With INDIE INTERVIEWS, I talk to the game developers hanging here on Cohost to learn more about new games you might love.
I like text. In some ways, text is the simplest building block of a game. When your team is small, it's one of the most approachable things you can add, change, and build upon. Heck, there are whole genres of game built entirely on a foundation of text. But how do you make sure that writing is actually effective? That's where writers in the world of games come in. I chat with Narrative Designer @damonreece to ask them about their experiences in writing and wrangling narratives.
You can find Necrobarista on Steam, Nintendo Switch, Playstation, and iOS.
You can find Grim Tranquility on Steam.
Introduce yourself for everyone here on Cohost: Who are you?
Hello! I'm Damon and I do narrative for videogames. I've been at it for around ten years now.
How did you find yourself first getting into game development?
I was a teenager with a lot of terrible ideas and very little understanding of how the industry or the development process worked. I basically just dove in without any reservations and made a lot of silly mistakes. But mistakes are a learning opportunity, and I certainly learned a lot of lessons from my various misadventures. The first time I felt like I was properly "in" game development was with the release of the first game I directed, called Steal My Artificial Heart, for Antholojam in early 2015. I still think about it a lot and would love to expand on the concept someday with my wonderful set of collaborators.
Players may have heard the terms "Narrative Designer" or "Technical Writer" before, but not quite know what makes that different from a "Writer", the term we usually see in TV, comics, and literature. From your experience, what are the responsibilities of a Narrative Designer or of a Technical Writer? How does it differ from the act of purely writing?
"Narrative designer" is one of those things that means something different at every job. At some of my gigs it's just been a fancy name for a writer, at others it's meant that I've been designing tools and language syntax (I briefly worked on YarnSpinner), and at others I've been in charge of the entire narrative presentation of the game, including things like visual direction of cutscenes, UI design, organizing other writers, creating narrative-centric advertising material, et cetera. Speaking more to my own specific interpretation of the practice, my approach is to work on multiple levels to guide the game as a whole to a place where the narrative can shine best. I also put together the actual narrative, in most cases, though I strongly prefer to have reliable collaborators there instead of working alone.
In regards to how it differs from traditionally recognized forms of writing, I'd say that narrative design carries more of a focus on the experiental aspects of storytelling. As an example, I worked on an expansion for Hacknet, a game where players spend most of their time digging through filesystems and putting together the story from context clues. With the knowledge that that's how players are interacting with the narrative, I was free to write a lot of diegetic text (chatlogs, readme files, etc) that felt like something you'd naturally find on someone's computer. You can hide a lot of useful plot detail in there while still having it feel naturalistic. Diegetic text is basically my favourite thing to write!
From the outside, it feels like the most fun part of game design is deciding all the cool things that will be in the game. But a lot of actual development is built on deciding what will NOT be in the game. How did you and the team decide what you will NOT include in Necrobarista, in terms of disparate branching narrative paths, character choices, character customization, multiple endings, etc.? Was it difficult to set up rules for yourself for what that project is and isn't meant to be? Would Necrobarista's story have been hurt if it was beholden to "video game" expectations?
So for Necrobarista, I joined the team to run a fairly hard reboot of the narrative - the team had built three or four pretty detailed prototypes and demos before they decided they needed some outside help. Their first prototypes had a lot of very interesting and experimental narrative design touches that I wish I'd had a chance to play with, but by the time I turned up they had settled on a storytelling format pretty similar to how Pyre did its visual novel scenes, though ours was obviously a bit more involved presentation-wise. I think, when it came down to it, the decision to not have any significant interactivity was just a question of maths. As it turns out, having bespoke cinematography and animation for every single camera shot in the game is very expensive. Even if we'd had infinite money, though, I believe that the story we told would have been negatively impacted by attempts to make it more video-gamey. The free-roaming segments between chapters are there to give players a moment to breathe, and the existence of those segments does have a narrative purpose that's revealed at the end of the game.
As far as difficulty goes... truthfully, I was just there to write the game. I had a heavily process-driven approach to my work; I did a lot of outlining and built a bunch of tables to map out the character relationships and how they evolved over time, and I stuck to all of those plans pretty closely. There were some things that organically appeared during the writing process, like the lovely tenor of the relationship between Kishan and Ned, but overall the only real handicaps to my ability to do the job came from life tossing me around a bit during the dev process. That might explain some of the more heartwrenching stuff near the end of the game, sorry.
Writing can take us deep into places we may not want to go, if it serves the headspace of the story. At the risk of sounding macabre...did your experience with Necrobarista change your thoughts about death, or how we spend our hours on this planet?
It did, but not how you might expect. Death is an intensely personal thing; we all deal with it very differently. Spending your hours, however... ignoring the very literal way that we used that phrase in Necrobarista, it's something I've thought a lot about. Necrobarista has been, so far, the highest-profile release of my career. Without going into specifics for NDA-related reasons, the game had an extremely difficult path to launch, and the launch itself happened without much warning. I live alone, but I was actually sleeping on the couch just to be closer to the computer in case there was some sort of catastrophe I had to help with. It was unhealthy. And so, once it released, I found myself unable to stop reading every little bit of discourse on the game. Every positive review, and, more importantly, every negative review, in every language (one of our publishers cheaped out bigtime on their translations). I was finally on the other side of that weird divide, and not having the self-control and self-actualization to turn my face away from the unending torrent of opinions was really bad for me. So, when I think of how I spend my hours, of which there are a finite amount, I find myself thinking more and more of how I feel better when I'm not discoursing or looking at things that I know are going to stress me out. It's a process that we're all collectively engaged in right now, and it is, well, a process. A couple years after both the game's release and my departure from the studio, I'm still working on those things. I haven't tweeted or looked at gamedev Twitter for three or four weeks, and it's doing wonders for me.
There are a lot of writers out there who love playing games and would love to get involved in making them, but "Writer" sometimes feels like it's out-of-reach for an entry-level position. Any advice for writers who want to work in games or interactive fiction?
This is a pretty hard one, and there are a lot of pretty awful career coach grifters out there who will take your money and give you horrible one-size-fits-all advice. If you're a screenwriting grad in California you can find a game writing job with one of the AAAs easy, but most of us are not that. I'm from a part of Australia that until very recently had no government support for gamedev, so I was fairly disadvantaged when it came to finding work. I think an important thing is to approach the practice with respect/enthusiasm and not as a get-rich-quick scheme, since the pay is generally awful and the working conditions are worse. There are a lot of really amazing creators who aren't doing this as their primary source of income, and that's a very healthy way to approach it, which is to say: learn to make things (perhaps in Bitsy or Twine) for your own self-gratification, not for the approval of others, but do share them and listen to feedback. Processing feedback is a skill in itself.
Also, make friends with editors.
Is there a project you're working on currently? Tell us what's next for you.
I'm currently working on a couple of unannounced projects with Pillow Fight, who are just the most lovely people in the world. The talent they've pulled together for these games is ridiculous; the magnitude of skill and professionalism on display is humbling, and that's my favourite way to feel working on a game. One of them has people whose work I've been following since I was a teen! It's wild. Anyway, the first of those two projects should see an announcement soon. Beyond that, the future is a mystery.
Lastly, are there any indie games out there you've been playing recently? Any favorites to shout-out?
My favourite indie game is FINAL FANTASY XIV ONLINE by--
oh, that's not-- right, yeah, ok.Jokes aside, I really enjoy @npckc's games. They're well put together, are heartfelt, and they don't overstay their welcome. My favourite indie game of all time is Ladykiller in a Bind from @love, which has some unbelievably good narrative design and truly excellent writing. It sets a quality bar that I'm always going to be trying to reach.
Shoutout: Amarantus, an upcoming visual novel from one of my besties with—again—some really spectacular narrative design and fantastic writing. If you're into interesting trainwreck relationship sims, this should be on your radar.
Thanks so much for chatting! Everyone can follow Damon here on Cohost, at @damonreece. You can find Necrobarista on Steam, Nintendo Switch, Playstation, and iOS. You can find Grim Tranquility on Steam. This is the final interview of 2022. There's lots more developers here on Cohost to chat with, so I'll see you folks in January!
