in the Game by Zaq

The second arc would be Lacrimosa by Kalafina

The Gods' Arc would be Paper Boquet by Mili

3. Who are your favourite characters you've made? Why?

Is it to cliché to be like "my current self-insert protagonist is my favorite character I've ever made"? Her and my antagonist are just THE BEST and I love them.

4. What other pieces of media do you think would share a fan base for your story?

Mmm, I think Untitled Yssaia Game's story would appeal to queer Game of Thrones fans who could FEEL the straightness in GoT, especially if they also like anime. I would hope I could get general anime fans as well as Arcane and Genshin Impact fans, but I feel like those are too mainstream and Yssaia is not. Realistically, I think I'm gonna get the Wadanohara people and the Ib people and, if I get really lucky, the To the Moon people.

5. What has been your biggest struggle with your wip?

Marketing lol -- explaining what it is to people in a way that they realize they want it.

6. Are there any animals in your story? Talk about them!

Fuafua 🥺🥺🥺

Look at her! She is a six-legged, six-eyed slug cat called a Maret. Marets fill the same role as ocelots in Yssaia, except they're more semi-aquatic like otters and their skin has a stressball-like texture.

7. How do your characters get around? (ex: trains, horses, cars, dragons, etc.)

They walk or ride Rumateurs (which are alpaca-like beings with ossicones) or take ships or airships or trains. I don't like writing about travel that much though so it is a background element.

8. What part of your wip are you working on rn?

I am pre-editing the first arc for my alpha readers and the third arc has another 50k to 100k words to draft. We're at like 250k words total right now and it is so unwieldy 😭😭😭

9. What aspects (tropes, maybe?) of your wip do you think will draw people in?

Oh, I have a convenient graphic for this. Hang on...

10. What are your hopes for your wip?

I was just diatribing about this earlier but the DREAM is to turn it into an RPGmaker adventure game and have it go viral and make a million bucks off it. I'd love to be the next Undertale but it'll never happen because I am not positioned to be the next Undertale, you know?

So yeah, that's what's what! Thanks again for the ask! This was so fun! I'm gonna pass this to @maiemorrae, @moonfeatherblue, @zebee-nyx, @winterandwords, @modernwritercraft, @words-after-midnight, @spideronthesun, @theprissythumbelina, @thepanplate, @thetruearchmagos, @maskedemerald, @moondust-bard, @pluttskutt and @emelkae 😍😍😍 I actually internalized Verba's WIP so well from this tag and I wanna make sure I'm updated on what all you cool people are working on! Open tag to any of my other moots too! 🥳

IMPORTANTTTTT⚠️

I will edit this to have a blank easily copy-and-pasteable question section when I get back to my computer. If I forget, @ me!

#writeblr #wip questionnaire #writing #indie game dev #interactive fiction #indie gaming #fantasy writing #dark fantasy #game dev #game writing #gamedev #yssaia #amaiguri

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wanted-game-if · 3 months

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don’t you love it when you’re writing a MC that wakes up in the middle of nowhere not remembering anything and wearing a mask, they see seemingly can’t take off gah im so excited to share everything this project is like my own child

i’m thinking of eventually adding an option where you or someone else draws/paint something onto your mask (if I do decide to do it where someone else is doing it will probably be an RO) because I’m pretty sure I’m gonna make the mask either white ,black or a soft gray probably not going to give the option of which color, so I’ll just have to decide on one (I am very indecisive lol)

#if #indie games #interactive fiction #writing #if wip #interactive novel #interactive game #writers on tumblr #writerscommunity #if community #choices #writing blog #ideas #game writing #game wip #main character #if mc #masked character #charater design

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openworldadventurer · 1 year

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hey! if i recall correctly, you were a writer on kingdoms of amalur? after playing the demo over 10 years ago, i finally got around to playing the entire thing thanks to humble choice and re-reckoning. just wrapped up the main an hour ago and just wanted to hear where you were at with the game these days. what was your favourite part to write? what did you think turned out best? were there any darlings you had to kill as per the saying? and anything else you want to share about it

Aw, I’m so glad to hear you got a chance to play it! It did kind of disappear into the void for a while, so I’m glad that you got a chance to return to it! There are so many good games out there, and only so much time to play them, so thanks for spending your time on one of my babies!

So, I was responsible for building the main questline (along the broad story outlines of the higher-up folks, of course), and I still have fond memories of working on it. My favorite was writing for Agarth, which makes sense when you realize the character’s broad personality was basically just me. Originally, he was supposed to die early in the story, but people liked the character so much we kept him alive and made his inexplicable survival part of the story!

As for darlings that ended up on the cutting room floor, there were lots (as there always are for big games like this), but the one that hurt was the original plan for the final boss fight. Originally, you were supposed to slowly learn how to summon those alternate versions of yourself, and you beat the boss by summoning every infinite alternate version of yourself to team up and defeat them — literally using the freedom from fate as your weapon. But the realities of production meant that fight scene had to be scaled back and those “alternate selves” became enemies you fought. Not as narratively satisfying, I felt, but that’s how games go.

That said, my real regret is how the studio closed, terribly and painfully for everyone involved (look up Big Huge Games and 38 Studios to read that tale of woe, I won’t repeat my teary story here). It also meant we never got to work on the sequel, and I had a really exciting alternate take on the classic “orc” trope that I was sad never got to see light. My write-up for their culture and gameplay is still sitting in my design portfolio, waiting for the right project to take root…

#game design stories #gamedev #kingdoms of amalur #game writing

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jesawyer · 11 months

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What's your take on game directors who also work as writers or designers on the project? Is it better to keep it church and state? Or does it depend on team size? For example, in a narrative-heavy project, it seems to make sense to me that direction should come from the writers' room. But there's also some good arguments on the side of the camp who believes the director should not be the one doing any "doing" in any discipline. What would you advise, from your experience? Thank you!

Unsurprisingly, I am in favor of directors doing some in-engine work on their projects. Confirmation bias is heavily at work here because I've done direct implementation on all of the games I've directed.

On F:NV I wrote* Arcade, Hanlon, Joshua Graham, and other characters in our editor. I also implemented and tuned all of the weapons and mods (and other system design things like perks and recipes) in the GECK.

On Pillars of Eternity, I wrote Pallegina and a few minor characters in OEI Tools. I did direct in (Unity) editor implementation and tuning of many spells and items (though Tim Cain implemented much of the code that I used). I also did some encounter work in editor.

On Deadfire, I wrote Pallegina, Eothas, and a few other convos in OEI Tools. I did less in-engine system work because I had a small team of system designers and I had more director responsibilities, but I did do some tweaking and tuning in the game data editor (GDE) of OEI Tools.

On Pentiment I wrote around 1/4 to 1/3 of the dialogue in OEI Tools and set up all of our dialogue checks in the GDE. I mostly stayed out of Unity because Matthew Loyola and Alec Frey handled most of the design tasks there. On Pentiment I did a far greater percentage of content work than I normally would, but it was also a team of 13 people with only 3 writers (including me) at any given time.

Here's what I think the "pros" are: you have a better understanding of the pipelines people are using, you are doing work under (mostly) the same conditions as the people you are leading. You are directly touching the data that is going into the game and it makes you acutely aware of what's involved in doing that (at least in part).

The cons are the obvious ones: your main job is leading people and if your nose is buried in the weeds, that can be difficult to do. Also when it comes time to cut content, you might get precious about the work you've done vs. the work other people have done.

In my experience, the important thing is to not overcommit. Do a little work, sure, but err on the side of a light load. It's not practical for you to even have a quarter of the content workload as someone working on the staff.

*Minor note but when I say, "wrote" that also includes any related scripting done within dialogue for checks, setting global variables, etc. All Obsidian narrative designers are expected to do the scripting for their dialogues, though the interface in OEI Tools makes that generally pretty painless.

#game design #game writing #pillars of eternity #deadfire #fallout new vegas #pentiment

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dungeonmalcontent · 2 months

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Re:Alignment Action Card Prototype

Alright, so, the more I write these action cards the more I realize that some of the systems that I am developing might need to stretch in some places. Tech stacks, for instance, are currently doing some heavy lifting because they encompass everything that is not a combat obstacle or a NPC stack interaction. Tech stacks gotta be able to handle a lot of rules abuse, though the basic tech actions have the essentials.

I'm rambling. Here's the preview.

From left to right we have the basic combat, sway, and tech actions for the cooperative alignment. There's some minor graphical blegh still going on, but that can be easily fixed. These are more proof of concept for the template + the card design and are using the rough drafts for rules content.

You can see some of the design philosophy for alignment based actions here too. Cooperative actions generally rely on the cooperation of others. These actions usually have a lower priority because someone else has to do something else first. The benefits of going later in stack priority but working with someone else means that you are pretty much guaranteed to avoid a critical failure with a +1 to an action roll or have a high chance of actually working things out with people that value cooperation above all else (the neutral sway on mutual benefit for 3 should actually be the 1 result, that was a typo I'm only seeing now).

Note also that the actions cards have a place for the player or character name to go. Ideally cards are actually placed in an ordered stack or laid out in priority order to resolve the action stack. Having a clear identifier of what player/character is rolling for which action and when is very important. And yet, somehow, did not occur to me until I was actually writing the actions out in a spreadsheet. The GM has to deal action cards back (or have players take their actions cards back) after the end of the stack.

And, note finally, the dimensions of the action cards are such that they can fit in penny sleeves (or your other favorite TCG sleeves). This has the added benefit of being dry erase friendly when in a sleeve. Complex actions can have tick boxes to identify how many times the action has been used, and dry erase can be used for those tick boxes when the card is sleeved along with the player identifier.

#ttrpg #rpg #indie ttrpg #indie rpg #game design #game writing #re:alignment

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stuffydollband · 4 months

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Hey I’m looking to connect with people making video games who want music for those games. I’ve got a ton of instrumental tracks and I make more constantly as a way of procrastinating from the rest of the music I make. If you’re makin any kind of game, whether it’s a visual novel, an RPG, a rogue-like, whatever: hit me up. If you’re an indie gave dev and I like what you’re working on, I won’t even charge you for it. If you’d with a major studio, I’ll be cheap.

#music recs #lgbtq musicians #indie music #video games #video game music #game development #game developers #video game development #video game design #visual novel #game writing #game dev stuff #video game art #gamergirl #stuffy doll #networking

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hpowellsmith · 9 months

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Do you think a degree is a good place to start to get into the narrative designer scene? I don't have any sort of degrees and whenever I look at job postings it kind of intimidates me.

You don't necessarily need a game design degree. There isn't a single route into getting a narrative design job and most of the narrative people I've worked with have academic experience in other areas. Classics, publishing, linguistics, screenwriting (and other kinds of writing), film, literature, teaching, computer science, biomedical science, history, and philosophy are all things that come to mind off the top of my head. I personally have an English Literature bachelor's degree and a postgrad teaching certificate.

I do know a few narrative people with game design degrees and they speak highly of that experience - but it isn't essential and there's some ambivalence in the field of games about how much value you get from it. It would really depend on where you were attending and who was teaching it, and so on. Do research the lecturers and their industry experience before signing up to anything!

A lot of narrative jobs will require some sort of degree. Not all! But many will explicitly. Then, more trickily, there's the implicitness of it all: it's rare that I've encountered a narrative person at a studio who doesn't have a degree, and among many other things that's a marker of the lack of class diversity in the field.

That said: a degree is unlikely to directly help you get a narrative job unless it's very specific (eg you're an expert in the Franklin expedition, and the game is about trying to rescue the ships). It will more give you transferable skills. My PGCE helped me learn to deliver presentations and pitches. My English degree helped me discuss art. My PGCE taught me about being rigorous about developing skills and assessing where I'm at and taking feedback. My English degree pushed me to read widely. But none of that fed directly into getting a job in games - when I graduated from my undergrad degree I didn't know how games jobs worked anyway and neither did my career advisors.

Whether or not you have a degree, you need to have examples of your skills and how you've applied them to your work. If you've had jobs in other areas, you can refer to that - you're great at spotting data entry errors? fantastic. you can meditate an argument between a group of crying five year olds? great. And most of all you need completed examples of your writing and your games work for your portfolio. It doesn't have to be massive ambitious projects, but you need to prove that you know how games fit together, what makes them feel good or not good to play, and can apply it to your own work.

Make interactive fiction. Make a small game, or a bigger game, in bitsy. Join a game jam and work with other people on something - that will give you something to talk about in interviews, and teach you about working with other people on a creative project. Finish things! Not only will that give you more to discuss, it will also mean that you have a better sense of the bigger picture of interactive storytelling. I got my first studio job off the back of years of short hobby IF and a completed CoG game; I brought skills from my studies but I wouldn't have got a foot in the door without those projects to show that I could write well, understood narrative design, and could finish games.

Some unsolicited advice:

Be cautious about expensive game writing courses. They can be valuable for networking and pushing your to be rigorous about your work, or they can be a money sink. Remember that in 99% of "dream studios" there will be people working there for whom it's a nightmare. Don't put people on pedestals and remember that studio games are a team effort - but also respect and celebrate your own contributions. Don't dunk on games in public: I've seen a lot of people do that and then turn around and ask for a job from the people they were dunking on. It doesn't make people inclined to say yes. Don't neglect your peers in favour of trying to get in with a crowd that's already established; but if trusted people offer mentorship (such as Limit Break in the UK) go for it. When you are one of those established people, don't pull up the ladder behind you.

Here is a doc of resources from Raymond Vermeulen and another from Adanna aka AFNarratives. Also there are a ton of free talks available from AdventureX, Narrascope, Writer's Guild of Great Britain, and the GDC Vault about narrative which are both interesting and useful.

None of this is any guarantee of anything, there are a lot of people competing for not many jobs and if you find someone selling One Weird Trick to get into the field of narrative design, avoid them. I've seen talented people with a lot of experience struggling to find another contract after one has ended. So I don't want to act like I have it all figured out - but I hope it's helpful.

#indie games #game writing #narrative design #game industry

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