Scripting – Game Design Coming To Life The Bard’s Tale Diary #5 By Sean Patton, Game Designer – inXile entertainment So the other day, my girlfriend (I should qualify that. In the game industry you should not be able to refer to a person you are dating as a [gender]-friend until they have successfully stayed with you through a complete development cycle. Many a strong relationship has crashed upon the rocky shores of crunch-time), asked me how work was going. And I said, “good”. And as relationship partners are apt to do, she replied “well, what are you doing?” Drat. Well, if I have to answer the question, I might as well turn it into one of those fancy developer diaries. You know the ones, where gaming fans skim through boring, non-descript banter in hopes of getting a tasty morsel of inside information and a couple of screenshots. (On a slight tangent, I hear there are a group of gamers applying the power of the PS2 to analyzing the Equidistant Letter Sequences found in developer diaries. Boy I can’t wait for that web site to launch!) I’m a designer at inXile. As Matt has said, a lot of time and planning has gone into The Bard’s Tale project. I think most designers will admit that the best part about being a designer is getting a project kicked off. You have a blank slate in front of you. It’s you versus your imagination! It’s a great time. I actually came on to the project midstream or “post-blank slate”. In fact, there were several full slates that had been thrown out before I really got to InXile. Once you get the design team’s vision on a piece of paper, the work has just begun. (I’m going to go ahead and sprinkle in some fancy game developer lingo for you gamers hoping to get in the biz. Sometimes this powerful document is called a vision doc or a design doc. For a bunch of people that are supposed to be showing-off their creativity, I think they should really work on the title). Now the best artists and the best programmers and the best designers work out the big questions, like technological hurdles, art concepts, budget and dietary needs (not everyone in the industry lives on caffeine IV’s). It is really quite exciting and I came on sometime after that meeting. Then after a few short hops the project is really rolling. The programmers start programming and the artists start arting and the designers, well their design is done, so they lounge around on sofas eating bon-bons and talking about the injustices on American Idol. No I’m kidding, designers hate bon-bons. Actually, designers begin their real work once the project is kicked off (this is about where I got on). Level design, game balancing and scripting are just some of the tasks a game designer is going to do. Well lately, I’ve been doing a lot of scripting. Now some of you may be saying to yourself, “Are there any more screen shots in this Developer Diary?” but what my provisional girlfriend would ask is “what is scripting?” and she might think that it had something to do with writing, something akin to film scripts (FUN FACT: I come from the film industry and received a B.A. in Theater with an emphasis in writing). But that is incorrect - scripting is laying down scripted events in the game, defined in the design document. So the design document says things like, “The Bard goes into the bar. If he buys all the drinks the bartender has to offer, the Bard is kicked out of the bar and can never enter again” (A tragedy if I’ve ever heard one). One system we are using is our Drama Scripting System developed especially for the game. The system actually uses very basic commands and some common operators to determine what to do. So in this scenario you might see something like this: If Bar_Inventory = 0 goto KickBardOut Else goto OfferBardBrews Pretty easy but because it is customized specifically for our uses we can script the majority of events that are in the game. Sometimes it’s faster and more efficient to have a programmer develop a specific element rather than doing scripting. But for the most part we use our Drama Scripting System. In a game such as ours there are a huge amount of scripted elements. RPG’s have tons of dialogs and characters. Our game has like a bizagillion lines of dialog and some pretty diverse situations so we spend lots of time scripting these events into the game. And since the game is non-linear and affected by the player’s created character there are scripted events that most players will never even see! (So what I’m saying is that when you buy the game, let my life mean something by playing it 3 or 4 times, okay!) Right now, we are going back through our scripted events and seeing exactly how efficient they really are and tweaking them where necessary (Lingo Alert! This is called “polish”!). Scripting tends to get very busy towards the end of the project. It glues the elements of the design, art and programming together. It also tends to be one of those things QA teams are all over to break (Fie on you QA team, quit working for the man!). As better art assets and better programming elements become available they will need to be added into the scripts. In fact, just today a scene that hadn’t been touched in months got some new art dropped in. With a bit of minor tweaking of the drama script the scene was able to take advantage of the new art and was dramatically improved. So when our lead designer says we are doing a bit of polish for the next few months you can bet a lot of that is going to continue to be at the scripting level. Also scripting tends to be a great way for entry level aspiring game developers to get into the biz. If you’ve got an interest in getting a job with a game developer and want to start working on games, “scripting” is a great way to do it. You might want to check out more info at: http://www.inxile-entertainment.com/contact.html. Well, that’s it for me. Back to my American Idol. And then maybe some OC.