Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
lot about writing for characters who aren't entirely human. Take every opportunity
to learn the methods writers use in other media and take whatever you can use.
2.4 Learning to Love Excel
Microsoft Excel and other spreadsheet programs aren't as antithetical to narrative as
you might think. Most writers know how to work with an outline, and that's just a
spreadsheet without the dividing lines. It's also not confined to the 8.5
Ă—
11 blank
white page writers tend to think in. Your outline can go down one column, the next
column can hold fleshed-out dialog, the next column can hold delivery notes for the
actors, and so on off to the right and down forever.
I learned how to use Excel back in college during my short stint as a physics
major, but there are easier ways to learn its quirks. Online classes and tutorials can
demystify things like how to automatically wrap cells and change how they're dis-
played. Don't let the accountant-style layout intimidate you. This is just another
program to learn. Jump in and take charge of your knowledge acquisition. You'll be
far more valuable to an employer.
There are a few things I really love about Excel when working on game projects.
For one thing, the tiny little cells encourage brevity. Players don't want to listen to
long monologues—they want their information delivered in a punchy, pithy sound
bite. If you only see a small space to write in, you're going to think in terms of short
sentences.
Spreadsheets are also really good at managing huge volumes of data. When you're
facing 100,000 lines of dialog, it can be incredibly helpful to sort these by character
or quest or whatever. Having the lines automatically numbered can also be very
helpful for planning purposes, and if you learn how to use some of the more advanced
controls, you can have the program automatically generate numerical filenames and
fill in a series of cells containing identical content.
Nobody needs page numbers in the video game world anyway, so why use a word-
processing program designed to break things up by the page? What programmers
and level designers need are line numbers. They need to be able to instantly find the
dialog they're looking for. Audio engineers find Excel very helpful for organizing the
voiceover sessions from the back end. The actors may not need all the columns and
cells, but audio engineers can automate the gargantuan task of attaching multiple
takes of each line to the spreadsheet script.
When I sit down to start a new project I know needs to be in a spreadsheet, I start
out by building the skeleton. I put headings on all the columns and set the program
to keep those headings at the top of the window at all times. I also set it up to sort
those columns without messing up the relationship to data in the rows. This way I
can tell it to just show Grandma's lines, and it won't reorder just the data in that one
column, lining up the name Grandma with dialog for Ninja #3.
Once I have my skeleton in place, I start filling it in. See the sample of the
skeleton with a little meat on its bones in Appendix A. I usually work scene-by-scene
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