Tag Archives: Game Design

Train2Game interview: Brink Lead Writer Ed Stern Part 2 – Game Design

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Train2Game was at last month’s Games Writers Panel at BAFTA’s headquarters in London. There, the Train2Game blog spoke with panellist Ed Stern, Lead Writer at London studio Splash Damge. In an in-depth interview, Ed discusses development of Brink, game design and game writing and offers advice to Train2Game students on how to get into the industry.

Part 2 focuses on narrative in games, what makes a good game designer and advice on how aspiring writers can get into the industry. It’s on the Train2Game blog, or alternatively you can read it on Train2Game’s Scribd page. Part 1 of our interview with Ed Stern is available here.

We’re here at BAFTA for the Games Writers Panel, the theme is ‘Putting the protagonists in the hands of player kills traditional narrative concepts,’ what are your views on that?

It’s really interesting because we’re so used to, as writers, we think about character a lot and we think about action a lot. But compared to prose or theatre, stage play or screenplay, we just have to empty out our tool kit almost completely. All we’ve t left is a hammer and when you’ve got a hammer everything looks like a nail!

It’s really hard, we’re giving up control to players most of the time. Basically, if it’s a cinematic, players resent it because they’re not in control. If the player is control you’ve given up all control of the pacing and meaning to the player, what happens if they just don’t want to look at the thing you’re claiming is important?

I think part of the answer is what Bernard Herrmann did with movie scores. He realised the symphonic form or the classical form, it needs too long to develop, you need to write in tiny little dramatic units that’ll work no matter how short the scene is. It’s kind of like that and you just get used to writing at postcard length, or Tweet length.

So what do you think makes a good game designer?

I don’t think there’s any one quality but I guess adaptability because your Plan A will never work out. It’s like they treat you at Sandhurst, no battle plan suffice contact with the enemy, battles only ever take place on the edge of maps, never  in towns you can’t pronounce. It’s kind of like that! It’s the art of the possible and there’s and old joke; you finish up the game with the team you should have started with and a month after it shipped you find out what it was about.

So you want people who are flexible enough to not get too up or too down about stuff, but still remain completely passionate and committed to it. I think it’s hard for people when they first join the industry as they can do the passion but they can’t do the pragmatic. Or you get people who are a bit too pragmatic and won’t stand up to fight their corner and be passionate about it and then accept the production decision when it’s made.  So as in all things, balance.

How did you get started in the games industry?

It was just dumb luck. I was working in TV production making TV about computer games, or out of computer games, and one of the guys we had as a consultant was setting up a studio and needed a part-time writer to do press releases and I just fell arse backwards into it…Which I realise isn’t a replicable step but there’s lots of stuff now as then.

There’s a huge mod scene, there’s lots of teams making games out of existing games using existing technology, changing the look and changing the meaning. No one is stopping anyone from making game; it’s just very hard to get paid for it. But when you’re in that initial phase there are certainly projects out that that need writers or need designers, it’s just whether anyone is going to pay you for that time.

But it’s always more important to finish something than to start something, that’s what we look for when we’re hiring, what people finish in their portfolio, not what they start then kind of get a bit bored with and give up on.

Carrying on from that, what advice would you give to a writer or designer looking to break into the industry?

Learn to code, learn Unity, learn Flash, be able to make a game. Because even if you’re not great a graphics or great at sound you’ll understand what the issues are. You know that game Game Dev Story? You want to have at least a couple of stats in the other disciplines. Even if you’re never going to be hired to do sound, have some idea what the issues are with sound. If you’re a writer have some idea what the graphic issues are so you don’t inadvertently end up writing a cheque that no one else can cash.

I think that’s a problem for people coming into the games industry from other industries, they just don’t realise some things are incredibly cheap. I mean in games it’s not that much more expensive to make a building fly through the air then it is to just sit there. By the time you’ve made it you might as well move it around.

But some things are incredibly expensive. Like facial animation; that’s ridiculously expensive and that’s something you get for free in theatres and movies.  Close-ups are incredibly hard for us; they’re way more expensive than any other shot. But then again by the time we’ve built a set we can fly the camera around for free, that’s cheap for us to do, we don’t need to hire a helicopter. So yes, have some awareness of the other disciplines and the relative costs, I think that’s the most useful thing.

Speaking of facial animation, do you believe games will get on a par with films and television? We saw it earlier this year with L.A. Noire but it takes a lot of time and effort right now.

Possibly, it always sounds like it’s just around the corner. Maybe it will be with enough computing power. Photorealism, it’s a blind alley; games are a million times more expensive to make than Tetris now, they’re not twice as much fun as Tetris. Games like Limbo, now that’s not a realistic art style but it’s a fantastically immersive one.

Project Zomboid is a very unpromising sounding game, it’s about a zombie invasion, surely that’s been done to death? They do amazing things with that premise, Will Porter, the writer does incredible work within four lines; I was totally, absolutely obsessed with the fate of those characters. Graphically that’s not enormously complex and it’s just text on screen but it’s enormously effective. Now that’s not expensive, but it’s bloody good writing and it’s really effective on the player. So maybe that’s a more effective way of doing it because it’s not as expensive, but it’s not trying to be movie and as a result you get playing immersion and dramatic involvement much cheaper that way.

Thanks for your time Ed.

No problem, thank you.

Leave your comments here on the Train2Game blog, or on the Train2Game forum. 

For more information, go to www.train2game.com

BAFTA’s public events and online resources bring you closer to the creative talent behind your favourite games, films, and TV shows. Find out more at www.bafta.org/newsletter, www.facebook.com/bafta or twitter.com/baftagames

Train2Game interview: Brink Lead Writer Ed Stern – Part 1

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Brink Train2Game blog imageTrain2Game attended last month’s Games Writers Panel at BAFTA’s headquarters in London. There, the Train2Game blog spoke with panellist Ed Stern, Lead Writer at London studio Splash Damge. In an in-depth interview, Ed discusses development of Brink, game design and game writing and offers advice to Train2Game students on how to get into the industry.

Part 1 focuses on Ed’s role as Lead Writer, the design and art of Brink. Read it below here on the Train2Game blog, or alternatively you can read it on Train2Game’s Scribd page. Part 2 of the interview is here on the Train2Game blog.

First of all, can you tell us a bit about your role as Lead Writer at Splash Damage involves?

It’s an odd one. It’s sort of a narrative designer director role which means lots of things. It can end up being virtual location scout and production designer and wardrobe guy. I think a lot of it is giving design documents and reference images to artists, environment artists and level designers and so on. And it’s tough for writers because we’re used to working with words but lots of people who make games aren’t textually inclined, you’ve got to give them images. So, photo research is bizarrely a lot of the writing I do.

Because it doesn’t matter if I write a document that I think describe what’s going on, that’s not the target audience, the target audience is the team making the game and quite often they’re more visually inclined. So yes, writing back-story, creating the world, writing cinematics, storyboarding cinematics, writing dialogue, directing performance capture, directing voiceover and trying to do localisation as far as possible. Well it’s not so much trying to do that as building in localisation, so something like ‘here’s a text box, I can’t fill it with text in English because in German it’ll be a third longer so whatever I write has to be a bit shorter than that” That’s the glamorous world of games writing!

Splash Damage released Brink earlier this year, how did you go about writing it?

Well that was really fun because that was the first time we at Splash Damage produced our own original IP. Previously we got to work on Quake and Doom and Wolfenstein which is fantastic, because if you’re working on other people’s IPs that isn’t a bad place to start! So we needed to demonstrate we come up with a world. Arguably we overwrote that, that’s kind of an RPGs worth of back-story and world for pretty much just a multiplayer shooter. But it was great! It was great fun to do and the goals were it couldn’t look like anything anyone had seen before, and we wanted to be sticky, it’s a great test of a character. You turn the page and do they still linger in your mind?

Dickens is a great example of that. He’s got characters who only have a detail of their costume, he only talks about the guys’ waistcoat, but he’s really memorable, even after you put the book down you think what was it about that guy? So the goal was that the world itself would be the games main character and it would be memorable and even when you’ve finished playing you’re thinking ‘What was the deal with…Oh that, that’s the half of that that was in that other level there!’ It was trying to create a world complex and sticky enough so players will think about it even when they weren’t playing.Train2Game blog Brink image

Is that the reason behind the very distinctive art style Brink has?

Partly. I mean partly that’s just to get away from photorealism because there are enough dark brown or green shooters and so it was a unique thing. Also for immersion, I mean realism doesn’t actually engender believability. In fact it turns out that you can exaggerate facially quite a bit, it’s whether there’s an immersive character or situation. But yes, partially it was also to be visually distinct. It made it interesting trying to direct for that with performance capture, because the actor makes a subtle gesture, but by the time it’s been replayed on this enormous hand model with these huge great meaty fingers, quite a subtle gesture turns into this huge operatic gesture. We didn’t see that coming, we should have anticipated that.

What were the challenges of writing a mainly multiplayer focused game in Brink?

The problem is that you’ve got is all the writers tools are generally about a protagonist and you stick with this hero who works their way through. We didn’t have one – we had these three characters depending on what faction you chose and you saw cutscenes with them – but you weren’t one of them, you were just a member of their team.  The challenge is to make the player interactions meaningful so that when they press a button, they don’t just feel like ‘I’m running around and pressing a button on a controller or clicking a mouse.’ You’re feeling like ‘I’m one member of this team and I’ve picked this faction rather than the other and I’m in this location and I give a hoot about what the objective is.’

One of the things we did – for instance there’s a level called Container City and it’s a kind of slum – and if you go there as Security you’re told ‘They’re building a bio weapon, you’ve got to get this thing,’ and that’s a pretty important reason to go and get that thing, fair enough. But if you’re as Resistance you get told ‘They’re stealing our vaccine.’ So hopefully they care about that. Or my personal goal if they’re paying attention to the story – and lots of people don’t, that’s another thing – is they go which is it? And we’re never going to tell you definitively and it’s entirely plausible that it’s both because what do you make vaccines out of other than viral particles which could be used as a bioweapon?

The goal was that it wasn’t just ‘Take objective to place B,’ that we were going to dress it up in a fiction, so that even though it’s all just chaotic being shot in the head action, the narrative carries on even though the cinematic was over. That was the challenge.Brink

And what was the thinking behind adding the alternative game endings as missions?

Well we didn’t want to privilege one story over the other: if you win fantastic, if not that other thing happened. We didn’t want there to be a canonical ‘this is correct and all the other ones are wrong.’ Actually it turns out there is kind of a storyline but we didn’t want to collapse all the possibilities down unless we absolutely had to.

I think it’s a problem with lots of games that in their urge to explain everything they kind of explain everything away and it’s like an equation where it all factors out and there’s nothing left, it just goes, and it’s an exhaustive explanation of what’s going on and there’s nothing left to think about. So we quite like that there were these loose ends and the loose ends themselves would join up, and so players should have questions should have questions about ‘Why are they doing that?’ If they’re of a disposition to listen to audio diaries, ‘Oh that’s what that was about!’ Even if players aren’t into that I think they can sniff it in the time and trouble that’s been taken.

So that was the goal, even if people didn’t watch all of the cinematics or read all of the diaries, somebody has done the work and it does all add up to something.

Looking back at a Brink, if you could change anything, what would it be?

We weren’t able to do it, unfortunately, but it was very much the plan that you would be one of the characters in the cinematics, it would be you doing those things. But because we really wanted to let people choose their voice packs; that would’ve meant recording every line of dialogue in every single one of the voice packs and we just didn’t have the budget to do it. That I think would’ve changed the sense of story, because it would’ve been you going through it, not just three guys you might or might not care about. That would’ve been one thing that would’ve changed the meaning of the game and it’s a shame we weren’t able to do that.

Read part 2 of our huge interview with Ed Stern here.

Leave your comments here on the Train2Game blog, or on the Train2Game forum.

For more information, go to www.train2game.com

BAFTA’s public events and online resources bring you closer to the creative talent behind your favourite games, films, and TV shows. Find out more at www.bafta.org/newsletter, www.facebook.com/bafta or twitter.com/baftagames

Train2Game & Epic Game Jam winners announced!

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UDK Train2Game blog imageThe Train2Game & Epic Game Jam is over and the winning teams are:

  • Team A (The A-Team)
  • Team B (Nova Eye)
  • Team G (Team Gandalf)

A fourth team has also been made up from individual students picked from the remaining seven participating in the Train2Game & Epic Game Jam

Each of them produced a game based around the theme of Guy Fawkes using Epic’s Unreal Engine.

These Train2Game student teams will ‘Make something Unreal Live’ at The Gadget Show Live 2012. The development teams will benefit from a six-month incubation period in which a range of senior industry veterans will nurture projects by reviewing key milestones, providing guidance and shaping scope.

During this time, talent will prepare for the final showdown at the Gadget Show Live, where more than 100,000 attendees will watch them bring to life Unreal Engine 3-powered creations in real time.

The winner of that will see their game get a full release.

Well done to the winning Train2Game & Epic Game Jam teams, and good luck preparing for ‘Make Something Unreal Live’ at the Gadget Show next year. Good luck!

And thank you to every one of the ten Train2Game student teams that took part. Stay tuned to the Train2Game blog for more reaction.

Train2Game news: Clue to the future is in Game Dev Story – Brink writer

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Brink Train2Game blog imageTrain2Game students should learn alternative game development disciplines in addition to their chosen field to increase their chances of finding work in the industry.

That’s according to Splash Damage’s Ed Stern, writer of Brink, who likened hiring employees in the industry to mobile title Game Dev Story.

“Learn to code, learn Unity, learn Flash, be able to make a game. Because even if you’re not great a graphics or great at sound you’ll understand what the issues are.” Stern told the Train2Game blog when asked advice he’d give a game designer looking to break into the industry.

“You know that game Game Dev Story? You want to have at least a couple of stats in the other disciplines. Even if you’re never going to be hired to do sound, have some idea what the issues are with sound.”

The Splash Damage Creative Director used an example of a game designer knowing what game artists are capable of as an example.

“If you’re a writer have some idea what the graphic issues are so you don’t inadvertently end up writing a cheque that no one else can cash.”

He also told the Train2Game blog what he looks for when hiring a new employee, and that’s to have completed projects.

“It’s always more important to finish something than to start something, that’s what we look for when we’re hiring,” he said.  What people finish in their portfolio, not what they start then kind of get a bit bored with and give up on”

Of course, Train2Game students have the opportunity to complete projects and the Train2Game & Epic Game Jam this weekend.

Stern’s comments echo those of ID Software’s Tim Willits, who in an interview with the Train2Game blog, said that completing a mod is a great way to get noticed.

“Lots of times we have people who send resumes’ in with 20 half completed mods; we don’t want that, we want a handful of one’s that are actually done, and that’s really important” he said.

Ed Stern was speaking to the Train2Game blog in an interview about Brink, games writing and how to get into the industry. It’ll be published on the Train2Game blog in full on Monday.

So Train2Game, what are your thoughts on the Brink Creative Director’s advice? Have you been looking into learning other disciplines? Do you already have skills in other areas?

Leave your comments here on the Train2Game blog, or on the Train2Game forum.

Train2Game news: GTA V Rockstar’s ‘largest and most ambitious game’ so far

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Train2Game students saw the much anticipated Grand Theft Auto 5 trailer revealed yesterday (which can be seen here on the Train2Game blog) and Rockstar have dubbed it their most ambitious game ever.

“Developed by series creator Rockstar North, Grand Theft Auto V heads to the city of Los Santos and surrounding hills, countryside and beaches in the largest and most ambitious game Rockstar has yet created.” said the developer and publisher.

“Grand Theft Auto V is another radical reinvention of the Grand Theft Auto universe,” added Founder of Rockstar Games Sam Houser, “We are incredibly excited to share our new vision with our fans.”

Last month, the Train2Game blog reported that Rockstar’s Dan Houser believes Grand Theft Auto is only beginging to scratch the surface of open world game design.

Rockstar claim Grand Theft Auto V will see “A bold new direction in open-world freedom, storytelling, mission-based gameplay and online multiplayer,” which “focuses on the pursuit of the almighty dollar in a re-imagined, present-day Southern California.”

The press release from Rockstar makes no mention of Grand Theft Auto V’s release date or what platforms the title will feature on.

Earlier this year, the Train2Game blog reported that the original Grand Theft Auto was “almost canned” before being saved by a bug. That’s something for Train2Game QA Testers to keep in mind, not all bugs are bad things!

What are your thoughts on the comments from Rockstar about Grand Theft Auto V? Can it live up to the hype? How will they change the game design?

Leave your comments here on the Train2Game blog, or on the Train2Game forum.

[Source: Rockstar]

Train2Game news: Uncharted 3 director on story vs. gameplay

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Train2Game blog readers may see Uncharted 3 as one of the most impressive, story driven games on the PlayStation 3, but some out there criticise it for its linearity when compared with RPGs and other open titles.

Developer Naughty Dog has responded to those criticisms by stating the Uncharted series storyline is more important to them than gameplay.

“That’s not really our genre,” Uncharted 3 creative director Amy Hennig told Gametrailers. “We like those kind of games, as players and fans of other games, but for the action-adventure – especially the pulp-adventure genre – that doesn’t really make sense.”

“It’s about having a very clear, linear story arc that doesn’t allow for a lot of the dilution that is created by player choice in some cases. We always call it ‘wide linear’ – within the path that we give you you have a lot of choice within it, it’s not just hit this button, and this button, and this button.” she added.

Despite the tight nature of Uncharted 3’s story, the Train2Game blog has previously reported that Naughty Dog say they make up a lot of the game as they go along.

Train2Game students interested in how Uncharted 3’s script is written  and performed should check out this behind the scenes look on the Train2Game blog.

For more on games writing, check out the huge Train2Game blog interview with Deus Ex: Human Revolution writer James Swallow.

Away from game design, Naughty Dog believes the PlayStation 4 is needed for the next big leap in graphical improvements.

So Train2Game, what do you make of Naughty Dog’s comments on storyline being more important than gameplay for Uncharted 3?

Leave your comments here on the Train2Game blog, or on the Train2Game forum.

[Source: Industry Gamers]

Train2Game news: Guillermo del Toro – video games ‘One of the peaks of human narrative’

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Train2Game students, especially those who read our recent interview with Deus Ex: Human Revolution writer James Swallow, will be aware of how powerful narrative in video games can be.

Now, it isn’t only games industry veterans espousing the potential of games as a storytelling medium, but well respected film director Guillermo del Toro.

“Video games are no doubt the bridge to the future of genre narrative,” he said on the latest Irrational Games interview podcast.

“You’re not going to see the narratives of, let’s say, a [Pedro] Almodovar or an indie film maker wane; they’re going to stay, but big, genre, artistically-challenging, brilliantly-done storytelling.  Holy shit, there’s a lot you can do in games that you’d never even dream of doing in movies, or TV, or comics.”

“Films are fantastic. They are one of the peaks of human narrative. Now, and I’m sorry to break the news to the movie industry, but so is the video game.” del Toro added.

And the Pan’s Labyrinth director believes video games will improve massively within the next decade.

“The video game – not all of them right now – but the video games we’ll be playing in 2020 will be f***ing masterpieces,” said del Toro.  “Many masterpieces.”

He also discussed the differences between directing a film and directing a video game, arguing it’s only possible to produce the latter if you have a true passion for medium, a passion that all Train2Game students no doubt have!

“It’s not a medium where you are going to wander if you’re just an interested observer,” said Del Tero  “You have to be a gamer to completely absorb the possibility of narrative in games with their own f***ing set of rules. The mistake you have many times is you have a filmmaker who says ‘oh there’s money in video games, I’m going to go make a video game’. No.”

“You need to truly have a passion, and even a layman understanding of the medium or you will be completely pummeled by the process,” he added

The Irrational Games podcast featuring Bioshock Creative Director Ken Levine speaking to Guillermo del Toro will be of huge interest to Train2Game students and can be listened to here.

As previously reported by the Train2Game blog, del Tero is currently working with THQ on a three part video game series, Insane, due for release in 2013.

So Train2Game, what do you make of del Tero’s comments? Does it offer any encouragement to you as a Train2Game student?

Leave your comments here on the Train2Game blog, or on the Train2Game forum.

[Source: Industry Gamers]

Train2Game interview: Deus Ex: Human Revolution writer James Swallow – Part 2

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Train2Game recently attended the Games Writers Panel at BAFTA’s headquarters in London. There, the Train2Game blog sat down with panellist Deus Ex: Human Revolution writer James Swallow. In an in-depth interview, Swallow discusses writing Deus Ex: Human Revolution, games writing in general, DLC, what makes a good games writer and much more.

Read part 2 below on the Train2Game blog, or onthe Train2Game Scribd page.  Part 1 is available here, Leave your comments here on the Train2Game blog, or on the Train2Game forum.

Going back to Deus Ex, how have you fleshed out the narrative not only for the game, but for the novel, Deus Ex: Icarus Effect,  which you wrote as well?

That was a lot of fun to do because I’ve already got experience as a novelist and when Del Rey Books approached Eidos and said they’d like to do a novel, they said ‘Why don’t you hire Jim, he already has experience?’ Basically I was the right guy at the right time in the right place because I had experience on both mediums so I could bring story that we hadn’t been able to put in the game. Say stuff that ended up on the cutting room floor, or stuff we couldn’t explain or explore in the in the game because we didn’t have enough time, I got a chance to bring it out in the novel and flesh out elements of story you don’t get.

With a novel you have the opportunity to get inside a characters head, you can show stuff from a completely different viewpoint. It was fun for me personally to revisit a world I had great time writing then write a story in a completely different way to writing a game narrative story.

You’re here at the BAFTA Games Writers Panel to talk about ‘Putting the protagonist in the hand of a player kills traditional narrative concepts,’ what’s your opinion on this as a writer?

When you’re a writer and you’re writing for a TV show or a movie or a book, you’re directing where a character goes, when stuff happens to them. You work that narrative and development for the right dramatic impetus.

In a game you can’t always do that because you can’t always know exactly where a player is going to be and you can’t railroad their experience and say ‘I want this dramatic turn to happen exactly here and you have to be standing here and do this thing exactly!’ because players might not want to do that, they might be looking at something else, they might want to be interacting with a completely different character. So you have to approach it in a very, very different way and it can be very difficult because you want to deliver story, players want to have a story delivered to them, but at the same time they don’t want to be railroaded.

So there’s a peculiar dynamic tension you get as a writer. On the one hand you’re being pulled towards the idea of giving players agency, having the ability to discover the narrative themselves. On the other hand you’re being pulled in the opposite direction which is you want to have a structured narrative that makes senses, that delivers the right dramatic impact at the right dramatic time. It isn’t an easy line to walk but it’s fun to do and I really relish the challenge of it because it isn’t often as a writer you get a chance to work in a medium that is so dynamic and so diverse.

What are the key skills a good games writer should have?

Play lots of games, I can’t underline that enough. A lot of the games writers I know are people who have experience from other areas of gaming. The people on panel with me, for example, Andy Walsh has experience working in soap operas and theatre, there’s me with experience of working in radio. Rhianna Pratchett has experience of working as games journalist before she was a writer whereas my buddy Ed Stern has come up through the ranks purely involved in game design and games writing.

So there’s no one course into it you can take. I would say be a good writer first, obviously, you can’t be a writer without being a writer.  But play lots of games, understand games, and try not to come at it just from a writer’s standpoint, but understand a bit about design and the way games are constructed. Listen to what level design guys and art design guys talk about, producers and directors, understand how they do their job because ultimately if you want to be a games writer you are going to have to interface and mesh with these people. So if you have an idea of what it’s like to walk a mile in their shoes, you can do your job a little better.

How did you get started in the games industry?

Purely by accident. I’ve been a games fan all my life and I love playing video games, I stay up way to late playing them all the time. I was actually doing some work for a magazine where I just happened to be covering a preview of a game release and one of the guys working on this game was actually using some material I’d written. He’d no idea that I’d actually written it. He said ‘We’re using this source material’ and I said ‘Really? I wrote that!’ ‘Really? We should probably hire you then!’ and that was it, I kind of stumbled into it.  And once the opportunity came to get involved behind the curtain with games writing I thought this is something I really want to do.

Since then, for about the last 10 or 12 years now I’ve been working on one or two game projects a year as well as doing prose and script writing. It’s great fun, such a fantastic medium to be working with. It’s really rich for a storyteller because it’s so new and dynamic and I’m fond of saying this: there are no maps for these territories.  What we’re doing is breaking new ground and a new way of telling story. I mean, who would not want to be involved in a new way of expressing your medium.

So people who want to get involved in the games industry, with games writing, what advice would you give to them in order to get that critical first step in?

Definitely get yourself a good grounding in writing and don’t be afraid to work in a games project perhaps in a facility that might not involve being a games writer, like working in QA Testing. That’s always the sharp end of anybody, working in QA which is unforgiving grunt work but there’s no way you’re not going to learn about games other than that job. If you’re going to take that job, that’ll be what teaches you the most about the way that games work and the way games don’t work.  I think it’s very important to play a lot of games to understand games and to understand narrative. If you can get those two things, you’re o n the road to becoming somebody who can write good game story.

Anything else you’d like to add about anything you’ve spoken about?

I’m really pleased with the way people have taken to Deus Ex: Human Revolution. Four years of my life went into working on that. I’m fiercely proud of it; it is without doubt the best games project I’ve worked on in my entire career because the story was really respected on that game and I’ve just really enjoyed being part of it. I want to thank everyone who bought a copy of it and I hoped they all enjoyed it!

Thanks for your time James.

Thank you.

Part 1 of the Train2Game interview with games writer James Swallow is available here.

For more information, go to www.train2game.com

BAFTA’s public events and online resources bring you closer to the creative talent behind your favourite games, films, and TV shows. Find out more at www.bafta.org/newsletter, www.facebook.com/bafta or twitter.com/baftagames

Train2Game interview: Deus Ex: Human Revolution writer James Swallow – Part 1

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Deus Ex Human Revolution Train2Game blog imageTrain2Game recently attended the Games Writers Panel at BAFTA’s headquarters in London. There, the Train2Game blog sat down with panellist Deus Ex: Human Revolution writer James Swallow. In an in-depth interview, Swallow discusses writing Deus Ex: Human Revolution, games writing in general, DLC, how to get into the games industry and much more.

Read part 1 below on the Train2Game blog, or on the Train2Game Scribd page, while Part 2 of our huge interview is here. Leave your comments here on the Train2Game blog, or on the Train2Game forum.

First of all, can you tell us what your role as a games writer on Deus Ex: Human Revolution involved?

Wow, that’s kind of a ‘how long is a piece of string’ question really! The job of games writer isn’t like saying ‘I’m a journalist’ or ‘I’m a novelist,’ games writer is a very broad church because there are so many different things you can do in it. You can be writing cutscene dialogue, you can be writing dialogue for the third tier characters you bump into in the street, you could be writing text for text boxes that’ll pop up on screen. There are a million little jobs that fall underneath the term of games writer and I think I did a little bit of all of that stuff on Deus Ex.

It’s kind of fun to be able to do that because it gives you a broad understanding of the entire game and a feeling like you’ve really invested narrative in every single element, from basically what’s written on the back of a gum wrapper you find in the street to the main cutscene where you’re confronting the villain of the piece.

How do you even begin to create the narrative for the in-depth world of Deus Ex: Human Revolution?

In a lot of ways it’s similar to the process of working on a television series because the game is made up of episodic sections in the different levels, hubs or mission sections you get. You break the story. We sit down in the beginning and we say ‘OK, what’s the story we want to tell? What is the motivation and the concept of it? Where’s the very highest level of what we want the story to bring to the player?’ And then it’s a question of back engineering it, constructing the skeleton of the storyline, the narrative beats of it, and then trying to find a structure that works with level design, with character design and hopefully the whole thing meshes together nicely and you get an interactive, dynamic , story experience.

 Deus Ex: Human Revolution Train2Game blog image

 

How difficult was it to link the Narrative of Human Revolution to the original Deus Ex game, released over 10 years ago

Well the original Deus Ex has such a strong narrative to it and so much back-story that it was an embarrassment of riches, we had tonnes and tonnes of back-story we could use. One of my earliest projects on the job was actually writing a timeline that went from 2027, when Human Revolution is set, to 2052 when the original Deus Ex was set.

As we did that we started back engineering elements of the story and saying here are plot threads we can bring back and we can connect them together and hopefully people who are fans of the original Deus Ex games will appreciate the little kisses of history we put in there. I love doing that kind of stuff, I think it’s great fun to bury these Easter Eggs in there and make the story mesh together.

Such as the one after the end credits that links the two games together?

I can neither confirm nor deny that!

With all the choice available to the player in Deus Ex: Human Revolution, how do you go about writing the narrative so it doesn’t become too overly muddled during the course of the game?

You do a lot of writing, lots and lots of stuff.  It is a difficult thing to do because when you start a game you have no idea how your player is going to play it. The thing with Deus Ex is we had the four main pillars of gameplay; you could play aggressively, you could play it stealthily, you could play it in an adaptive way, you could play it with a social approach. There are a lot of different ways you can go through the sections of the game, you could try and mix and match. When I played it personally I found that I’d bounce backwards and forwards between the pillars of gameplay depending on how my mood took me. You can play it as a nice guy if you want by helping people, getting cats out of trees, or you can be a scumbag kicking the dog and mugging the old lady, and all those options are open to you.

How do you construct a game where all of those possibilities are open to a player where they’ll feel real?  It’s hard to do because you have to write dialogue that reacts to the events and the style of gameplay. Do you write hundreds and hundreds of different versions of dialogue? That’s not possible with the technology that exists right now.  You have to try and write dialogue that’ll be generic enough but at the same time not too generic that it’s bland, to try and make it so it’ll fit multiple levels of encounter and multiple levels of narrative.

It’s not easy to do, it’s a big challenge because you think of where you are in a game, of the information you have to put across, you want to give pitch and moment and drama to a character… But you also want to be able to say ‘The princess is in another castle’ and you want to be able to deliver feeling and emotion and you have to do that in one line of dialogue. It’s not easy, but it’s an interesting challenge though.

What are the different challenges of writing for the Missing Link DLC instead of the full game?

Away from Deus Ex I’ve worked on some other DLC as well; I worked on Pigsy’s Perfect 10 which was an add-on for Enslaved: Odyssey to the West. Working on that what we realised was that generally with a game you have a discreet beginning, middle, end experience and to build on story DLC you have to find a place where you can connect it. With the Enslaved stuff, what we did is we took a character who was playing a supporting role in the original game and we spun out an entire storyline out for him. So it’s kind of a side story, almost a prequel because the DLC ends with the characters introduction into the storyline of the main game, so it connects that way.

With the Missing Link we created a very discreet, compact narrative for our hero Adam Jensen and when we were approached and asked to do DLC we had to work quite hard to find somewhere we could fit it.  And we realised that we had this point in the game where the character is off the grid and this is the perfect opportunity for us to put in almost a missing episode of the story.

It’s interesting with DLC because you want to produce a dynamic, interactive, interesting and ultimately rewarding experience for the player. But you have to do it in such a way that it doesn’t break the story that you’ve already created for the source material. I guess that’s the unique challenge of it, to find a way to make a story that parallels what you’ve got without overwriting it.

Part 2 of the Train2Game interview with games writer James Swallow is here.

For more information, go to www.train2game.com

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Train2Game news: Deus Ex writer on what makes a good game designer

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Train2Game recently had a chat with Deus Ex: Human Revolution writer James Swallow at the BAFTA Games Writers Panel where he discussed various aspects of game writing and game design.

But does the he think is the key skills a good video game writer should have?

“Play lots of games, I can’t underline that enough.” he told the Train2Game blog in an interview to be published on Monday.

“I would say be a good writer first, obviously, you can’t be a writer without being a writer.  But play lots of games, understand games, and try not to come at it just from a writer’s standpoint, but understand a bit about design and the way games are constructed”

Swallow argued that a good game designer needs also needs to understand the roles of the rest of the game development team in order to do the best work.

“Listen to what level design guys and art design guys talk about, producers and directors, understand how they do their job because ultimately if you want to be a games writer you are going to have to interface and mesh with these people.” said the Deus Ex: Human Revolution writer.

“So if you have an idea of what it’s like to walk a mile in their shoes, you can do your job a little better.” he added

Train2Game’s in-depth interview with Swallow covering Deus Ex: Human Revolution, writing for games and how to get into the industry will appear here on the Train2Game blog next Monday.

So Train2Game, what do you make of the advice from the Deus Ex: Human Revolution writer? Do you think about game design while playing video games?

Leave your comments here on the Train2Game blog, or on the Train2Game forum.