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focusing on place rather than people

Bladerz666 · 2010-11-15T09:20:38

Hi there, I'm Dan.I'm looking forward into getting a job in games design and to do this I'm making myself a design document. This design document has to be perfect and I'm currently working on the games script. I recently attended a lecture from the game director on enslaved: odyssey to the west where he listed the importance of not over-convuluting script and whatnot.I'm confident with my skills of developing characters as well as forming their personalities into somehting three dimensional.but, because I've been thinking about this subject so heavily, it's got me thinking, can the structure of stories in games be done better? (to me cutscenes feel a bit disconnected from the gameplay) And it got me thinking, do we really need to focus on characters when telling these stories?focusing on characters in film works because they are the focus, it's on rails, they're nearly always in the eye of the camera. In a game environment the player often is alone and is left to explore an environment by their own will.With this in mind, I feel that,when designing a games story, it should be very much focused on a place. After coming to this realisation I noticed something, alot of great games focus on their world as much as the characters in it. Final Fantasy games, the mass effect universe, and many more.So when writing my script I'm not even thinking about characters yet, I'm thinking about places, cultures, secrets, and history that I want characters to experience, and in turn the player.What's your opinion? should a game focus on characters or the universe it takes place in? should it be 50/50? please give me your thoughts.

Writing for Games Game Design

Started by Bladerz666 November 01, 2010 09:23 AM

9 comments, last by Pete Michaud 13 years, 7 months ago

Pete Michaud

137

November 15, 2010 09:20 AM

Your question reminds me of the Foundation series by Asimov. It goes through many generations of different characters, focusing instead on the Foundation itself and circumstances surrounding it. You should give it a read for how that sort of thing can work.

Kōtiro: the Making of an Indie Game