AdviceToolbox
Exceptions
“But what about The Last of
Us?!” I hear you cry. Well...
OK. There is a small minority
of (usually) very high-profile
games in which the story and
line-delivery are filmic enough
that it can be worthwhile to
prototype the story like a
screenplay, purely as a human-
readable script. It’s rare, but it
happens. The recently released
script book for Insomniac’s
Spider-Man game is a great
example of this.what’s required for their part of the project, and
smart developers continually update the GDD,
reflecting the new needs of the project over time.
Sometimes they get so extensively detailed that
we start to call them bibles.
VERY DIFFERENT INDUSTRIES
The real reason these aren’t distributed as widely
as screenplays is simply that the games industry
does not have a social-Darwinist underside,
wherein people publish GDDs speculatively online
in the hope a game studio picks up their idea.
Instead, GDDs are written collaboratively by the
key creatives in an existing team, and there’s
never really a need to expose them to the public.
However, a quick search on Google will yield a
good number of GDDs from popular games for
you to peruse.
But even then, the story
sections of GDDs aren’t written
in any kind of screenplay
format. They’re usually
detailed summaries, more like
a film’s Wikipedia page than its script, and it’s very
rare for them to include things like actual lines
of dialogue.
The reason for this is that game scripts are
also often inherently non-linear. Consider the
Civilization games, where all of the writing is
inside a host of unique, situational interactions
with other faction leaders, most of which are
absent from each individual playthrough. You can
summarise the breadth of each leader, but could
you possibly represent this in such a way that
you could sit at home and just read the entire
script for Civilization? Probably not, but we’re not
finished adding problems yet.
MAN VERSUS MACHINE
Real video game scripts need to be machine-
readable. They are not a plan for a human to
read, they are a file (or asset) that is part of the
actual software itself. The game needs to be able
to chop lines up, extract the data about each of
them, then use them in-engine. In our Civilization
“Real video game
scripts need to be
machine-readable”example, each passage would need an ID number
of some kind, so that it can be found easily by
the computer. It would need to be tagged with
the speaker, which we’re used to in screenplays,
but also with the voice file, which is likely to be
obscurely named. It would then need a list of
preconditions against which the game can check
itself. For example, is this passage about a military
surrender? If so, the game must know it can only
display this passage during wartime, if the enemy
faction’s morale score is low, and when the player
is winning.
Reading this document would be, frankly, quite
horrible, and is unlikely to make any sense unless
an inordinate amount of additional work is done
in adding plainly written context to every passage.
Think of it like this: if a film script is like a cake
recipe, trying to read a game’s
script is like trying to read a
slice of the cake.
The real game script, the
one that’s actually part of the
game, is written in whatever
format the writing and programming teams can
agree on, usually a compromise that’s slightly too
technical for the writers, and a bit too human for
the game engine. What this actually looks like
depends entirely on the type of project and the
individuals responsible for it.
Sometimes you’ll use a programming language
like Ink, Yarn, or Harlowe, and your writers will
have to learn it. Other times, the writers will
simply write lines in a massive spreadsheet, and
the programmers will have to find a way to parse
that into the game. Large developers sometimes
use specialist software that bridges this gap, such
as articy:draft.
So if you’re going to write a game, look at GDDs
rather than searching for screenplays of video
games. Then consider what machine-readable
format is best for your unique project, and start
the real writing in that. Which machine-readable
format is best for what type of game? That’ll have
to wait for a future column, but it’ll probably begin
with “Well, it’s not quite that simple...”wfmag.cc \ 39 In The Last of Us’s script
‘prototype’, Neil Druckmann
used blue text to differentiate
gameplay descriptions from
standard action. Most game writing is done
during production, not as a
plan beforehand. It therefore
doesn’t really exist separate
from the game.