{"id":838,"date":"2010-11-18T11:34:35","date_gmt":"2010-11-18T11:34:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.steve-ince.co.uk\/blog\/?p=838"},"modified":"2010-11-18T11:34:35","modified_gmt":"2010-11-18T11:34:35","slug":"the-writer-developer-relationship","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.steve-ince.co.uk\/blog\/2010\/11\/18\/the-writer-developer-relationship\/","title":{"rendered":"The Writer-Developer relationship"},"content":{"rendered":"

Inspired by a piece over at the Eurogamer site<\/a>, but also by the comments on the piece,\u00a0I thought I’d write my own take on this.<\/p>\n

Firstly, let me say that I’ve never received $100k for any of my writing jobs.\u00a0 In fact, a couple of the games I worked on had complete budgets that were of that order.<\/p>\n

It’s very easy to dismiss the story or dialogue in a game as a waste of bringing in a writer, particularly if it doesn’t come across very well, but the real heart of the problem can often be a failure of the developer and writer to establish the right working relationship.\u00a0 I’ve seen good dialogue writing undermined because of poor voice acting or inappropriate character expressions.\u00a0 I’ve seen a good story spoiled because it hasn’t been in sync with the gameplay pacing.\u00a0 Develop your relationship properly.<\/p>\n

I spoke to a writer earlier this year who’d landed a job on a high profile game.\u00a0 There was already the bones of a story in place but he saw lots of ways to improve it.\u00a0 However, every time he did so the developer pulled it back to the original story.\u00a0 If a game’s story is weak it’s often because a developer thinks they know best.\u00a0 Sometimes they do, of course, but often not.<\/p>\n

Developers – please learn that a good game writer doesn’t want to undermine a game but enhance it.\u00a0 They’ll work with you to create something special because it’s in their interest to do so.\u00a0 “Good game writer” being important here.<\/p>\n

And writers – if you don’t understand that gameplay is the most important part, you’re not cut out to be a game writer.\u00a0 Also, if you don’t understand game design, learn the principles of it.\u00a0 How can you write for games if you don’t understand at least this part of game development?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Inspired by a piece over at the Eurogamer site, but also by the comments on the piece, I thought I’d write my own take on this.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[54,40,50,3],"tags":[7,9],"class_list":["post-838","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-development","category-game-writing","category-games","category-writing","tag-game-development","tag-writing-for-video-games"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.steve-ince.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/838","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.steve-ince.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.steve-ince.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.steve-ince.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.steve-ince.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=838"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.steve-ince.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/838\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":839,"href":"https:\/\/www.steve-ince.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/838\/revisions\/839"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.steve-ince.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=838"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.steve-ince.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=838"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.steve-ince.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=838"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}