With NPCs comes character scripting where we write what the characters say along with what they are doing. Just like in a movie or play, games have scripts as well. I was in charge of writing the farmer, pub owner, and apprentice seamstress' scripts for the scenes they have with the prince. Turns out, I have a natural knack for that kind of stuff, so I was able to work on that pretty quickly when I needed to.
For awhile within the content-heavy writing time, I hit a major road block. Something that I've been having to work with a lot this semester is continuing to write even though I have writer's block and am out of ideas. I found out during that that I'm not half-bad at editing. Sometimes my co-content writer has more ideas than I do and I balance out our work by being his proofreader. I never used to like editing, but I found that it's something that comes easy to me compared to doing actual writing sometimes.
In order to make sure the entire team can follow and understand the lore, my fellow content writer and I created a formal lore document that has the timeline in which everything happens in detail in it. That way even a programmer can understand what the story is all about so they're able to explain our game to anyone who would ask. That's important so that everyone is on the same page.
One of the important parts of our game-- and any video game for that matter-- is to have non-playable characters that give our character quests and unlock special items like the letters. Three of our NPCs are a farmer, pub owner, and an apprentice seamstress. Each NPC has a letter from the queen to give the prince and he even gains a pet cat named Sophia.
A lot of the time I spent in class the last few weeks, I have spent doing editing on what we have written that will officially go into the build. The key with editing and proofing the lore is to read it out loud to see if what is being said makes sense. Sometimes as writers we get caught up in our own thoughts and write things down that aren't the easiest for others to understand.
I spent the last two weeks writing content for the game, kingdom background, the relationship between the witch and Oberon, and NPCs. I worked with the other content writers on the lore. We decided to name the kingdom Thalion and have a barkeep NPC with a quest for the main character in the town.
The first week of classes has already passed and I am officially in semester 2 of the CSG programme at MATC. There are a lot of things that have changed since semester 1 but mostly for the better!
Infinity Horizons in no longer our group company, our new company that is blended with other members from other companies is called New World Empire. I decided not to take any extra leadership positions this semester so when I write on here about things I'm involved with it will mostly be about content designing. The game we are working on is a continuation of a game idea that was created in semester 1, but not the idea that Infinity Horizons had come up with. The game is a RPG top down/side scroller that is a medieval fantasy game. I will at some point probably explain it on my blog here, so look out for that! Assigned Reading (Normally this will be posted on my 129 blog): I read the first two chapters in both of the assigned textbooks for the course and a lot of the beginning stuff was a refresher on Agile and a reminder of why using Waterfall is a bad idea when making video games. Important things to remember and a few key terms: Agile focuses on individuals and interactions, working software, customer collaboration, and responding to changes Feature Creep: features being added to a project after the original scope is defined Emergent Requirements: stakeholders request new features User Stories: features that have value to the customers every iteration |
AuthorLizzie Quinlan lives in Brookfield, WI with her fiance, cat, and two guinea pigs. Archives
March 2016
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