Obsidian's Chris Avellone on Creating a Writing Submission
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As for questions about writing... So I'm working on portfolio pieces. Aside from my own personal work, I thought it might be good to make quests and stories for existing games. Do you think that's okay? And if so, how would I go about writing, say, a Fallout quest with its branching sections and dialogue? Visio? Excel? Word? Or is there a proprietary system you use? And do you write in prose first, then make the dialogue section?
As for your portfolio: My vote is you don't do portfolio pieces, and instead, do the following:
- Choose a company and game franchise you'd want to work on, preferably with an editor (Oblivion, Dragon Age, Fallout's GECK, Neverwinter Nights).
- I suggest this because your resume and submission will be stronger if it's clear you know the target company's tools. In addition, these editors may also have an export function so once the dialogue is written, you can convert it to a text only submission if you want.
- Do all your writing in the game engine so people can "play" the writing. My experience is that writing anything outside of a game editor usually costs more time than it saves, and often, the conversation tool will train you on how to write for the game. You'll also learn to set animation states on the characters, do skill checks, and also play with camera angles to emphasize the writing.
- I don't recommend doing any writing samples that aren't specifically requested - most studios that concentrate on narrative have tests with specific criteria, so I'd wait to receive that and then do your writing to match the test.
- Note that if a studio rejects you, then use the writing sample you made for them as back-up and part of your portfolio by default and move on to the next one.
- As for non-engine writing: When I am writing off-site (after hours, by the pool, in a coffee shop, etc). I sometimes do text writing clumps in Word and then copy and paste it into the engine when I'm back in the office. I did this a lot during the DLCs and KOTOR 2, especially. I do find that Word is helpful for spotting grammar problems, but to be honest, the best thing to handle grammar and spelling is a solid text importer/exporter (like the GECK) where after you've written every damn thing in the game you can think of, you can dump all the files in the game into Excel, then Word, then have Word do the grunt work of spotting all the misspellings, grammar breaks, etc. across the whole game.
- For the huge text dump and spelling/grammar pass above - we usually do that at specific points in the text lock process on our game, preferably before QA starts looking for text bugs so those bugs don't clog up the system.
- We also recently experimented with hiring a technical writer to come in and proof our text dumps as well, although the first attempt might not have been the best since the main nemesis in the DLC (Lonesome Road) used a lot of broken English.
At Obsidian, we either use the publisher's engine toolset (GECK for FNV with modifications) or our in-house Onyx conversation system that's tailored to how we write dialogues (and has script-ready text exports, and flowchart functionality for the branching built in). Anyway, hope this helps.
