Manuals, In-Game Text, and Credits - Professional Techniques for Video Game Writing - page 48

Stick to the character. Make sure the character you write is also the same character
that the player may encounter again in nontutorial missions. Make sure the “voice�
is the same. It confuses the player when Sergeant Molson starts out being a kindly
father figure in the tutorial and then becomes a hardened and abusive combat veteran
thereafter.
Teach from basic to more advanced to advanced. It does no good to teach play-
ers how to create multinode waypoint paths for large groups of units when they don't
know how to select a unit or move it in the first place. Work with the designers to
create a waterfall list of skills, basically what is the most basic thing the player needs
to know, followed by the next most basic, and so on.
Keep it understandable. Game worlds frequently come bundled with a lot of
made-up words. Unit names, strategy names, functions that are only known to hard-
core fans who have played these games before (know what a shmup is? How about
a 4X game? A waypoint? Rushing in a real-time strategy game?) Character names,
god names, place names, etc. are all likely to be unfamiliar to the new player. Keep
the language simple and based in real English. If you need to introduce a concept
or game item with a name that doesn't automatically tell the player about its nature,
you'll need to define it somehow before going on. This is hard to do when you are
trying to keep things short, which leads to the next point. . .
Know when to let the player go and let him learn by trial and error. Players
don't want to be stuck in your crummy tutorial. They want to get to the action
now! Make sure you get them there as quickly as possible. Remember that manual
you've been writing and that in-game help you've been agonizing over? They can go
to that if they want to know the specs on an A-10 Warthog. All your tutorial needs
to teach them is how to choose a plane and get in the air. You can also spread your
tutorial throughout the game, popping up only when a new gameplay mechanic is
introduced or the character gains a new ability. See Chapter 12 for a more detailed
look at this task.
In-Game Help
Let's back off a bit and say you're only doing help text and not the full-blown tutorial.
Help text is short. Really short. And there's a lot of it, depending on the game. You
may need a bit of text for each item and character in the game, as well as each
distinct bit of the user interface. Some text may be as short as “Hit Points,� while
some may be as long as “Selection Interface: Use this to select individual units from
your squadron.�
As I've said, this job takes a lot of communication with the game development
team. You'll need to find out every instance where a piece of in-game text is needed.
Likely, you'll need to create a list in XML or Microsoft Excel that the programmers
can call to pull the correct information to the right spot in the game. In-game text is
also the easiest thing for testers to find errors with, so you'll end up having to learn
the bug-tracking software the project is using and monitor that for the inevitable