Writing For A Video Game
Everything Is True
Ada Hoffmann's author newsletter
Now that Trinity Fusion is out, I wanted to talk about what the writing experience was like, especially for readers who don't have any experience writing in this industry. I didn't when I started, and it was a really fascinating process!
Writing a novel is, relatively speaking, a solitary job. Of course that's "relatively": a good novelist benefits from good beta readers, editors, publicists, enthusiastic friends to bounce ideas off of, and other people who come in at various stages of the project. But video game writing is much more profoundly a team effort, where the writers are responsible for only a particular portion of the finished product - which has to fit seamlessly into the other portions.
When Angry Mob Games approached me, they already had some ideas pretty solidly in mind - a multiverse that was collapsing and merging, a protagonist who needs to join with her alternate selves, a roguelite structure where the protagonist can die a lot but is transported back to the beginning to try again, and where a lot of the plot and character arcs develop in these back-to-the-beginning scenes, similar to Hades. They had names and concept art for the three different worlds, ideas for the three alternate selves' personalities and abilities, and a lightly-sketched-out idea of the different enemy factions that would be encountered there.
So my job was to come up with the connective tissue that ties these things into a coherent story. Why was the multiverse collapsing? Why was Maya's quest the best way to mitigate the damage? Why was she able to keep reappearing back at the Citadel after she "died"? Who was helping her, and why did some factions oppose her? What was going to happen with the opposing factions? Why and how was [SPOILERS REDACTED] going to appear? How were the characters going to grow and develop as the story went on?
I brainstormed a lot about this. In fact, I leveled up at brainstorming! I found that, to fill in the blanks of a story like this, I actually needed more ideas than in a story I write by myself, not less.
I also wrote a bit of dialogue. Writing video game dialogue is very different from writing dialogue in a story; you can't pad it out in the same way with physical descriptions or internal thoughts. (I’m used to relying very heavily on internal thoughts.) There are also strict character limits, because the dialogue box is only so big! That constraint was fun to work with, like writing haiku. I became very aware that the dialogue is just one part of a whole that has all kinds of other pieces in it - the animation, the voice acting, the visual surroundings, and all the action and fighting, among other things.
When I read reviews of Trinity Fusion, I find that the parts of the game that impress people most are things I can't take credit for even a little bit - like the graphics and the quick, smooth way that the combat works. But I'm delighted that people are enjoying it, and I'm glad to have been one small part of what made the game work.