Tuesday Aug 2

Meeting 21

MC: Roberto

Wednesday: Adrian

Writing for games

Game writers don't just write things that the player will read and see. They also write things for the game design team to think about.

How to Write Your First Video Game Quest

Game writing includes:

General backstory of the game
Backstory of characters, NPCs, objects, etc
Outline of what happens with scenes and characters, layout by layout
Cutscene narratives
Dialogue boxes

Formats:

Traditional storywriting
Outlines
Flowcharts
Scripts
A mixture of any of these—whatever works!

Important:
Game writers can also create possible narratives that the rest of the team hasn't decided upon, but might consider in the future. This is world-building—giving the game design team a lot to think about as they create other aspects of the game.

Expanding the storyverse with Twine

Every game designer team (or design team) will create an interactive Twine story, based on some aspect of the storyverse.

Possibilities:

Backstory of a character (player, enemies, NPCs)
Backstory of the world environment
A narrative extension — a story that involves elements from your game, but it is different than the actual story happening in your game
A possible dialogue between 2 characters
"Fan fiction" — a story that could be written by an enthusiastic fan of your game

Your story can be any genre you choose (epic adventure, horror, sci-fi, romance, mystery, etc).

Twinery.org

A Twine story example: Ella Stevenson

What to type in passages

Always give a passage a title. Keep it short.

You can type text into a passage. It's best to keep digital story passages fairly short — screen-based interactivity and long writing that taxes the attention span tend not to mix very well.

To make a link to a new passage

Use: [[ ]]

Format: [[ desired text -> next passage title ]]

(Or: [[ desired text | next passage title ]] — same thing)

Adding images – hotlinking

You can copy the full URL (web address) of an image file on the web, and use it in your Twine passage.

For example: if I search for Mario and find a picture in Google Images, I can view it and then right-click and Copy image address

This is the data on my clipboard after copying:
https://pngimg.com/uploads/mario/mario_PNG71.png

The I can write the HTML tag and paste in the url.