Posted by Spanner on Wednesday, March 2, 2011 in Fiction, Portfolio | 0 comments
Writing a story, drafting a script and designing a narrative has been likened to architecture. It’s all about structure, and as vastly different as projects might be, a writer needs to understand the essential, underlying craft of story writing. Here I thought it would be beneficial to walk you through my own particular process, so you can see how my projects are built from the ground up.
You can’t start writing a story before you know how it ends. This might not sound like a big deal, but far too many people dive into the writing without a clear idea of where the story is going. Detailed outlining is the process I employ to ensure the narratives, characters and story structure are rock solid before “FADE IN” is written in the top corner of the first page. In a game, tracing the pace of the main character’s development in the story is crucial to how that character evolves as a playable entity. Gameplay elements such as character abilities, set pieces, objectives and NPC interactions are largely dictated by the flow of the narrative. Establishing a series of tent-pole events from beginning to end, in collaboration with the whole development team, is essential to achieving this before writing begins in earnest. This includes construction of the overall story arc, where it starts, the route of the main character’s journey, premises and motivations, and most importantly, how it all ends. Based on the client’s brief I begin with a foundation template for the story concept. This includes a title, genre, logline, synopsis and a list of the main characters. Below is an example for a sci-fi concept written for a developer client.
TITLE: Proxy
GENRE: Sci-Fi
LOGLINE: In the year 2380, the first ever genetic human/computer hybrid strikes back against an ancient, megalomaniacal computer system that used her unique and powerful abilities to sell dangerous narcotic software.
SYNOPSIS: The world is suffering from massive over-population and a devastating energy shortage. Due to the lack of natural resources, everyone is fitted with cybernetic prostheses which generate the bio-electricity and synthetic nutrients needed to survive. In the ghettos, “loaders” use their neural brain-implants to install illegal narcotic programs called “highware” (which affects humans, computers and robots alike). Most of these addicts have so much fragmented code, spyware and viruses in their heads they can barely function. Highware cuts deeply into the global corporation’s profits, so Corporate Security are sent to trace the download source. They pin-point it to a mental institution, but all they find is a young, catatonic girl in an empty room. Someone is routing highware downloads through her unique organic/computer hybrid brain. When the remote network connection is severed she regains awareness. Her first conscious contact is with a host of seasoned military combat machines. Using her unique physiology, she remotely hacks the machine’s control systems in a flash: her thoughts slicing through military grade encryption like a razor blade. Once their combined expertise is assimilated into her bio-mechanical structure, her fighting prowess becomes incredible. Defeating the military, she escapes into the ghettos and takes refuge in an old disused library run by a centuries-old, hyper-intelligent mainframe called Fountainhead, and a group of outcasts living there. When Proxy is forced to kill a highware user who’s being controlled by a bounty hunter program sent to recapture her, she decides to put her unique skills as a human/computer hybrid to use in bringing down corporations and highware dealers for good. Fountainhead knows the highware dealer is an ancient, sentient and powerful computer system known as The Gateway. Proxy sets out to steal an advanced military grade anti-virus program from the corporation’s software vault. Once she’s tracked the physical location of The Gateway, she will be able to use her technological distinctiveness to hack it’s CPU and install the anti-virus software; destroying The Gateway program once and for all. But The Gateway wants her back so it can continue to use her to distribute highware, and activates a virus within the loaders’ neural implants to create an army within the ghettos. With Corporate Security hunting her for stealing the anti-virus program and the demented Gateway tearing the ghettos to pieces to find her, Proxy must race, hide and fight her way through the real world and cyberspace to put an end to the suffering in the ghettos.
CHARACTERS: Proxy: The first ever genetic human/computer hybrid. Although she doesn’t realise it at first, her unusual genetic structure makes her extremely powerful in both the physical world and in cyberspace. She desperately wants to understand her origins, but is hunted by the corporation and the drug baron who had been using her. As she discovers the extent of her abilities, she becomes more than a match for her antagonists, and a champion for the downtrodden of the world’s techno-ghettos.
The Gateway: The Gateway is a megalomaniacal computer program that develops and sells highware. It was using Proxy as a remote network connection to supply the narcotic software laced with viruses. It intended to ruin the corporations that rule from orbit and take over the world economy. The Gateway is the digitised consciousness of a once famous computer programmer who has gone insane from being stored for hundreds of years in an inadequate CPU.
Fountainhead: Fountainhead is the powerful CPU at the core of a long since defunct library. The A.I. mainframe uses its vast knowledge, wisdom and resources to turn the old building into a sanctuary for the oppressed, destitute and broken – offering medical, mechanical and anti-virus assistance to those in need. It offers Proxy refuge, and guides her to discover her full potential. It has a personal history with The Gateway.
Dynamic Reflection Laboratories: One of the largest, most powerful corporations in the world. It invented the life support prostheses that convert electrical energy into synthetic nutrients and bio-electricity for the populous. DRL also owns a large number of power plants, deriving its wealth from the escalating costs of recharging the life support implants. As loaders spend their money on highware rather than recharging, DRL aggressively seeks to stop the supply to protect their profits.
This template gives the development team a panoramic overview, which can be rewritten, adjusted and developed until it’s the story they want me to tell. It then becomes the foundation for a full game design document. It’s expanded into a four page synopsis, expanded again into a step outline, and then broken down into game construct detailing levels, events and objectives that are seamlessly blended with the narrative design. This helps to avoid the regular problem of gameplay and narrative being distinctly dislocated from one another. A game’s objectives work best when they are drawn from the narrative in a meaningful way, and the outlining stage is when they begin to emerge organically. The growing outline creates compelling objective sequences by intertwining them with the narrative. I include them as part of an expanding design document, making it much easier for the team to create an experience that offers a seamless blend of narrative exposition and contextually relevant goals.
>>Next Page: Characters
Site protected by VNetPublishing.Com Web Security Tools