Getting the Work Done - Professional Techniques for Video Game Writing - page 83

9
Getting the Work Done
Wendy Despain
You've got one of the most exciting assignments of your writing career. It's cutting
edge, it's interactive, it's new. Now what? Well, now you've got to get the work done.
Video games may be notorious for slippery deadlines, but nobody (especially not the
new writer) wants to be responsible for that calendar creep. And you're probably not
going to have a huge team to spread the blame over. Quite often, if the script is late,
there's nobody to blame but you.
Worse yet, in video games, they'll move ahead without you. If someone needs
your dialog and they don't have access to it, they'll put “dummy text� in so they don't
miss their deadline. Sometimes this is as basic as “blah blah blah,� but usually they
try their hand at writing dialog (because, come on, everybody can do this) and will
show you exactly why they needed to hire you. And there's always a danger that some
VP will read that dummy dialog and think it's the final dialog coming out of your
office. In a project where so many people have their hands in the mix, the best thing
you can do to avoid any confusion is to meet or exceed your deadlines.
9.1 It's a Matter of Scope
When facing your enemy the blank page, or even worse the blank spreadsheet, don't
underestimate the scope of the battle ahead. Most writing projects are scoped by
words. An hour-long episode of television is somewhere in the range of 12,000 to
13,000 words. A two-hour feature film is roughly 20,000 to 30,000 words. A novel,
which every writer would consider a big project, is anywhere between 50,000 and
100,000 words.
Video games blow all of these out of the water. They often have 100,000 words
of dialog alone. This isn't counting character or scene descriptions, notes to the
voiceover artists, or trigger notes so the programmers know which line should be
played when the character trips over a crate. This is a big job. You're not going to