And then I realized that I'd left Kay-Kay on the ship for the last three or four missions, and I was still hearing it.
It was actually the mercenary/pirate/ninja using a generic human male enemy soundset. Apparently we didn't have enough lines for "I see an enemy," and "I see an enemy" as a condition was firing a trigger a bit too often.
Enemies.
Everywhere.
All. The. Time.
On ME2, we're trying to avoid that. In fact, if anyone ever says something to the effect of, "That sounds like a lot of work / memory / money," with regards to something regarding sound sets, all you really need to say is, "Enemies everywhere!", and they nod hastily and sign off on the idea. It's like the 9/11 of design justifications.
All the other writers are either in charge of bigger and scarier things or are leaving for other projects as soon as we get over the main writing hump, which means that I'm working on implementation of our good friends, the sound sets. This would utterly terrify me were it not for the fact that other people, people who know what they are doing, are working on the back-end stuff. We have an awesome fantastic system that works like a cross between our normal writing toolset and Outlook's rules filters, so I can simply set up something like "When: I: See an Enemy: Who is a turian: I say this line".
And then I just write "Turian enemies everywhere!", and we're good to go.
The systems designers and programmers are coming up with some great data about how often certain conditions fire, which is good, along with playtesting the in-progress soundsets we already have. About the hundredth time you hear the same follower shout "I've got the merc!" or "The merc is mine!", it becomes clear that wow, perhaps "Engaging an enemy of type ______" is not the most useful thing to have as a high-probability trigger, because, you know, if the main enemy for the level is a mercenary gang, then, uh, you might be hearing that line a bit. Or you set it to an absurdly low priority, or you give it a huge cooldown, in which case, why is that a sound set line and not a one-time ambient line that your followers shout the first time you see them? Writing a soundset line that you then have to effectively cut means you've wasted a bunch of resources, and are dragging those resources around for the entirety of the game just in case a mercenary happens to pop out of the woodwork somewhere.
The enemies also need some tweaking. I thought I was being cool by noting the races of the party members, but you know what? I know who's in my squad. I don't need to be reminded that there's a drell in my party. I'm aware. So about the hundredth time that some pinhead shouts, "We've got a hostile drell!" or "I'm engaging the drell!" or "The drell is down!", the gloss is off the excitement of my new drell follower.
One guy played a bunch of games and obsessively analyzed their chatter and banter systems, noting which types of calls they have tons of versions of for each actor, and which are rare but special. I'm working with him, with an eventual goal of getting more of the right calls and fewer of the wrong calls. (And some calls removed entirely -- see "Enemy merc sighted", which, you know, just makes your squad buddy sound like an idiot when you're half an hour into the merc-centric merc-mission. Wow, dude, really? Mercs? Here? Like the ones we've been blasting for half an hour? Thanks for the tip!)
Finally, we're trying to get in better touch with the core benefits of sound sets. Sound sets add flavor to the level, which is great. And they can also be little rewards -- a good solid enemy death cry lets the player know he just succeeded. But Mass Effect 1 didn't do a whole lot with a third area of sound sets -- giving hints.
In Mass Effect 1, if you shot a krogan, and it went down, that guy was getting back up in a moment. But a lot of players missed that. They'd shoot the krogan, then turn to shoot someone else, and then be surprised and unhappy when the krogan rifle-butted them in the head. This was a not-fun surprise. It's not like krogan are stealthy. The goal wasn't to trick anybody. It would have been fantastic if we'd had the time and the tech to note when a krogan was getting back up in regen mode, and to have someone in your squad shout something as simple as "Watch out! Krogan getting back up!"
We're trying to get things along those lines into Mass 2. Litlte things that aren't huge by themselves, but which make combat a little more intuitive and a little more fun. If we get them, I'll be jazzed. If the system ends up not working (and things do get cut for time or because they hit the memory too hard or for any other number of reasons), it will still be at least as good as it was in Mass 1.
Minus enemies everywhere.
Work: Sweet jesus, I am ready for the big heavy crunch to be over. This week saw some of my stuff head off to VO, and other stuff get prepped with last-minute rewrites. I'm also working on sound sets, trying to get some increased options so that people are less likely to shout "Enemies everywhere!" like the Sicilian from The Princess Bride every three to five seconds during combat.
I think next week will see me dive back into henchmen, but I'm not really sure.
In Mass 1, I was the little guy writing side quests. I can comfortably say that I'm embedded a bit deeper this time. I'm writing squad members. I'm writing big missions. And I've still got some tiny little roleplaying plots that warm my heart, in addition. I am really proud of this game, for all that the process of making it has killed my diet, my workout schedule, my sleep debt, and my eyesight.
Life: On Wednesday, I saw a post on the internal work messageboard declaring that a coworker's friend was moving, and had to either find a place for his cats THAT DAY or send them to the Humane Society. (While initially harboring uncharitable thoughts for people willing to toss their pets into a shelter to get euthanized when they move, I later found out that the coworker's friend was moving from Canada to the UK, and had no clue where he was going to be living, and had been looking for someplace to place the cats for four months, which made a bit more sense.)
Faced with, in effect, "Please take these cats, or we will kill them right now," we are now the proud owners of two new cats. They live in the Dude's room and are currently practicing their hiding and panicking skills. The old cats are reacting predictably. Raja is calm and unimpressed, Athena makes occasional investigative forays and then goes elsewhere to think, and Avelie makes horrific yowling kitty threats that are inversely proportional to his complete and utter inability to ever attack anything except the little blob of light made by the laser pointer.
Because I don't care. But not in the sense of not wanting it to be good. I don't care in the sense that I fully trust the dude whose area of expertise this is to do his thing. I don't care in the sense that I know it's going to kick ass, and I know it's going to kick more ass than it would kick if I butted in to give a non-that-field-of-expertise opinion. So... good not-caring. Have to work on a phrase.
Another term that is only, to my knowledge, negative in English: fan service. Not in the boobs sense, but in the "And now, for all of you who loved this character, BASK in the character development and angst and ability to stand up for that person and say stuff that suggests people should now begin high-fiving in slow motion while the end music from Top Gun plays, and... yeah" sense. The "Technically, this can't be a Mary Sue, because it's actually a character in the game" sense. And again, that sounds negative, but I really really love this plot. The tech designer has put in some fantastic combat, and the cinematic designer (well, design team, really) has made this into a fun roleplaying-heavy plot with some great chances for Shepard to get emotional. If it comes off as well as it's looking right now, some players are going to love this thing.*
So, you know, fan service. But fans need to be serviced, too.
* Bear in mind, my feelings now in no way correlate to the players' feelings when we ship this thing. I was really in love with some plots that people have called out as the absolute stupidest in Mass Effect 1. I'm aware of that. But if I dwell on that too much, I'll never reach. So I'm assuming that everyone is going to love this as much as I do.
I remember hearing talk about a pen & paper game, but I'm really impressed that we got Green Ronin. Whether they're going to use True 20 as a base for Dragon Age classes (Warrior, Expert, and Mage map pretty well to DA:O base classes) or develop a whole new system, I know they'll do it with respect for the IP.
Next week, I dive back into plots, which is a nice change of pace. After spending two weeks having people talk about their feelings, I'm looking forward to writing deep compelling lines like, "A blast that size will wipe out the entire colony!" or "We need to shut down those power generators to disable his shields!"
(I will try to write them better than that.)
I interviewed a potential writing candidate last week, and then went to lunch with him and other folks, including Dan, an old buddy from a previous project. It was fantastic.
Candidate: So writers kind of divide up tasks?
Me: Oh, yeah. I mean, on Mass 2, Mac is the lead, Chris is the IP guy, Brian is the character guy, Luke is the plot guy, and I blow stuff up.
Candidate: Um.
Me: Yep. Everyone else handles complex and nuanced character choices and moments of perfect beauty. I blow up helicopters.
(everyone laughs except Dan)
Me: See, you all laugh, except for Dan. Because he's edited me.
Dan: He's kind of telling the truth.
Me: I mean, it's like, look, once you've blown up one, you've already got the visual effects and the animation and all of it. Couldn't we just reuse it a couple of times, show it from different angles or something, kind of make it fresh and new?
Dan: It's really good that you're at least focused on reusing assets.
Me: I do what I can.
Once again proving myself to be the Michael Bay of whatever writing team I'm on.
It's coming up on half past midnight. Hopefully the Damsel will be home from editing soon.
The hard part of this stage of development isn't the writing itself. That's what it always is, albeit on a tighter schedule and longer hours. The hard part is staying positive.
Everybody is short-tempered and grumpy. Everyone is having trouble trusting that the other guy is doing the best job he can. Everyone is working longer hours and doesn't have time for people to come in and bug them, and everyone also needs to talk to that coworker about the thing that is blocking them from getting their work done.
I've been fortunate. I've been working hard, but I've only worked a few late nights and weekends. The Damsel, as the only editor currently there (we're getting Cookie back in a few months, hopefully), is getting hit a lot harder. And some of the other writers are getting crushed. And what it leads to is a loss of breathing room, of buffer space that keeps you from going ballistic when something goes wrong. You get people griping about stuff they would have sighed about earlier in the project, or yelling about stuff they would have griped about. Feelings get hurt. Grudges get held.
And at the end of the day, you're still trying to make a goddamn video game. I got paid to write dialog that made a few people laugh out loud. I got paid to write something that was fun and nice and cool, and to write something else that was badass, and... I think people are going to love this game.
I just hope everyone is still speaking to each other when it ships.
But again, every day, at least one that I can look at with pride. Things that will make people laugh. Things that will catch people by surprise with the gut-punch of emotion. Things that build on the fantastic universe all the big-boy writers developed in the previous game and hopefully do it justice.
I am going to enjoy a non-working weekend with gusto. Next week, I apparently start writing a henchman. Again, exciting and terrifying and a little weird to realize that I've worked here four years without yet writing a henchman's big dialog. The elevator banter, yes. The asides in big conversations, sure. But never the real "Hey, let's talk at length about my parents / job / species / biotic ability" whabam talk.
One thing that has really impressed me on this project has been the buy-in. I passed the cinematic designer working on a level I'd written, and the real VO had just come in to replace the text-to-speech stuff we use as a placeholder. (We used to use nothing. The text-to-speech is better, because it at least lets you get a hint about whether a given line is way too long or sounds stupid when read aloud.) And the dude was bouncing about how much better the scenes were with the real VO. I'm guessing he worked late to move it over, get the timing working right with the real lines and everything. Being on a team with people so excited about it, knowing that people in the other department have your back and want this thing to rock just as much as you do... it's an awesome feeling.
Next week should be fun.
Then I thought about it, and I realized that the messageboard guy was actually probably right. As a writer, I get so focused on things that I stop seeing everything but a tiny fragment of the whole. I overlook all the lines that:
- Are there because we don't have custom animations and have to make up for that lack with dialog. ("Here, let me hack into their database.")
- Take the place of art we don't have, or cinematics, for that matter. ("This armor must be hundreds of years old.")
- Explain the rules of a puzzle or trick section. ("We'll need to disable the power relays in the right order.")
- Have to be duplicated for all the squad members, even the squad members who logically wouldn't say anything about what you're saying but have to do so for one of the above reasons. ("I like blowing stuff up. Maybe if we blow up that power relay, it will help.")
- Have to be written as neutral because the player could come to that line from either an angry line or a happy line. ("But enough about that. Is there anything else I can tell you?")
And if you ask a writer, he or she will rarely remember those lines. Those are the game-writing equivalent of elbows. They do their job, and if you're lucky, you never notice them any more than that, because their job was to be invisible.
(As a side note, this is hardly the only medium that has lines like this. I remember my writing teacher, Pat Murphy, talking about how sometimes you needed to get a character from one side of the room to the other, and it couldn't always be brilliant prose, and sometimes you just had to say, "Hey, if it can't be good, at least make it short," and write, "He crossed the room." Every medium has moments where the necessity of conveying the continuity overrides the desire to make something that is beautiful on its own.)
And yet, for all that, if you ask me, I will say that I think BioWare's dialog is good, because I'm not looking at all that stuff. I'm looking for the moments, the moments like the ones I live for. You hit a point in a plot and you slap down a few words, and right there, you know, you just know with absolute certainty, that that's the line people are going to be talking about later. That's the line people will be quoting to each other on messageboards or arguing about at cons. Those are the lines you remember. Those are the ones you fight for. Those are the ones that make you proud to come in every morning or stay late at night.
(And as a side note, the fact that you know it doesn't make it true. Sometimes it falls flat -- your brilliant writing didn't translate well to VO, or didn't work structure-wise in the overall plot, or came at the wrong time in the game, and the line you thought everyone would love is met with a shrug. Other times, something you toss off in five minutes becomes someone's favorite line in the entire game. These things happen -- which in no way invalidates the feeling you get while writing the line. Why gamers react the way they do is a post for people smarter than I am. This is just about the writing end of it.)
A lot of people who wish they could write video-game dialog think about the shiny bits. Sometimes they'll even make snarky comments about BioWare's dialog (or Obsidian's, or Bethesda's, or anyone else's), saying that they could do better. Nine times out of ten, they're a) wrong, and b) looking at the shiny bits, the bits that are the reason you want to come in every morning. They're missing the hinge-lines, the structural-support lines, the ugly clunky necessary bits that make the whole thing go. Maybe they could do that. I can. But it's not the ubiquitous skill some people expect.
And if you're lucky, I think, you get one great line per day. That's what you fight for. A whole lot of structure and necessary stuff and "Oh, what if you come back to talk to this guy again after getting the plot but not completing it yet." A whole lot of hinges and structure, all so that you can have one line in there somewhere at the end of the day that makes you say, "Yeah, they'll remember that one."
I was at work from ten to midnight last night (after the boys were asleep), and on Sunday as well. I got, I don't know, two or three lines on each of those nights.
Those were good nights. Higher than average. Those are the crunch nights you live for.
My buddy Dusty (lead tech designer for Mass Effect 2) was part of a presentation on how the level design process has changed from Mass 1 to Mass 2. Somebody took a video of our video, and you can hear him talking a little. There are also some good writeups of the presentation Dusty and Corey did.
Dusty, along with everyone else, has been busting his butt for more than a year on Mass 2, and I'm really jazzed that he finally had the chance to actually talk about it.
Some stuff went out for voice-over. It included one of my plots.
I got to hear a couple of audio lines, including a take on the line that made my wife (the editor) sniffle when she read it.
The actor just fricking nailed it. Add in cinematics and final art, and this is a conversation that could make some players (even those more jaded than my wife, who cries at the end of every Pixar movie) choke up.
I am really really jazzed. The actor really seems to connect with the character, and it's just... really really good.
These are the days that make me love coming into the office.
I make a sad-ass effort to make a combine tractor out of Kid K'nex. The Dude is unimpressed. The Bud wants to take it apart.
I put them in the bath, take time to slack on the computer while the Damsel lies on the couch.
I get them clean. The Damsel lays out pajamas.
We get them dry and clothed. We try to remember whose turn it is to go to sleep with whom.
I get mine to sleep, head into the other room, take over for the Damsel.
She goes back to work.
I get the other one down. Have a snack. Surf the web. Write. Occasionally ping her on IM. Write some more.
I mix chocolate milk and regular milk for the Bud, who will wake up sometime between midnight and two. I put it in the microwave and set the timer, so that all I have to do is press Start.
Eventually, I try to go to sleep. Before I do, the Bud wakes up crying. I go in, pick him up, cuddle him. He wants Mom.
I get him into the kitchen and press start. 44 seconds later, he has hot chocolate. He grabs for it as I screw the lid on, and the lid crunches on his fingers. My plan to lull him back to sleep gently is pwned.
We cuddle in his bed for a long while. He eventually stops crying and drinks the hot chocolate between post-sob hiccups. Sometime around two, I decide that he's asleep, and I head back to my room.
The Bud toddles out of his room moments later, and I give up and bring him into my bed to sleep. He's happy until he realizes that Mom isn't there, and then there's more sobbing.
Shortly after he calms down, the Dude, awakened by the sobbing, comes into the room and climbs into bed as well.
The Damsel gets home sometime around four in the morning, and she finds us all dog-piled in the bed together, finally asleep and ready to be sleep-deprived and short-fused and brain-dead tomorrow.
Tomorrow, we repeat.
BioWare makes really good games. I am incredibly jazzed about the game I'm working on, and I'm pissed as hell that I don't have a computer capable of playing Dragon Age right now, or I'd be doing so instead of making any progress whatsoever on the novel. Whatever happens, the company is going to come out of it strong and successful, and if something unexpected happens, it will still have been the best job I've ever had.
Thanks to everyone who responded to the earlier job worry. I will go back to working on Elcor Hamlet.
I am really scared.
I'm not saying this as an EA employee who knows a whole lot of frightening stuff you don't. I'm saying this as an EA employee who reads Kotaku every morning with his hot chocolate.
My boss and I said at some point back in October that we really just wanted one month where we could just do our jobs without worrying about the project massively changing direction, someone high-up leaving the company, or some other big boom. Just a month to put our heads down and bust our asses making a game without worrying about politics or the future or what the hell those star destroyers are firing at up there in orbit over the pissant desert planet we live on.
We're both on different projects now. I'd still love to have that month.
There's a cold and mercenary whisper making the rounds. Not a rumor, but a piece of advice. Don't try to outrun the bear. You can't outrun the bear. Just outrun the guy next to you. Make sure that the bear gets somebody else before it gets you. Don't be the least valuable person on the project. Don't be the one no other project would want to take should something happen to your project.
And you know, christ, I already try to be that guy. I've got friends on other projects, and my shit gets done on time. But what the hell kind of way is that to make it through a week? "Hey, this week I made a strong case not to be voted off the island!" How long can you think that kind of crap before it moves from "Make myself look good" to "Make the other guy look bad"? I'd rather get laid off than turn into the politicking jackass who thinks that sort of garbage every day.
We just bought a house in October. I've got two kids. I don't know what happens to our Canadian residency status if the Damsel and I both get laid off. I'm coming up on five years of experience in the gaming industry, and if I get laid off, I have no idea where I'm going jobwise. Somewhere else in the gaming industry? Who exactly is looking for writers/designers right now? Some other industry? How am I going to convince an ad agency or a technical website that five years of writing video-game dialog amounts to jack in their field?
And selfishly, petulantly, as I said to the Damsel last night, "This is my fricking dream job. After being here, I don't want to get paid less to put on a tie every morning and go to a job I don't love."
The Damsel told me that this job is a lot like the fun parts of college, and to treat it that way. Love every minute of it, hit it as hard as you can, and if it ends, at least you'll have gotten everything you can out of it.
So on Monday, I go back, and I bust my ass, and I focus on how much I love this job.
And at night, I start looking at fallback options, since all my bosses' good intentions and genuine caring -- and there's a lot of it, sincerely, all the way up the line -- won't matter if somebody a thousand miles away decides that one number needs to change to another.
This week rocked.
It was one of those weeks where I felt like the team was kicking ass, and I felt like I was helping. We're trying to get a certain percentage of the game to a certain level of done-ness for Christmas, and it has everyone busting their butts to get things both good and stable. Because I'm a recent add-on, I didn't have as many areas to worry about as the other writers, so when my own stuff was done, I got to go around and do spot-work, writing a few of the unattached and less important conversations for other areas. It sounds like grunt work, but it requires being able to dive into an unfamiliar level and come up to speed pretty quickly. Beyond that, it was fun. As New Guy on Project, it was great to see a bunch of areas that I'd just read about beforehand and talk to the other writers and ask questions and make jokes and generally, you know, feel like part of a team.
I finished up by doing some playtesting, and I'm amazed at how good the game looks this early in the production cycle. I also filed enough bugs that the lead writer at one point refered to me as Bug Boy. (My wife, the editor, notes how much fun it is to have three writers independently file bugs on the same typo. It also gives her a good idea of who is playing through what. "Oh, looks like Patrick's heading over there next, huh?" I suppose it's a bit like blood spatter, looking at a spray pattern of filed bugs to see how someone progresses through the game. I wish I could come up with a less CSI-ish metaphor, but there it is.)
So anyway, there it is. No great quotes I can pass on -- the ones that made the whole room laugh are also the ones that tell way too much about the game -- but damn, this was a fun week. After next week, we're on break, and I'll spend some of the break playing our game, and some of the break playing Dragon Age, and some of the break playing with my kids. :)
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lotusice had some interesting thoughts about it.In far less important news, the new BioWare blog has a three-part piece by me about romances in games (largely pen and paper games, actually, and taken at a high level). They are variously here, here, and here, and the powerful arguments I make are apparently so convincing and audacious that the entire Internet has been rendered silent when faced with them. That, or nobody has heard of the BioWare blog yet.
Also, I'm now on Mass Effect 2! I was really excited about the small part I had in the first game, and I'm looking forward to contributing here.
When your job is to write plots, put logic on plots, and document plots on the wiki, and you can't access the dialog toolset, the plot state manager, or the wiki, that's the company's way of telling you to clock out a bit early that day. I felt bad for my boss's wife, who works in Audio and grudgingly admitted that she could still technically do things even without the network. I believe my boss had a beer in her honor.
