Quote: Elves and other Tolkein/D&D races, or werewolves and vampires. No. Just no. We've seen it a hundred times before,

Huh ? Werewolves were done in hundred games ? Thats news to me...i can remember several console platformers with werewolves, and a few fightings...and thats about it.

Maybe not games but plenty of movies and pop culture. Its tired and used up just the same.

Some people don't understand this, but this is a very important rule: do not use excessive vulgarity in your story and script. A good story doesn't need it to be powerful and exciting. Swearing, if used in the right way, can be useful.

Quote: Original post by sunandshadow
Some good principles for designing any story:

Control Focus With Detail vs. Ambiguity - Some of us prefer a lot of detail, some of us very little; nevertheless, you need to use both in your writing to direct your audience's attention to the important elements of the story. If you make everything detailed your audience will be bored because you are not asking them to use their imaginations; if you make everything ambiguous your audience will be confused, which again leads to boredom because they have no foundation on which to base their imaginative guesswork. Either make the setting ambiguous and the main character and plot clearly detailed, or make the setting detailed and the character motivations and plot ambiguous, and the audience's attention and suspense will be focused on figuring out what the detailed parts imply about the ambiguous parts.

I really like these principles, but I'm not sure the above applies to games. The setting and world can't help but be detailed simply due to games being a visual medium (unless, of course, it's a text adventure or a game with very crude graphics) and games having more information detailed (items, character stats/appearance, layout of locations, etc) that otherwise wouldn't be in written form.

I'd suggest that for games the principle would apply not to setting and plot but gameplay and plot. If the plot is ambiguous the player can make up for it by creating their own stories through the fun and interesting gameplay. If the gameplay is lacking or unfun this might be overcome by a very detailed, interesting, and thought out story. For instance: Ultima Online didn't much much of a story surrounding it, but I enjoyed the process of making my character and forming my own stories through playing. And The Longest Journey didn't have particularly compeling gameplay (it was point and click) but the story drove me forward out of interest.

Of course, all games and gameplay styles are different, and some don't even require a story for them to be enjoyable. It might only really apply to RPGs or Adventure games.

Quote: Original post by Sulphix
That's just my two cents. Loglines. Learn about them, use them, love them. They're also great tools for separating the good ideas from the bad ones.

What, exactly, are loglines? Wikipedia and Google's define have both failed me.

From reference.com:

A log line is a brief summary of a television program or movie, often providing both a synopsis of the program's plot, and an emotional "hook" to stimulate interest.

"Elements of Screenwriting" is a very excellent quick POETICA packed read, could be wrong on exact title, very sound, a great introduction to stucture.

The most important "do" I can think of is to have other people edit your work.

I've been playing and writing a bit of interactive fiction lately, and even in those games spelling and grammar errors slip through occasionally and can ruin the player's immersion.

It seems like an obvious thing to suggest, but you'd be surprised how many errors are never caught in released interactive fiction (including some of mine), not to mention the horrible grammar in many RPG Maker games and such. Trust me; no matter how good you think you are, you'll never catch all the errors yourself. You'll just read over your own writing and skip right past the typo, saying it correctly in your head without realizing it's written wrong. Get someone (or more than one someone) to proofread your game's script, or anything you write, really, before you publish it.

Personality, personality, PERSONALITY.
I got tired of these stupid games where the main guy is like so cool so nice so light-side-of-the-forceand and the vilain is like me-am-bAd

seriously the best game I ever played had 4 main characters: a girl who fears death, a girl who is bullyed by her classmates, a girl who says 2 jokes in every line and the main character..... WHO DOESNT HAVE A PERSONALITY
yeah, hes like the lost guy in the nowehre, living just becuase he got to live, nothing on his mind, hes happy....
believe me, its the profile of the perfect boring guy, but its thanks to those 3 girls around him that you feel his emptyness and, more importantly, his desire to be something, if there is something that main characters need, its the other-character-who-will-make-your-main-shine.

ie: in a game where the main guy is the dark-wise-intelligent guy, you will need something like a character who never stops talking, who yells and screams for nothing and who does remind me of these gangasta guys all wrapped in golden chains and stuff. it shows how much the main character is wise and darky compared to this one, and most importantly, makes players (hardcores or kids or whatever) say stuff like "this one is my favourite, hes soo funny" "this one is so saad... just like me"
I think that having a character that sounds like ppl is just great
or makes ppl thik of themselves is just great

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