Hey, it’s SnakeF8!

I would like to give the heads up that I am not a professional writer, but these are my experiences applying what I’ve learned about writing from peers, myself, and classes. I also asked co-designer Sirdiesalot to weigh in his techniques as well, so there are more methods to the madness. Writing is an art, so my process and the techniques included may not work for others.

What I've Found Success Doing

Although I don’t have much to show, most of my time last month has been delegated to writing and refining the Soldiers’ Descent story. Originally, I wrote the entire demo on a flowchart then converted it to a Google Doc as a novel format, but I wasn’t too happy with how the dialogue turned out. It at least helped me figure out how this demo should flow story-wise. With this in mind, I bullet-pointed key events I wanted to happen similar to a story beat, and then I deleted all of the original document to restart. Success in this context could mean anything, but success here is comfort and a solid workflow.

For some people like Sirdiesalot, writing the story in a novel format works best, but he’s been experimenting with that awhile. That’s when I started using Twine as a medium to design the game’s script (You can get it here at https://twinery.org/). For games, it’s different from novels because too much reading without a break may cause the player to skip, and I’ll admit I have done that before with RPGs. For Soldiers’ Descent, I’ve set a few ground rules for the script:

Dialogue Considerations:

• Only two options on dialogue choices
  • Because of UI design choice
  • Would be too much for a two-man team to implement more than 2 choices
• Dialogue for a single character should NOT exceed 3 consecutive dialogue boxes
  • More than 3 may cause the player to skip
  • This counter resets if there is an animation break
    • As in dialogue box closes during an animation then reopens
  • May be minor exceptions
    • Dialogue is short (3-5 words)
    • Comedic effect
• Narrated dialogue will use second-person to refer to Dex or player

Overall, these are all part of a revision process which I’ve adopted while taking my Gen Ed writing courses in college, yet these techniques work because they helped me feel a lot more comfortable with the writing process. Although I’ve used these techniques academically, each also works for me when writing fiction. Revision can be divided into two types: Global and Local. The difference between the two is that global revision handles your writing’s ideas and how the entire writing flows between each paragraph or chunk. Local revision fixes the contents inside each paragraph or chunk on a very minute level. Global is general, and local is specific.

Note: Whenever you see the word “paragraph,” I mean anything from a literal paragraph, a chunk of a story like a chapter or a set of dialogues, or even quests. I couldn’t think of a better word to summarize chunks in a story because you can do this in so many ways.

Global Revisions

Global revision looks at the whole of your work, and I can best compare it to looking at a continent and the countries that take up that land. It’s stuff like your main ideas and structure.

• Reverse Outlining
  • Reverse outlining allows you to pick out the significance of what is transpiring. For each paragraph, ask yourself how this advances your story and if the player would be interested in the contents.
  • The Purdue Owl Writing lab also has a few pointers on how to do this (https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/general_writing/the_writing_process/reverse_outlining.html) 
• One-Paragraph Summary
  • A one-paragraph summary forces you to condense all of your story into one paragraph. You could even do it for each chapter, quest, or sidequest if need be. This technique allows you to figure out if all of the contents flow and make sense.
• Paragraph Analysis
  • Paragraph analysis now looks at each paragraph in your story. Is your paragraph too long? Is your paragraph too short? Can this be divided into two different paragraphs, or can this be merged together? Does this flow well with the other paragraphs before and after this one? These are the questions to ask yourself when making a paragraph analysis.
• Miscellaneous Revisions
• This is stuff like taking into consideration your overall audience
• In extreme cases, deleting your work and starting over can be seen as a global revision technique to keep the main story beats, topics, or ideas

Local Revisions

Local revision picks apart the weeds in each paragraph. This is pretty much your standard revision that goes on such as cleaning up grammatical errors, trimming fat, improving flow, and more. Also keep in mind, there are edge cases for everything because writing is an artform. Even though it’s mostly self-explanatory, here’s a checklist that might help out:

• Read aloud before and after locally revising
• Peer review
  • You are going to be biased towards your own work
  • Regardless of what feedback you get, it’s your decision to make these changes
    • Feedback isn’t law. It’s another factor you have to make on a revision
    • While having someone else critique your work is important, it's your taste vs. their taste
    • In the game design sphere, it may work better in execution than it sounds on paper
    • At the same time, it may sound good on paper, but it may not be good in practice
• Fix grammatical errors
• Check for run on sentences
• Check for comma splices
  • These are commas without the “and, but, so” attached afterwards
  • These can also include commas being used to divided sentences
• Replace certain “to be” verbs (I am, he is, she is, they are, etc.)
  • It’s okay to have them, but replacing these with different verbs create spice in writing
• If a compound sentence is combined with “and,” try and see if other compound words can fit
• Try and remove adverbs
  • Alright in dialogue
• Conciseness is key
  • If you can think of a shorter way to explain something without losing the overall meaning, do it
• If it doesn’t contribute to the main story, or the gameplay and story do not blend/connect, remove it
  • This case applies to main questlines and mandatory requirements
  • It’s okay to keep some of this stuff if it is optional to the main story
• Active voice
  • You can get away with passive voice in dialogue because it’s normal
• Clean up flow
  • This could be either be flow in dialogue and/or flow in the story
• For dialogue, ask yourself if this conversation makes sense
• Would this be an actual conversion people would have?
• Can you tell who is speaking without seeing the character’s name?
• When writing dialogue between characters, you have much more freedom on word choice because everyone talks differently, so do not be afraid to create some personality!

Final Remarks

At this point, your story may look a little different, so you might need to go back and globally revise. Until you are satisfied, keep globally and locally revising. At least for Soldiers’ Descent, I’ve been going back and globally revising the surrounding paragraphs for each local revision I made. There is no “cookie-cutter” way to revise because everyone does it differently. Sometimes, I even go out of my way to locally revise as I go.

If you think my experiences and what I’ve shared are helpful, feel free to bookmark this page or save it in any way you see fit! There’s a lot of writing resources you can find through Google, and I wouldn’t mind helping people with the peer review process. Any feedback on this post is much appreciated, so I'd be more than happy to see extra advice in the comments! I'd like this guide to be a valuable tool for anyone needing that push.