One of the developers of "A Vampyre Story" recently posted this tiny pearl of info. on the official AVS forum:

Quote:

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Hi All,





Concerning characters and dialogue, I learned a very valuable lesson from Brad (Incredibles, Iron Giant) Bird when he taught at Cal Arts. He taught me that there are two types of story telling; action, and verbal. You have to make the right one for the right media. He was talking about the TV series A Family Dog based on the three short films he and Chris Buck made and that Tim Burton did character designs for, that showed as one episode of Steven Spielberg’s’ Amazing Stories. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/6302089611/103-3693783-0163047?v=glance . He said the TV series, produced by Tim Burton and Spielberg would fail because the A Family Dog original films were action based movies, where the main character was essentially a mime- a mute dog who expressed himself with acting. It was very expensive, fully 2d, animated acting that made that episode so good.





Well you can do that kind of acting if you have a big budget, like a feature film has, but you can’t when you are doing limited, low budget animation. And this was the problem with the Family Dog TV Show, they couldn’t fully animate the Dog because they just didn’t have the money. Brad Bird’s point was if you are going to do a TV show or a low budget animated film, it has to be about the dialogue, not the acting or animation, because you just simply can’t afford to do it. Brad proved this with his work on The Simpsons and King of the Hill. Both have ‘so so’ art and ‘so so’ animation, though it is story boarded and written incredibly well (The Simpsons has never ‘jumped the shark’).





So this got me to thinking about adventure games. Are they acting based or dialogued based? And it seems very clear to me they are dialogues based, more than TV even. A typical movie has 2000 lines of dialogue at most, and a typical TV show maybe half that. But a typical Lucas Arts adventure games has 7,000-10,000 lines of dialogue! That is four to five times as many lines as a typical movie. So to me, after game design, dialogue is the most important thing for a comedy adventure game, not the animation. But we still have the task of animating at least one TV show’s worth of animation to go along with those 7000 lines (that is another story).





So they best way to make the dialogue in our game good is to have a team of good writers, scripters and story board artists. One man alone can’t write all those lines and make each one entertaining. Ok. So Tim Schaffer can (he proved it with Full Throttle and Grim Fandango). But most writing mortals, like me, can’t. So right now we are starting to write all those lines. We are then going to chuck them and start over to make them even better, and then throw most of those out and make them even better then those.





A typical script writer has three goals: disseminate the plot, develop the characters and make the dialogue entertaining. An adventure game writer has all those goals and one more: to give the player the information he/ she needs to play the game. I am confident we can tell a great story, give the player the game play information he/ she needs, and develop interesting characters. To me, making the lines entertaining is the hard part.





And what will allow us to do that, without wasting money, is creating the whole game in a rough 2d format using freeware, first, before production. We use temp art and animation, and just wire the puzzle together, so the whole thing works. And then we go to town writing the silliest and funniest stuff we can think of that fits into the story, fits with the characters and situations. Then we test it and do it all over again, until we think it is pretty damn funny and entertaining. It’s a great way to prototype the whole game before we do a lick of final art, music, sound recording or 3d programming. It allows us the freedom to be spontaneous and creative, and, the best part, it doesn’t come out of out our production budget.





We just started it so I can’t tell you if it is a success yet, but we did practically the same thing on Curse of Monkey Island, and it worked great there, so I am confident we can get a lot of positive stuff out of this prototyping stage.






I hope that explains our writing and design philosophy.






Thanks,
Bill Tiller

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