• Getting a writing gig in video games?
    5 replies, posted
Hey guys, weird question I guess. I had a regular job that pays well and I've played around with game making for a long time but my skill has always lied in my writing. I've never finished a novel, at least not to publishing, but I've written shit tons throughout my life and briefly worked on a project or two when I was younger. I've always wanted to work on video games as a writer but I never know how to get a foot in the door. I've emailed indie companies about it before but I've never gotten a response. Is there anyway to get into this industry besides finishing a novel and whoring it out to publishers or to quit my job and hit up college for an English degree? I guess the biggest reason I'm not just going "No that's the only way" is because most game writers I've met and seen don't even have credits like that, so I'm assuming there's a way somewhere.
Companies are more likely to pay attention if you've already got a finished project or two under your belt. So, doing your own small projects, completing, and publishing them is a good place to start. All you gotta do to officially be a professional game developer is to make a game, release it, and get paid for it. Since you're writing-focused, you could start with Visual Novel games. They're entirely story-based. There's free VN engines like Renp'y (Which was used to create Doki Doki Literature club) which require little to no coding knowledge. While VNs are commonly associated with anime style stories there's nothing stopping you from creating a more western style story, like something out of Telltale's line of games-those games follow the same sort of setup as a visual novel, they're just animated. In the end they are just stories with some player input that affects the flow of the story. You could also do an interactive movie game, like "Late Shift" did. https://store.steampowered.com/app/584980/Late_Shift/ Make something like that and publish it on Steam and/or a mobile app store first, and you'll be a lot more likely to get hired.
Go to game jams and dev conventions. If you meet people you can flex your work which will do much more than hoping your portfolio gets through the the piles of other applicants.
RPGmaker is also an engine that is extremely easy to learn and is very good for making stories both simple and more sprawling. It has a bit of a stigma for being a noob engine but if you are in any way capable of getting your own graphics made people will look past that. There are also a lot of scripts and plugins that can allow for a lot of things that the default engine cannot. They do not require any programming knowledge, only a bit of research on which will be best for your project and how to implement them. I can vouch for this. I am far from a social butterfly without any pre-existing ties to the game dev world but by going to a few game jams I got involved in several projects. In general you should focus on several short finished games instead of several prototypes and unfinished ideas (innovative as they may be).
So, let me start out by saying, congratulations on taking the first step every person must take in writing. Asking where the start. Many people who "want to write" never get as far as you have. Now let's sit down to the challenges. You've already (on the surface level, without realizing it) identified two. Writing is all about either craft, or networking. Or if you want to be cynical, it's all about how much you can make and who you've fucked lately. First off, write and finish things. Do this. Start a story, carry it through, finish it. It doesn't have to be a novel. The world is full of enthusiastic, bright eye-d shortstoryists and story tellers who don't shit out thirty thousand words wrapped in leather after a fortnight of cocaine and bourbon. Use this material you've made, no matter how big or little, to establish your portfolio. No matter what, write things. Finish them. Whatever they are. You have to be able to prove someone that you are a writer and not somebody that wants to have written. There are a lot more of that second person that the first, and they are the ideas guys of writing. They float around, uselessly, saying they'd "like to write" if they only "got the chance." It doesn't work like that. You always have a chance to be writing. You could be writing right now. Why aren't you writing!? So that's craft. Making the thing. Networking though? That's the primary reason people get "writing degrees." They're really accelerated networking for the well-talented or wealthy (the line blurs.) Nobody goes to college to "learn" to write, because that's not how putting the words on the paper in lines to make the paragraphs works. So, if you don't want to do something as abysmally optimistic and naive as quitting your day job for writing school, listen to what's been said. Connect with people, whatever it takes, get your writing on legs. Put it on wheels. Share your stories. Go to game jams. Start a blog. Become big on Tumblr or the fanfiction network of your choice. Try selling your amateur creations on Amazon's digital bookstore. No matter what though, that's the second step. Choose the people you want to work with, then put yourself towards convincing them that they want to work with you. Don't be shy. Put yourself forward. Email people. Shake hands. Smile. Be ready with a business card or a printed copy of "My Good Story," to share. Be careful doing this though. Never expect anyone to want your time and effort, or to properly appreciate what you write. You have to understand up front what people want from you. It's not just "write a story and now you've written a videogame." Write everything. Make a portfolio. What's a portfolio? It's you. If you focus on narratives, write compelling stories and share those. If you feel like you're "the guy" when it comes to item descriptions, then write lots of cool and colorful blurbs, perhaps accompanied by pictures and such. If dialogue is your thing, well, you get the idea. I made the mistake once of not understanding what was wanted from me. I collaborated, briefly, with an old friend of mine who wanted me to write "for" his Fantasy game project. Really, he knew what he already wanted. The writing was a forgone conclusion that he had "in his head," I was just there to make something that "fit." I was gutted when I would finish work on something, and he'd essentially put it all in a trash can, then save one paragraph he thought was "pretty clever." That hadn't been what I signed up for. I wanted to tell stories and build a world, not function as a biological random content generator to fill in his epic backstory. (I admit petty glee that he never got it off the ground, and now works on mobile games.) Finally, here's the dark secret sauce when it comes to Games Writing. Professional Games Writers don't exist. Kinda. A lot of games writers are (on the indie level) their own code engineers, producers and developers. Lucas Pope, the genius behind Papers Please and [game about boat murder] is a one man show. He writes and codes, he makes the game. A lot of "big" game writers either got their start because they knew somebody (ahem, networking) or they slowly sidled over the line between "coder" (or more often, "design," which is it's own... thing) and "writer." Hideo Kojima, a hopefully familiar name, essentially got his start as a manager, and only convinced people he knew what was up when he humbled himself and learned how to do the dirty work of actually "making" the game. Then he was given the chance to lead some projects, where he did his own writing and, hey, is that a gunship? The fact is that writing is, and always will be, criminally undervalued for the time and talent it takes in the Gaming medium. You cant just "be the writer." You have to be something to someone and have to seriously justify your weight on the project. This is further muddled by the fact that you're competing with real, genuine writers and "people who want to have written." But if you can write, if you can put the words in the order that make the paragraphs, then you'll already be ahead of 50% of your virtual competition, which is better odds than sitting still and loudly groaning, "let me write, I'll prove I can do it!" Most people who 'broke in,' did so with a good idea, some words on paper, and a pitch to the right person at the right time in the right place.
I can agree to this. Many dev stories I hear are, writing being delegated to people within the team who felt can contribute the most to the writing, regardless whether they can write well or not. It is somewhat similar to the game designer predicament: "why should we hire idea guys? We can generate amazing ideas on our own." Unfortunately I don't know how the screening process works in larger corporations, but I assume networking and fame carries the most weight. Writers in games are usually either established in other mediums, or spawns from a secondary role.
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