Hello Veeky Forums Forgive me if I miss any unwritten rules. I never come to this board but I thought this would be the best place to ask.
I don't read often. Like most people I spend most of my time playing games or watching movies. However I have a problem, the majority of entertainment companies are absolutely worthless at telling a story. The mass amount of mediocrity is praised because the lead is attractive or there's a flashy action scene. If companies can spend millions of dollars on a movie's CGI or leading actor, why cant they hire a decent writing team? Look at fantastic beasts. It was awful, the movie had barely any point because the story was falling apart.
This, among other things has inspired me to be a video game developer.
> waste of time > no money > worthless industry
I get it, I want to be the change. A company that actually cares about putting out quality.
I have spent the last few years practicing my art and technical skills. I am confident in my ability to self critique everything about my ideas. I am not ready yet, but I am coming closer to becoming adequate. However I am unsure about putting together the stories.
How do I write a story. >research it I want to hear opinion.
I have Ideas for a setting, a beginning and end, characters and possible plot Ideas. How do I tie it together. Where can I find an example of a workflow for this sort of thing.
>You learn by seeing good and bad examples, go read. I'm constantly surrounded by that, I want a clear cut guide with reasons behind it.
What type of game are you going for? And I mean this more than just "is it an RPG vs a strategy game", is it a single player or a multi-player? The tone you want to push across should be reflected in your technique.
You don't write a philosophical essay on how words acquire meaning the way you write a political polemic. Without knowing what kind of game you want to make, nobody can really give you any kind of advice except in the most bland, meaningless terms.
Justin Jackson
I guess the one I'm thinking of would be a VR game That industry really lacks in story right now, just pointless tech demos.
Colton Thomas
single player, a good deal of interaction and dialogue with a lot of people. My problem isn't the dialogue but the overall story.
Jason Green
generally, the way the a game story relates to a narrative is that the player is given freedom when the narrative isn't progressing, and triggers the progression of the narrative by doing certain things: reaching certain places, talking to certain people, etc.
Jordan Hill
I'm sorry, I wasn't fully clear; although VR is somewhat helpful, I've never even played one, or thought much about them, so I can't offer much in terms of what could be done with the medium better than elsewhere.
But you said you have ideas for a setting, a beginning and en, characters, some outline of a plot. I don't need to know details, and I don't really want to. I do, however, want to know a few other details.
How long do you think this game will last for an average playthrough?
What sort of emotional range do you want your players to feel as they go through this game? Is this something lighthearted and feelgood? Is it something where you want them to be puzzling over it in between sessions and after they've finished? At the emotional climax of the game, do you want them crying, laughing in humor, whooping in exultation, pissing their pants in terror?
How grounded in everyday experience is the setting of the game? Is it something very modern, humdrum, slice of life? Is it far into the fantastic? Is it historical? Are you dealing with the salt of the earth or with exceptional people?
Will there be anything that is not part of earth as we know it reality? Magic, super-advanced sci-fi tech, really odd morality depictions, anything that would require a suspension of disbelief?
William Torres
Generally realistic, I'm going to throw a few supernatural elements in but nothing absolutely insane.
I want the game to be able to be played through completely without forcing the player to be involved with the story. However when a player tries to become more involved in the story It will benefit him.
Say you find out that some side character needs help, pursuing their problem may actually come in the way of your main quest or hinder you temporarily in some way. But by the end, you'll be able to look around and see all the people who helped you, ACTUALLY helped you get to the end.
If you beat the game without dealing with other people in game then the ending wont feel meaningful.
Adrian Lee
Games don't need stories, games need good gameplay. You sound like a clueless epic-idea-guy to me. I might be wrong but I don't care. Games are not meant to convey stories anyway. Stories in games only serve to give context to gameplay.
>I have Ideas for a setting, a beginning and end, characters and possible plot Ideas. Great, so you've got everything except for what a game needs, which is gameplay. Nice. Game development starts with the creation of puzzles, or mechanics, or whatever, and a story is added later. First you need to make a system that the game works with and later you drape a story over it. You're approaching this all wrong. You have to understand the medium incredibly well before you try and do something as highfalutin as improving it, and your lack of actual knowledge of game design tells me you'll only end up frustrated and unable to achieve what you want.
If you really wanna see how games do story well, go play Morrowind, Earthbound, and MGS3, and study them.
>Look at fantastic beasts. It was awful, the movie had barely any point because the story was falling apart. I don't know man. I think the point of the movie was to guide the audience through a magical fun trip instead of presenting a story per se. I liked some parts of it. It had like two layers of "stranger in a strange land" with the main character entering New York, and then the muggle entering the wizard world. The inclusion of a muggle in the story is pretty genious too, because unlike in Harry Potter, the main character in this film is already an adult wizard and thus knowledgeable of the wizard world. Including another character for the audience to experience a magical world through is clever. At least, it could've been worse. The setting was interesting too, I think. For what it's worth, the film achieved what it set out to do. The twist was retarded though.
Owen Morris
I understand that. I hate Idea guys, I've gone through three coders because they were all idea guys.
I just didn't include the game play part because I figured it didn't matter when discussing writing.
Jack Scott
it was mainly the villains and the twist.
Michael Bell
make a simple platformer game that caters to tumblr and women like undertale, free money
Gavin Hernandez
>Games are not meant to convey stories anyway. Stories in games only serve to give context to gameplay.
I've never understood this projection. The idea that games should always do that comes across as somebody who can't deal with the fact their position as the game-player might not be completely central to the experience of it. Games do just as well borrowing influence from cinema and TV. Well written interactive fiction or adventure games like Kentucky Route Zero attest to that.
HOWEVER, I sympathise because I like those types of games too. I played through The Last Grauniad recently and it's the type of input-driven experience that works much better when it tells its story through events rather than cutscene CGI (it has those and those are the worst bits).
Point it, games are sometimes a rather interesting medium when they're mixing things up. That interactive element keeps the focus but a completely ludological experience is not simply the only way to achieve great story design.
Carter Brown
You will never, EVER divorce ideas from technique, or in this case, gameplay. What ideas you can express well will be defined by what you can make with the other aspects of your medium.
For a simpler example, think of movies that were based on books. Often, the ones that make better movies aren't the greatest books; The Godfather, the one that Puzio wrote, was pretty awful, actually.
But anything where a lot of what's going on is conveyed either visually or through dialog can be translated into a movie reasonably well. If you want to take a psychodrama, where everything is wrapped up in what a character is thinking, no matter how good you think the book would be, it would be a shit-tier movie, because a movie audience can't have a direct line into a character's thoughts the way a book's reader can.
Jose Campbell
Also, I'm slightly confused by:
>Games are not meant to convey stories anyway. Stories in games only serve to give context to gameplay.
And then you citing Earthbound as an example. The gameplay in that game is drek.
Levi Mitchell
Well, it's your game, and I don't want to tell you what to do, but generally, I don't think you should divorce the story and gameplay the way you're implying, such that it's possible to play through it without dealing with the other people or the like.
But I really need to know the emotional core. Just one last question. At the climax, wherever that happens to be, what do you want an attentive player to be feeling?
Jacob Bennett
>Games do just as well borrowing influence from cinema and TV
Was supposed to add literature to the end of that hence the KR0 example.
Angel Robinson
You guys are great, this is the most civilized discussion I've had in a while. I'm coming to Veeky Forums more often.
Games, at their core are meant to be fun. The key element of a game is game play. However that doesn't mean you cant try to perfect every area of the game that you can, in this case the story.
I don't mean to imply I'm trying to separate the two, but my problem isn't making plot points impacting for the medium, but organizing and creating the plot points themselves. I don't want to go into it with a handful of ideas and make up a story as I go. I want something concrete to build on.
David Lopez
You might get a better answer on Veeky Forums, in all honesty. There's a fundamental difference in how you want the plot to progress in a game, where you're going to have an emergent and dynamic narrative progress (how much, of course, will vary from game to game), and something like a novel which is completely unilaterally dictated.
But even there, there's a ton of variables.
Luis Wilson
Veeky Forums hates video games but you should remember that synergy between different elements is incredibly important for successful storytelling in games. e.g. undertale
Joseph Jones
>The gameplay in that game is drek. Well, I didn't think it was. But either way, having to employ the otherwise useless "pray" option to kill the final boss is pretty genious, because it only works in context with the story. The story elevated a simple and uninteresting action to something, dare I say it, emotional. Same with having to kill the Boss in MGS3 by pulling the action button. That's what I mean. There's more examples, but this is the main one I guess.
Nicholas Morales
Why is the videogame industry so focused on developing games that you can finish but not really win? Could this relate to the lameness of their storytelling concepts?
Sebastian Sanders
Ah, fair enough. I thought you meant that the gameplay was the main reason why people would or perhaps should play Earthbound.
Jackson Jones
it's what sells not what is good. YOULL NEVER GET BORED sells better than THE ENDING IS GREAT
Hunter Nguyen
Ok, so do you want more like a visual novel, like a VR interactive movie, where you might be able to choose things to say to characters, choose your own adventure? with little puzzles and stuff?
how advanced is VR with controllers and stuff? I suppose voice command might be stupid (to have some person just annoyingly barking out words in the living room)
Jason Jackson
There are two traditional camps in gaming theory: narratologists and ludologists. The former think the story is primary; the latter think that gameplay is primary.
To be different, you will have to bridge this divide, OP. Make them the same thing.
So, really, your first focus as a game-maker should be atmosphere. With the proper atmosphere, you provide context to the gameplay, which thereby becomes a story. Who or what the player controls becomes a struggle to navigate through an environment. The limits of the player's controls become a difficulty curve. The degree to which the player is able to complete objectives becomes the amount of the story the player can access.
Play with this. Use it to build worlds, and let the stories come out of the environment. Try to express a mood, and then let the pieces of the world speak to you.
It has to be interactive to you before it can be interactive to the player. You can't know everything that's going to happen in the story before you write it; you have to just go in and find a story that will tell itself to you.
Hope these ideas spark some thoughts, and you develop cool shit with it.
I believe in you, OP.
Jayden Martin
Video games fucking suck, start with the Greeks. John Carmack was right when he said that stories in vidya matter as much as the ones in porn. That being said I've actually watched porn for the plot before so this isn't a totally hopeless pursuit.
Levi Richardson
as overused as this will sound. open world, free roam. dialogue like fallout or mass effect. most likely simpler than that.
thanks dude. My only problem with that is things like bio shock infinite, which nailed atmosphere but the plot was retarded. Although i'm pretty sure they went into it trying to make a convoluted plot.
yeah games suck amirite
Brody Morales
writing across different media is vastly different, writing prose fiction is not the same as writing for a video game or film and television
I imagine you want to become a game dev because you like games, so what are the ones that you think tell stories well? what about them makes the story come across, strikes you as being special? given the medium, what factors other than the writing alone contribute to the storytelling?
I don't really play video games and am not involved in the "gaming community" but I've seen some of their videos and they make decent content as far as I can tell. good luck
