Scott Chen, OPUS story writer
OPUS game scene
OPUS : The Day We Found Earth
Well, right now Ascender almost reach the finish line, but we are still in the pit stop of a few laps to go. Polishing time before the checkered flag waved! So, I have to make my mouth shut to prevent anything spoiled. I want to share my checklist to you at this moment, the big parts before wrapping up:
There’s more things has been done in past weeks. I feel so lucky that I can attend the Casual Connect event in Singapore from 17 – 19 May 2016. I have a chit chat with some story writers and learn some lessons from the story gurus. I’ve met this guy, Scott Chen, the story writer of OPUS : The Day We Found Earth, story driven telescope simulator-like game. He’s fantastic! He shared that the power of his game is the story and the gameplay authenticity. So, I asked him if he had the same struggle that I had as writer, and he’s not denying it neither agree with it, he is quite confident with his English and story concept. Lesson learned : Proof reading and dialogue fixing is one thing but having a confident in your writing is more important. His work is picked by Google Play Store as Editor’s Choice under the name of Team Signal, studio game based in Taiwan.
In addition, I saw another amazing story-based game called Désiré, black and white point and click adventure from France developed by Sylvain Seccia. Best Game Narrative in Indie Prize Showcase! I heard his accent and his speech when receiving the award, his not so fluent in English, I think, but still, he won! So, lesson learned : even English isn’t your first language, but go for it! You still can make the best story! No need to worry so much about it!
Best Game Narrative in Indie Prize Asia 2016
It’s been a quite remarkable story writer experience for me attending the Casual Connect Asia 2016. Last week, I also met one guy, Cipto Adiguno, the brain behind story in Celestian Tales: Old North, a classic JRPG from Indonesia who awarded as Best Game Narrative and Game of The Year in Game Developer Gathering Indonesia 2015. He’s so humble and we have quite long chit chat about being story writer and struggle delivering a lot of quests and dialogues. Lesson learned : If you find a publisher from US or UK, surely they will help you with narrative issues, but mostly you can make it in low priority because it takes a lot of effort if the number of narrative texts reach thousands. He said that player will understand what you want to deliver if you have a good basic in English.
No need to be so worry about that, visualization and gameplay is the most important part, you just have to make sure the story is firmed. I’m quite agree with this as in this article said “Realizing that 95% of people won’t remember a thing you’ve written a week after playing……………. They won’t do any of the sidequests, they won’t read any of the lore, they won’t care about any of the time you spent trying to make sure. And that’s okay.” With all these things connected, my confident is boosting up, as a newbie in game writing world, I feel proud that I can give my idea and writings in Ascender and become part of GameChanger as story writer. When I received the news about we won Best Game Narrative 2016 in Indie Game Festival Indonesia, I feel like “Really? How’s that possible? With all those grammatical errors?”, now I’m assured that I just need to continue polishing Ascender’s narrative parts and never stop learning to write an amazing game story from experienced one. Side Project: Read all those Warcraft’s tales (my book still being captive by Ruby anyway) and start to write Ascender’s book.
Best Game Narrative in Indie Game Festival Indonesia 2016
Garnet is signing out from GameChanger Team Headquarter!
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