Me suis renseigné sur le process chez Bioware en allant sur GDC Vault (présentation donnée en 2008), trouver le .ppt sur les dialogues de Mass Effect et c'est aussi le cas.
Durant la préproduction, c'est d'abord le lead qui commence à écrire (il donne donc les grandes lignes, écrit la note d'intention, les bases de l'univers...), puis ils recrutent d'autres pour participer à la rédac' et là, le lead a également un rôle de coordination. Ils précisent d'ailleurs un point (cf. la partie en gras dans la citation, comme quoi...). Quelques extraits de la présentation :
A few quick notes to set the stage the for our discussion.
Narrative, story are essential to all BioWare games. We employ 26 writers at BioWare, each project has teams of 3-5 writers, usually one of the first people on any project is the Lead Writer.
We don’t elevate story ABOVE other elements, but it is the one of the first considerations in any BioWare game and many of the elements in our game evolve from that narrative overview of our games.
One of the main ways we accomplish this is with our dialog.
BioWare employs 26 writers in our Edmonton office, and we are a key part of the Design Team. The Lead Writer reports directly to the Lead Designers.
Though the projects usually begin with just the Lead Writer, the writing team starts to ramp up in pre-production, often adding another senior writer and eventually reaching a team size of 4-5 writers and an editor during full production.
Each writer will generally work on a specific area in the game, and usually only one writer will write a given character. Exceptions to this are the PC and the henchmen. However, even in this case there’s usually an owner for each of these characters who is responsible for reviewing all the writing and ensuring consistency.
We also to regular peer reviews of the areas and are our own worst critics. The peer reviews allow us to work out many of the early kinks in plot and character development before it gets reviewed by key stake holders. It also has the added benefit and ensuring that everyone on the team is familiar with each other’s work. This is very important later in the project as we start to downsize the writing team, but we’re still doing VO.
As a team, the other departments know they can come to us with any questions regarding the story.
Once we have the setting and the characters planned out, the writing begins in earnest.
As I mentioned before, we work in a team of writers. Responsibility is divided into areas of the game. On Mass Effect, that usually worked out to a world or planet (roughly 2-3 hours of gameplay). Within that area, we try to keep just one writer to allow for consistency. The Lead Writer or Managing Editor ensures that each area is consistent with the rest of the game, but we also have peer reviews to assist with this.
The conversations, which eventually are translated to scripts, are divided by character. In general, each unique character will have only one conversation file unless they appear in multiple areas in the game.
To generate our dialog files and facilitate our writing, we use an in-house tool we call the Dialog Toolset. I’ve got a few slides here that will give you a brief overview of our toolset.
Si tu veux voir le .ppt : http://www.gdcvault....n-for-BioWare-s
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