Video Game Writer / Larian Studios Blog

Hello, Habr! This is Larian Studios again. We were very touched by the warm welcome and interest shown by the residents of Habré of our last publication, and therefore, without wasting time, we decided to write something else.

This time the word will be taken by the holy of holies of our studio - the department of writers and screenwriters. Since they do not speak Russian very well yet, I will serve as a translator of an article written especially for Habr by our writer Charlene Putney alphachar .

Charlene described what the life of a screenwriter in a game studio consists of, and why they are needed and what they do.

Since this is a text about writers, there will be few pictures, but many letters.

“Writing is actually very simple. You just sit in front of a typewriter and start to bleed. ”
Ernest Hemingway

Hello, Habr! My name is Charlene and I am a member of the writing team at Larian Studios. Now we are working on the plot, characters and dialogs in Divinity: Original Sin 2. Yes, this is the best work in the world! Today I’ll talk a little about what we do, how we do it and why writers are an important part of any serious team of game developers.

Who are we?

So, who becomes a writer / screenwriter in a gaming studio? At Larian, we writers are a small but motley team. We all have very different professions in the past, including the historian, screenwriter for films and those. the manager. We are united by only three things: passion for the printed word, love for RPG and total desire to dominate word games .


We read a lot . We share books, comics, and movie recommendations with all four offices around the world, helping to create a unique meta culture. Last year, our interests lie in the field of fantasy, science fiction and Russian literature. This influenced the formation of a very black sense of humor for the whole team.

What are we doing?

I’ve been with Larian for two years and not a single day was like the previous one. Hell, there weren’t even two hours like that! I try to allocate time very tightly, so that the tasks with the highest priority are done first daily, but this is not always easy. Our team of writers constantly juggles with so many tasks that it’s quite difficult to find all the time. This is chaos, but it works!

Over the years of teamwork, we, so to speak, have become a kind of collective unconscious , working most effectively as a tireless and soul-feeding Frankenstein monster, rather than a group of individuals. We mix and verify our work constantly to achieve the best result.

Here are just a few areas of our daily work:

Main story

We are working on writing and balancing the main narrative , taking into account comments from all teams. Teams of artists, designers and marketers all work with what we write, and we must be sure that our texts are as descriptive and detailed as possible, and that any serious changes can be understood without difficulty. Any plot is developed from general to specific, i.e. organically from the main mood, gradually expanding and forming through a long series of meetings at the board, screaming at each other, a sea of ​​coffee and laughter.

Of course, like all writers, we believe that history is the main thing. But by the end of the day you understand that the main thing is still the gameplay (gameplay). It doesn’t matter how beautiful our prose is - if it doesn’t combine with the game, everything will be torn to shreds and thrown into the basket. So it takes several iterations to create a really good story, which will be a good game.

Characters

We describe the characters of all the characters in the game, starting from their bright births and ending with heavy and cruel deaths. This applies to the characters of the players and their companions and to each NPC in the game.

For important characters, we create page after page of the story of their personalities. What drives them? What touched them so much that formed their approach to the world and other people, how do they act in danger? And in love? In friendship? How is the thread of their story woven into the canvas of the whole plot? Then, to see how much they look like real people, we sit down at the table and act out their every answer depending on different situations. After that, sufficiently strong personalities that go through our “sweep” often turn out to be completely different from their original versions.

As for less important characters, we still try to give them a twist. Even if it's just a merchant from the road with one replica. We are trying to give every creature in our world a touch that will make it unique compared to other characters.

Of course, in the process of creating the characters, we are inspired by the world around us. So if you see some eccentric in the corner of the bar looking at you closely, it could very well be one of us, studying, for example, your unique way to smooth your hair back. I draw a lot of ideas for the characters, watching on the passengers of the bus on which I go to work.

Quests and situations

Together with a team of designers and scripters, we discuss and record all possible situations in the game, correlating each playing area with a plot twist or themes developed in the main story. In this way, we participate in each task from the NPC, the riddle and the reward received, in each twisted turn, which will be opened further in the story.

Each individual quest or situation is assigned to a specific writer and scripter for joint implementation. We work closely together, together developing how the situation will be structured and how to breathe life into it. We discuss on Skype how everything will be played out, then the script will recreate the whole situation on our game engine from scratch, allowing the writer to then start creating dialogs. In the end, we get a glorious little creation from a writer and a scripter, something that can only be the fruit of these two minds working in unison. When the process is smooth, it feels like a real triumph of teamwork.

Dialogues

Using our dialog editor, we create replicas for each talking character in the game. Very, very many times . Writing a dialogue is an iterative process, and after the next review, a lot of text should be edited, rewritten or completely cut out. Depending on how you feel the passage of the game, the characters may change their names, gender, profession, in general, everything. Sometimes the character that you truly love does not go through the review alive, and then the old advice of one writer “kill all your favorites” comes in handy . It’s so hard to plant a knife when your pets have faces!

Inside our team, every day we conduct small reviews of each other's texts to make them as perfect as possible. Sometimes one of us gets stuck on the dialogue, simply can’t find the right words, and this is the moment when being part of the team is great, we can just exchange dialogs and look at everything with a fresh look. Our goal is for each dialogue to sound realistic, focus on the player and improve some aspect of our world without destroying its integrity ! That's an order!

World description

Speaking of integrity ... how do gnomes communicate with each other? What are the ritual rules of elven cannibalism? What specifically is the hierarchy in the Holy Order? We receive approximately such questions from the design team every Monday morning. The picture of most of our world already exists in our imagination and in our documents, but there are always these small strokes that need to be added - and we are the ones who have brushes in their hands.

Other

When we are not working on the above, we deal with magazines, tool types, battle cries, write texts for marketing, etc.

Despite the fact that we all deal with different areas in the game, each of us has our own area of ​​responsibility. For example, mine is the names and descriptions of each item in the game. One of my colleagues is responsible for styles and their grammatical correspondences.

In addition, each of the player’s characters is assigned to the writer, so that he maintains a constant style in his remarks (I'm a little bit in love with my own: Ifan ben-Mezd). By distributing areas of responsibility in this way, we are always sure that there is a pair of eyes that is the final quality control for every word that appears in the game.

It is also worth noting that it is very likely that there is not a single word in the game that any of us can recognize as our achievement. This is a team achievement . Everything that goes through numerous iterations and checks, as a result, turns out to be a product consisting of particles of the soul of each of us.

In a studio

Most of the team of writers (five out of seven) is in our studio in Dublin. However, the studios are not divided. All day we keep in touch with colleagues through Slack and Skype. This communication is so much that I, more likely, communicate more with my fellow scriptwriters from St. Petersburg, Ghent and Quebec, than with my fellow writer who is sitting next to me in the Dublin office!


Why it happens? As already mentioned above, each situation in the game is assigned to a writer and scripter to work together. Writers in Dublin and Ghent, scripters in all four offices - we constantly mix to create a variety of game situations.

And we need to be mixed. Now that we have already grasped the “Larian Way,” we writers cannot be left alone for long, otherwise we will go crazy. If you are a writer who is used to sitting in a dark room in the company of only muse, then most likely it will be difficult for you in Larian. We are more like a Borg or a colony of ants (why do all these comparisons sound so negative ?!) working in general documents , where everythingdisclosed, commented on, developed and constantly edited. And with such a distributed team, good documentation is a key factor to ensure that everyone is on the same wavelength.

After all, after all this fuss, what happens when we are finally happy with our character or storyline, or phrase, or dialogue? At this point, the rest of the studio shares its ruthlessly honest reviews. And this is good, because the next stage is our players . We want them to love and appreciate our work. Criticism can be difficult. When you spend nights flying, animating and creating characters and dialogues, it's hard not to take criticism personally. But it is necessary. All that we do, we do for the sake of the gamecreating the best possible experience for players. And our method of producing this best practice consists of ongoing partnerships, criticism and new iterations. And it works!

Does your game need a writer?

If your game uses at least some amount of text, then I would say “Yes!”.

Writing as a discipline often suffers from the idea that if everyone can print, then everyone can write. If you need a smooth plot, catchy dialogs, interesting quest endings and entertaining marketing content, investing in at least one writer will help make significant progress for your project.

Even where words are few, it is the writer who understands and can connect storylines, character motivations and find the right words for menus, commands, etc.

If you are not able to hire a writer on an ongoing basis, then even a little consultation of a freelance writer can work a miracle so that your game looks more polished and professional, and so that your stories are more complete and sparkle with catchy phrases that will return players again and again.