this post was submitted on 22 Jul 2023
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Writing
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I've been trying to write a story for a game I am working on and I can't get a good overall plot down. I am not typically a writer but what I do is writing adjacent so I thought it'd come more naturally. I'm a game engineer and working on my design skills. Mechanic design I am fairly good at but when it comes to narrative and setting, it becomes a bit more difficult for me. Any tips people can throw out are always welcome.
Whatever is going to work for you will probably be specific to you, but I think a good place to start is to read more stories. Try to nail down what it is you want to achieve with your story, and then find other stories that have succeeded at that, at least in your opinion. There are rules and tropes and formulas to storytelling that will make it easier to entertain readers, but at the end of the day, if you don't like what you wrote, and you didn't enjoy writing it, then I don't think it's worth it.
In my experience, once you start reading a lot, you start thinking more like a writer. You'll be watching a movie or a show and be thinking "How would I write this scene, how would I describe this to someone who wasn't watching it, and how would I do that in a way that they got the same feeling I got when I was watching it?" or "How would I improve this story, in what ways did it fail to give me the feeling I was seeking?" or "How could I incorporate some of these same narrative devices in my story, what is it that I like about this and how can I convince people that they like my story for the same reasons?"
You'll especially start asking yourselves these questions when you know you have a good story, and you're obsessed with getting your story on to paper. You'll start filtering everything you experience through the lens of that obsession, and every piece of media you consume will become a piece of the collage you create.
At least that's how it is for me, maybe you're completely different.
I've been reading over this the last few days and thinking about what sort of materials I really want to dive into. What do I want to adopt and adapt from? What do I want to build off of? This advice has been great and gets me thinking about my creative process overall. I have a problem that I want to immediately start implementing the game mechanics before I even know what those game mechanics are going to truly represent. So I've been taking it slow, writing my design doc, writing my setting up, following that with the narrative or typical player path then writing up my mechanics with a specific section as to why and how they help deliver the experience the setting and narrative is trying to deliver.
Writing a game sounds like hard-mode to me, so I don't think I can help, but hopefully someone else will have tips!
Just write the usual way then realize the player is going to want to do everything in their power to go in a completely random direction and either you can mechanically support that or not. Additionally, the pacing is entirely on the player for the most part.