en2ym3 wrote...
Do you know how writing works in the video game industry - as in, is it different anymore now than in past, or is it very much different in other game companies? How do deadlines and all that work? The only thing I really know is that, for Bioware, you guys would usually work on (a) specific thing(s), then get peer reviewed by the team (correct me if I'm wrong).
You’re correct on that last one. After we write out initial story drafts, we go through a peer review process with the other writers and a few other people involved in crafting our dialogue. We’re the start of production, so we have to
watch our deadlines – we can stall a lot of other departments if we’re not on top of things. As for the rest of the industry, BioWare's the only videogame developer I've worked at, so I can't really comment directly on writing practices at other studios.
Regarding your question about the past, there’s a lot of games now whose mission statement seems to be telling a compelling story. You don’t necessarily need a ton of dialogue to do so, but there appears to be more writers around. Or at least people whose main job is writing. Sometimes trying to find out who did the script for an older game is nearly impossible, if it was written by someone on the dev team whose main job was programmer/designer/artist/etc...
We definitely have to be mindful of how many times we can get an actor into the booth to record lines. After their time is up, we have to start getting creative with dialogue changes (cutting words, changing or adding shots, etc...) I’ve only ever written for games that have voiced dialogue though, so I’m used to that constraint. And there’s an upside: When the voice acting does come back, it’s so exciting to hear how the character sounds. Nothing brings a personality to life like, well, a person.I've sort of been extra curious as to the details of it once I read some comments on how voice acting in a game makes it more difficult for the writers, due to the fact that the lines are more set in stone after you get the actor to read their given lines.
Modifié par Sylvf, 11 août 2012 - 08:23 .
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