Lamplight City Narrative Commentary, Part 3: The process of script editing
This is a series of spoiler-free (or -lite) transcripts from my portion of the Lamplight City developer commentary, which includes behind-the-scenes insights and anecdotes about the story writing and editing process. Start with Part 1.
I recently witnessed an entertaining onstage conversation between 80 Days writers Jon Ingold and Meg Jayanth, in which they discussed, among other things, two different approaches to writing: “plotting” and “pantsing.” Plotters plan everything out in detail from the beginning, and pantsers make it up as they go along, flying by the seat of their pants.
I am very much a plotter, and Francisco is much more of a pantser. Working together on this project required some compromises.
As a solo developer responsible for nearly all aspects of production, Francisco has traditionally designed and written his games in parallel with all the work of coding and creating assets, starting at the beginning and filling in scenes with rooms and sprites and scripts and text as he goes on in chronological order until it’s done. After working out his initial concepts out on notebook paper, once he starts building, documents don’t come into it.
I, on the other hand, love documentation. Left to my own devices, I’ll produce more of it than most of my non-writer colleagues will ever care to read. I take a very structural approach, working out major themes and arcs and plot beats and scene breakdowns, rearranging things and filling in finer and finer detail at each stage until finally getting to the moment-by-moment actions and actual words of the text.
In order to edit the dialogue for the game, one form of documentation at the very least was non-negotiable: I needed some actual scripts to edit.
For most of the development of Lamplight City, the editing process was pretty backwards. Francisco copied the dialogue he’d already written in the engine out of the game’s code and pasted it line-by-line into a Google Doc, which I edited in “suggestion” mode. Then he accepted or rejected my edits and made rewrites in response to my comments, and when everything was done, copied and pasted the new lines back into the game code. Cumbersome to say the least.
We’re adopting a saner workflow for our next project, Rosewater, which we’re co-writing. Francisco is still building the whole game a scene at a time, but with only very short placeholder dialogue. (It’s pretty amusing, too.) All the game’s actual text will be outlined and written out in scripts first, edited, and then put into the engine.
And I’ll have much more opportunity to do my plotting this time.
Next: Iterating Mrs. Hanbrook
Back to Part 1
