Developing The Story, Answering the question of why is it taking so long to write?

Over the last several months as we’ve worked on development of our game project currently dubbed Project A51, we’ve been asked the question, “Why is it taking you so long to write the story for this game?” and honestly my answer has just been short that we “want to get it just right!”. I think now is a good time to explain just why this story is taking us so long.

First off, who isn’t sick of unbalanced games? You have games out there that have really good gameplay, I mean incredible gameplay, but the story is strongly lacking. Take Battlefield 3 for example, while BF3 rules with it’s multiplayer gameplay, it seriously lacks when it comes to the campaign story, it’s boring, and seems just typical. Now let’s take a look at the Call of Duty franchise, where they lack in multiplayer gameplay, they tend to have solid campaign storylines that keep me wanting more! With our game we didn’t want to settle for one or the other, we wanted to a great balance of gameplay and story.

We seriously want our story to take hold of the gamers, and not give them a single dull moment. Much like how The Avengers is written as a movie, it’s grabbing, never boring, always keeping you on your toes, we want to have this same effect while maintaining good gameplay.

So how do you maintain that balance?

I think the answer is fairly simple, you give and take, and don’t be afraid to seek others opinions! With this story it has been re-written several times by myself and other members of the team who are a part of the story decisions. There has been a lot of good ideas! There also has been a lot of crappy ideas. What we’re doing is taking the best of everyone on the story teams ideas, and scrapping the crappy ones. Then as far knowing if the story is gripping, and will have the gamers attention we give it to other people who we trust, who may not be gamers, or may be gamers but have nothing to do with game development, and we get them to read our story, and if they’re on average bored with it, then we know we need to scrap it and change things up, but if they’re constantly grabbed by the story and wanting more when they reach the end, then we know we have a solid story and just have to put it together with the gameplay.

In ending I hope this gives you guys a little bit of insight into the story writing process we’re taking here at Weeping Studios. It’s a lot of work, and a lot of fun, and we hope you guys all enjoy it in the end, and I hope this gives you a look at what the writing process is!