Things to avoid when writing a game's story.

So I was scrawling out a possible story for a game earlier. It featured a group of heroes who unwittingly release from its confines an evil being who was sealed away long ago, and then have to destroy the being in order to save the world. Stupendously clever, yes?

Then I thought about it, and I realized that the "sealed evil getting released" plot has been done about a thousand times in the RPG genre alone. I figured rather than beating that dead horse, I should either try to make the "sealed evil" bit different or unique enough that it doesn't seem cliched, or I should just find a different way to drive a plot.

What are things you try to avoid when writing a story?

I tend to not write story too often, and the only game I've really made story with isn't even beyond the sketchbook yet (despite how many years I've worked on it in concepts), however, I'd like to list a few things when coming to story for times I actually care about story I'm writing:

-Unless the game is purposely cliche', avoid cliche's unless you really want it in (the hero collects all 8 McGuffin Muffins, and gains the power to defeat villain-of-the-week #12).
-Don't worry about cliche's.
-Write the story, read it back, make a second draft. Read it again. Make sure it's not too wordy, trim it down to nice bite-sized nuggets so players aren't reading anything more than 2-3 minutes of text at a time.
-Don't be referential unless it's subtle and doesn't take away from the point of the text.
-Don't break immersion unless it's purposely a joke in the correct timing (i.e. not in the middle of an important speech)
-Don't try to appease the crowds with stupid trends relatable or not with controversy. Please please don't. I beg you not to. In fact, it's a command. I'll break your legs if you disobey.
-Keep in the tone of the moment. If something is supposed to be nice, make sure what is said can't be taken negatively....if you can manage it.

And that's really all I can think of right now, but here's a note on the last one, as an observation I made regarding the father of the Male Hero in Dark Cloud 2.

When the father talks to the hero, he came off as a jerk to me and all around unpleasant. However, to my old roomy, he came off as concerned and heroic.
In a sense, I read "I will help you, not for yourself, but for the world" as "The only reason I'm helping YOU is because the world is trouble" where are my friend read it as "I'll help you gladly, but not as for you being my son, but for great justice!/manly pose".

I found this interesting as it's a psychological connection here. My father in real life....I've not really got along with, in short. My friend's father was cool to him and he got along well with his father.
This essentially shows that if the relatable figure is blank enough a slate, you'll project your thoughts as to their tone they take with the player. So keep that in mind.

Perhaps try to establish the character's personality before giving them statements that can be misinterpreted.

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My main thou shalt not do is going with character cliches.

e.g.:

• The righteous paladin who's so stuck up that he looks down on everyone around him as being less pious.
  
• The dumb-as-a-rock barbarian warrior who is, as aforementioned, dumb as a rock but still has a heart of gold.
  
• The mischievous thief who steals anything that isn't nailed down, but is still good at heart.

And so on and so forth. Everyone's seen these characters before, so while they're easy to write, they get really old really fast. That's why when making characters, I try to give them little twists. Not very big twists, they still fall under some archetype or the other, but they don't fill the role you'd expect in the game or in your party. e.g.:

• The healer is batshit insane, and rather than being the pious healer, he/she is more of the mad scientist who will heal you in interesting ways to further his/her research.
  
• The assassin isn't a devious, clad-in-black, cold-hearted-killer, but is instead a refined dandy who dresses up in flamboyant silks and ruffles and much prefers poison and intrigue to cloak and dagger.

Still relatively common or have at least been seen before, but they make for slightly more interesting characters and can allow you to weave more compelling stories about them.

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Being from the third world, I reserve the right to speak in the third person.

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I wouldn't stress too much about how often a story element has already been used.

Instead, focus on making your characters interesting. Then instead of being yet another story about ancient evil that has been unleashed and now needs to be locked away, it becomes about the interactions of your characters, and how they personally deal with the need to seal away ancient evil.

I wouldn't say it's a bad idea to use cliches. Cliches are good starting points for creating a character, just like predefined genres like "Westerns" or "Sci-fi" are good starting points for creating a story. The important thing is to think of your characters as actual people, who have good reasons to act the way they do. The paladin might be stuck up because he was raised by rich parents, or because he had to act that way to avoid getting expelled from Paladin School. Those two paladins would end up making different decisions even though they're cut from the same cliche. You'll run into problems if you focus too much on the cliche or on the twist and fail to think of your characters as actual people.

I personally get annoyed with too much exposition, breaks in the fourth wall (when the characters tell the player how to play the game), and dialogue that takes the place of action. Example: "I hate you. *slugs Biff* I wish you would die!" Just show Margaret punching Biff. It's one extra frame of animation. Don't get so dang lazy.

Other things to avoid:

-NPCs who say "Hi," or some boring equivalent.

-Towns consisting of approximately three NPCs, all of who give roughly the same information. (Everyone else wants to sell my heroes crap.)

-NPCs who have no personality (because they're too busy giving the same information about the quest they know nothing about).

-Towns that sell only weapons, armor, and healing items. It's a town for crying out loud. Sell some pointless crap, too. Town A should specialize in fried pig entrails. Town B should specialize in baked chicken feet. They should be in the business of exchanging wares for profit. Not everything commercial has to be so violent in nature!

-Stories that have one plot. The best way to avoid focusing on a cliche is to write side stories that veer off the main road and explore subjects of personal interest. Remember, each town, village, subdivision, campsite, etc. should have a theme and governing story that the player can spend time solving. It doesn't always have to lead back to the world-destroying villain. Maybe a town is suffering because its two most important families are at war and need some way of reconciling for the good of the people.

-Stupid jokes. Unless you know you're funny, don't ruin your story with a lame joke. Likewise, if you can't be serious, your attempt at seriousness may come across as melodrama, and no one wants to play melodrama, so don't reach into your soap opera box of tricks. Just write whatever comes naturally to you.

-Villains with no purpose. If your villain wants to rule the world because he's evil, your game is stupid. If your villain wants to rule the world because he knows he can fix it and make it better, except for the fact that he's an idiot and will do nothing but cause people harm, then your game is interesting.

-Henchmen who blindly follow an idiot. There's something to be said about loyalty, but people are inherently smart, and if your henchmen don't have specific reasons for following your villain, then they, too, are idiots.

-Heroes who blindly follow an idiot. Another personal pet peeve: When party members join because they're bored and have nothing better to do, that's lame. I don't have a problem with heroes who believe in the lead hero and choose to follow him through hell and back, but there should be two things that go with it: 1. Common goal and trust--no one follows a stranger without having a reason, and 2. Recognition that following the lead will require sacrifice--for example, a fisherman who joins the party as a healer will have to acknowledge the fact that he won't be able to run his fishing business anymore, at least for the duration of the adventure, and that could mean a loss in customers, market share, and possibly even life sustainability. That's a lot to lose for the sake of globe-trotting around with a bloodthirsty knight.

Basically it all boils down to two things:

1. Keep your characters interesting and poignant.
2. Don't get lazy.

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I agree with this.

Instead of making an interesting story, focus on making a interesting world. This world should be immediately recognizably different from our own (unless the world is our own). Surlaw's Walthros games are a good example of this.

No matter how serious your story, don't feel that you can't make a fart joke.

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Super Walrus Land: Mouth Words Edition

Don't write like I write.

Seriously.

I have a nasty habit of cliches.

Look at my RPG games to see what not to do.

There's a reason classic archetypes have been popular for thousands and thousands of years of storytelling and staunchly going out of your way to avoid any cliches usually stinks and is boring. James is 100% on the mark here and the rest is just burps and farts.

My favorite video game villains are Bowser, Dr. Wily, and Revolver Ocelot.

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Super Walrus Land: Mouth Words Edition

Things to avoid: stuff like this thread, for the most part. The more you pigeon-hole your writing, the worse it gets. Don't think in terms of what you should be avoiding. An attitude like this is toxic for creativity and Surlaw already hit the point about cliches which is among the worst commonly-told pieces of advice that comes to mind. You can make a game about a prince saving his kingdom from an evil empire and still have it come out well; it's all down to the details. Good writing makes your story good, not avoiding problems.

A few basic ideas to think of when writing. This isn't everything, but they're things I think about a lot:
- Write conversations that flow naturally, as in two things people would normally say to one another. You may be tempted to cram exposition in to random lines of dialogue, but don't treat that as a goal. Characters need to naturally react to events. Consistently, this is one of the things people miss in writing for games (even on a professional level).

- Don't make laundry lists of descriptors for characters and then attempt to show them to the player (I see this all the time in design threads people post). There's nothing wrong with thinking about interesting details concerning your characters, but nobody cares that Hank the cowboy is lonely inherently; they have to see him sitting alone in the rain on a log eating creamed corn with haunting music playing for it to hit home. Have a character define itself through dialogue and actions. Pay attention to Cyan during Sabin's scenario in Final Fantasy 6. He's the most popular character in the game and this is one of his only moments where he actually says anything, so it's clearly effective. Everything we learn about Cyan is implicit in his actions and the way he interacts with the other characters.

- Have editors look over your script before you import text to the OHR and ask testers to tell you when things you have written are stupid or seem strange. Don't ignore their advice--any of it. If one person sees it, it's almost guaranteed somebody else will. That doesn't mean you have to change things if you don't like it.

- Less is more. Eliminate as many words as you can without losing the meaning of sentences. You can still have long-winded dialogue if it's actually saying something, but there's nothing worse than reading what are effectively the same text boxes over and over.

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Never Read TV Tropes.

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Super Walrus Land: Mouth Words Edition

If you really want to tell a tightly controlled narrative, you should probably write a book or make a movie. Games are tricky storytelling medium due to player interaction. Unless you have really minimal player interaction, in which case you probably aren't making a very good game.

Although, now this is becoming about the philosophy of game design. So let's just forget about it...



Just go with this.

Right now, I'm playing Final Fantasy 3. It's really great because there is absolutely no exposition between dungeons. Every line of dialogue is just a reason for the next quest. In my opinion, that's great writing, or game design, or whatever.

That is an awesome name.

Too late for me.

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Remeber: God made you special and he loves you very much. Bye!

Just chiming in to say I think James and Sephy are right on the money. What we think of as excellent writing and "good plots" are a function of the form of prose writing, generally -- they work the way they do in novels and short stories because those media are constructed in a way that emphasizes the qualities of "excellent writing" and "good plots".

Think about other media, though. Some of the best narrative comics I've read are things like Alan Moore's work, but his stories would be patently ridiculous if projected in the form of a novel or film. This doesn't mean they're bad at all, it means that he's written stories that capitalize on the strengths of the comic medium.

So, what I'm saying is: games are not novels -- it is folly to try to write a game like a novel. In a game, 95% of the text is coming from character dialogue; 4% is coming from system messages like "You got 300 gold!", and the other 1%, if it's there at all, is coming from omniscient narration (and then usually only at the beginning and end of the story). It's very plain that the function of "writing" in a game is to portray characters. "Plot" in a game is by its very nature going to be somewhat artificial, because it has to work as an instrument on which the designer can hang plot events in a seemingly causal chain; actual "good stories" in the novelistic sense don't work this way at all.

So, in other words, if you're very concerned about presenting a good plot through the form of a video game, you're working against the medium to a large extent. This isn't to say you should ignore it entirely, but if it's your focus, try writing a novel or short story instead. Focus on the presentation of characters, since this is what 95% of what "the writing" will constitute anyway, and the characters obviously serve as the avatars through which the player becomes invested in the game itself.

TL;DR -- games aren't novels, write characters rather than plot.

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