no no no design and writing have nothing in common (I''m the first anon, not the other couple btw). Well often the same guy does both but that''s not the point.

Ok a good example is Baldur''s Gate. It has a story written by some guy at bioware. That guy(s) was the writter. They made the story. The game designer was the guy who made the rules of that game. Since they are using the D&D rules the guy who actually designed the game doesn''t even work at bioware, he worked at TSR and now wizards. Well actually the people at bioware did do a little design work (minor changes plus a few other parts of the game such as play balancing) but the vast majority was done by a whole other company.

Example II: any strategy game. The guy who chooses what units to have and how strong they are is the game designer. He does not usually write the story. Someone else (the writer) does. The designer concerns himself with the mechanics of the game, particularly with regards to multiplayer.

Fundamentally design has nothing to do with story, it is about making rule systems. It does not include any writing at all.

Writing on the other hand usually includes some design, or at least feedback from the designers. However the two are fundamentally seperate. I think thinking about RPGs too much might have given you a misconception. Ok look at it this way: Quake has no story however someone had to design it. The people didn''t write anything, they tweaked weapon damages and movement rates.

just after posting that I came across this at the ethermoon.com forum. It''s by the Zileas, designer of the upcoming game Strifeshadow (and master SC player).
-----

And yes, many of the design axioms that made SC very successful are in fact applied to Strifeshadow, though the axioms I use are things like "make units have unique and non-redundant purposes"... "make each race different", "hold balance in high regard", "gameplay over reality" and other very broad reaching things that are virtually tautologies to my game design perspective when applied to RTS -- which is a style I call the engineered style, and which is followed by Valve, Blizzard, Looking Glass, and a lot of my other favorite companies.

Basically, engineered design is when you design everything for a reason, basically making artificial constructs to satisfy the gameplay you want to make, rather than making up some simulation and struggling to make it into a game. For instance, the Chaos Elemental got created by:
1) Determining that I do in fact need a unit of its gameplay characteristics
2) THEN artistically designing the unit

The style of design most in opposition is the conceptual style (as I call it), which is basically as follows:
1) Think of something that sounds/looks cool
2) implement it
3) Fiddle with things to try to make it part of a cohesive role

The first style is planned and reliable, the second is more of a crap shoot. Some of the most successful games of all time have used the second style, but seldom were the companies future games good... I won''t name anyone in particular. The engineered style consistantly produces good games, using engineering thought that has worked for ages on everything else, including software engineering.

The reason that engineered style is always better than conceptual is that you can always apply conceptual "smoothing" to the game after you design the function of game elements. For instance, give me a unit desc in terms of gameplay effect, and I''ll come up with a cool unit that matches the specifications. At least 3 or 4 hours per unit was spent on some of the harder ones where we had a good gameplay sketch, but no artistic vision to match it... The Dark Locust was one of those, so was the Chaos Elemental, so was the Tainted Wisp.... and some other units I won''t talk about.
[/end game design rant]

So yes, many units are similar. It''s impossible to deny that our work is heavily influenced by Starcraft, and we hope very hard to continue the tradition of evolving gameplay-heavy RTS. But we want to move forward, and the less we think directly about Starcraft, the more we free ourselves of any preconceptions associated with it. Trust me -- it took me at least a month when I first started designing this game to finally resolve to start from scratch, throw off all the SC conventions, and actaully build from the ground up. And even then sometimes a "legacy" snuck in that didn''t work. In all honesty, the Aether Tower system got designed to fufill how we wanted the resource system to be on paper (even though the previous system that was supposed to work didnt) at least 9 months AFTER the initial design (december last year or so)

Not talking about it directly helps you guys understand Strifeshadow more completely too. The less you compare, the more quickly you''ll appreciate the unique elements when you play, rather than be put off by them at first (and I know some people will take a little time to get used to... a lot of people just want a clone)

Zileas

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so you see he made up the atmosphere to fit the rules, not the other way around. The story was in fact inspired by abstract game rules and stats, not the other way around. The story is pretty good btw, they got a writer to do it.
-anon

Sadly, such seperation of desgin/story will eventually cause gray areas of overlapping, duplicate postings, and worse - the eventual beleive in budding writers that designers/writers have no say in each other''s work (worst case, yes, but natural direction of evolution). It kind of defeats the educational purpose of a forum, and that is to help people learn to deal with other people, in this case, help the story writers and game designers deal with each other. I can see it now, an argument over a failed game between two people beleiving that neither should have any say in each other''s work:


designer: ''The game design was sound, the story was horrible, that is why the game failed.''
writer: ''No it wasn''t, the story was great, you executed it poorly.''
designer: ''If you would have looked at the target system specs, you would have realized that it would be impossible to have a battle between 5 million people.''
writer: ''I don''t have to look at system specs, it isn''t my job. It is your job to make my story work!''

So on and so forth. Game design is a team approach between a story writer and a game designer. Working hand in hand they hammer out the limitations, feel, and realities of a game world to present to a target audience for approval shown fiscally.

This makes me sad. What would Fallout have been without writing and design having been integrally linked? Not nearly the game it was, that''s for sure.

One of the main reasons for the separate forum is that many people feel that writing as a craft is not respected.

Yes, game design and the "story" are dependent upon each other, ideally.

Unfortunately, what often happens is that a game is only about technology and effects, with no story to back it up. Or the "story" may be flimsy, cliched, unbelievable filler added as an afterthought. Coders often think that anyone can come up with a compelling story, but it takes talent. If that weren't so, then I'd just pick up a pen and be the next (rich) Stephen King.

Story gets slighted a lot. People say that game companies don't need writers, they say that story doesn't matter, etc. Well, there is a group of people who debated in this forum for a long time that story can be every bit as important as the other elements of a game - graphics, music, technical design - all of which have their own forums on GD.

In short, when we never hear another coder say "Oh, we'll just drop that in at the end," THEN we can bring the story forum back into the fold of general design.

- gollumgollum

Edited by - gollum on September 21, 2000 12:43:37 PM

By seperating the two, you become another flunky for the game designer. Imagine it, ''HEY! Here is a great design for a game, go get me a couple of story writers and some artists to make it look pretty.'' Yes, let the writers have their own area, and we''ll ignore them even more as they pound away at our design driven story.

We the designers will treat them as non-contributors and make them rewrite the story 100 times since the writer ''added crap'' and that isn''t what we told him to do. We the designers will view them as expendables during budget time as they are all just freeloaders anyways, since we wrote the design, how hard can the story be? We the designers will drop the writer in the end because the story is low on the list of things to check off, located right below ''cargo crate'' in the list of game requirements. We the designers no longer have to care about story because someone we hired and we paid is writing the story to fit our design docs. We the designers will drop whatever we want out of the game to fit time and budget and ignore the whiney writers snivelling about something called a ''plot'' being ''ruined'', whatever a ''plot'' is. Why should we listen, writers are just ''hired help'' and have no clue as to what makes a game good anyways, after all, they are just writers.

Yes, we the designers can rejoice now that we no longer have the burden of writing a story, and now just have to design the game to look pretty and incorperate the latest list of buzz words mixed with some new, made-up buzz words of our liking. So now when those free-loading reviewers complain about a game not having much of a story, we have a goto[sic] guy to place the blame on.

Ah, Sid never had it so good.

Hmm.

Sarcasm adise, I''m not sure I get your point.

How is writing less able to be separated from design than say, graphics? Graphics has its own forum.

If you''re saying that the choices a character makes, and hence the story, are set by the design, well aren''t the amount/file type/color depth/etc of graphics also set by the game design?

Maybe it comes down to this:

It''s difficult (though perhaps possible) to work on a a game from all sides at once. Most likely, you''re going to build a game one of the following ways:

1. Game engine, then story --> Quake, Unreal, Creatures, etc.

2. Story/World, then game engine --> Ultima, Fallout, Monkey Island

If you accept that idea, then there are two things:

While it is almost impossible to ignore a workable engine using process 2, it is pretty easy to use process 1 and gloss over the story part at the end.

Also, for my money, games that rely on technical wizardry are more hollow than games that use the technology to serve a greater story or atmosphere. I personally will buy a game because I like the idea rather than because it promises real-time lighting effects, or whatever.

Yes, they should be integrated, starting with the design document. But I think there is a real struggle going on. I think that the writing forum is for people like me, who want to make games with the following process:

Step 1. "What would be a really fun/cool story?", or "What would be a fun world to explore?"

and THEN...

Step 2. - "How can I make that world come alive on this tool I have, which happens to be a computer?"

Or, to put it on last way,

"Why should scriptwriters try to talk about their craft? Don''t they know that the people who make movies are doing it with cameras? Don''t they know that they can only do what the apertures and F-stops will allow?" :-)

- gollumgollum