10 Reasons Video Games Are The Hardest Thing To Write
7. Script Standards
If youve ever tried your hand at writing a script or a screenplay, youll likely have been both baffled and annoyed by all of the arbitrary rules you have to follow. Margins of particular widths, capitalised words seemingly at random film, radio, stage and even different types of TV programme all have their own unique formatting standards. The rules are so numerous and fiddly that professional tools like Final Draft rake in the money each year. Learning that games have no unified script formatting, then, might sound like glorious freedom from the tyranny of the TAB key, but its an anarchy thatll come back to bite the writer sooner or later. For starters, some bright spark (Im looking at you, programmers) might have decided itd be super-efficient just to enter dialogue directly into the game using a scripting tool or some XML, in which case there probably isnt a simple way to pull it all into one printable document. Having bagged Samuel L. Jackson for your game, you do not want to be the one presenting him with a mess of code-riddled dialogue to read, so youre going to be picking out the tags by hand the night before the recording if youre not careful. That being the case, you might have decided to keep your script in a more traditional style, particularly if youre used to formatting tools, but even this is a risky approach. Traditional scripts will buckle under the weight of all the chatter, alt lines, notes and context that needs to be given and actors wont thank you for drowning them in paper, either. As the writer, your best bet is to talk to the recording studio as early as possible and find out how they like to work. Either way, you can look forward to a lot of tedious copy-pasting thatll make you long for the clammy embrace of Final Draft.
