James Cavin Writes

Is what you are doing right now less emotionally fulfilling than moving large bags of rat feces? A useful metric for judging your current course of action. It's easy to get lost in the hustle and bustle of particularly chaotic industries and end up devoting large amounts of time and energy to prejects without actually considering whether or not they are, in fact, slowly crushing your soul. Fortunately, I have a foolproof metric by which to judge any endeavor mid-undertaking: Is what I'm doing right now less emotionally fulfilling than moving large bags of rat feces? The answer is sometimes surprising. You see, back in the halcyon days of my youth, I once took up a job at a national pet store chain which shall remain anonymous. (Never draw the ire of an entity with access to infinite malevolent, inbred gerbils*.) *Infinite in number and malevolence ...and inbreeding. My logic was as follows: "I like animals. I would a...

Temple Run: Legends was a really interesting challenge in general, but the trickiest part was definitely the limited time events that the design team wanted to do as post-launch content. The "main game" is a linear string of hundreds of also linear levels (it's the first Temple Run game where you can reach a finish line!) This linearity gave us the power to have a fun Saturday-morning-cartoon-show-style narrative attached. (Time and budget and layoffs complicated things, but the end result is still a zany little linear romp with a fun roster of pulp adventure heroes from across time and space that I'm still quite proud of.) The player started out with franchise mascots Guy Dangerous and Scarlett Fox, and then made their way across Temple Run's lost world, discovering mysteries and unlocking new allies to run as they went. NOW, having established this zany little linear story, the design team wanted to add limited time events that players could ...

Our premise is simple: Don't try to use story to contradict everything else that the player sees and does. It's actually a shockingly easy thing to fall into: players see the visuals and mechanics of the game and come away with a conclusion. Is it not the conclusion that we want them to have? Do we have a different narrative in mind? Quick! Send in a bit of story to tell them they have the wrong idea! WHAT THEY HAVE SEEN AND PLAYED HAS DECEIVED THEM. THE TRUE TRUTH IS WHAT THIS CONTRADICTING SNIPPET OF DIALOGUE HAS TO SAY! Tragically, videogames, are first and foremost, a visual medium. This means that if the player sees something, they believe it. If the visuals tell the player something, it is going to be an uphill battle to convince them that things are otherwise. If you ever find yourself trying to use the game's narrative to tell players that things are actually different from what the visuals lead them to believe, you are going against th...

A quick and simple rundown of the power of "player fantasy" in narrative design - OR - Narrative happens everywhere all the time on every single screen. This is a super simple narrative design trick that I've used on basically every project that I've worked on for the last decade. (I suppose that it actually dabbles a little bit in the fabled User Experience Design, for those of you who might be interested in such things.) Before I get any further, I should make it clear that I don't mean "narrative" here as character dialogue and text logs and big cinematic cut scenes. I mean narrative at its most primal: THEME and DREAM. I mean… (*Cue drumroll and/or epic eunuch choir chanting*) THE PLAYER FANTASY I use the term "player fantasy" a lot when I'm talking to clients, and I almost always have to stop and define it really quick. It's a weird sounding term, but the idea is actually incredibly simple:...

Are you human being who sometimes must describe things to other people to convince them to give you money to feed your children and/or dangerous addiction to high-end Lego castles ? Are these things which you are describing computer games on a digital storefront such as, to grab a random example, Valve Corporation's STEAM ? Well then, I have a beautiful, simple formula to make your description-writing life much easier. You should care, because I actually spent a couple of years as a subcontractor working on Valve Corporation's Steam storefront, and this was a formula that my team and I came up with to help smaller game developers create better, more discoverable store pages for their games. You see, in the before times, in the long long ago – Actually, before we get into that, here's the formula: Who am I? What's my goal? How do I do it? Or, as I like to think of it, RGG: Role, Goal, Gameplay. You can describe these things in basically an...

  There's a finite amount of text space in your game. It's a terrible shame to waste any of it. Item descriptions are actually one of my favorite things to work on in game writing and narrative design. It's an incredible opportunity to do all sorts of things that you couldn't do in your main story! Yet, for a lot of projects, this sort of "flavor text" exists just to exist: Something ought to go here, so here's something. This sums up 95% of mediocre videogame assets. An animation ought to go here – here's something. A texture ought to go here – here's something. Music ought to go here – here's something. A line of dialogue ought to go here – here's something. THIS IS A GREAT TRAGEDY. Nothing is just there. THEME HAPPENS EVERYWHERE ALL THE TIME. Indulge me with a quick thought experiment: 1. How many items are in your game? (Note: You can include anything else...

  – A Tragedy of Seeing With Open Eyes – – – Also Some Rambling Advice about Narrative Delivery Systems – – – – – And Why Your Narrative Designer Should Draw Even If It's Terrible – – – Long long ago, in the before times, when phones flipped, and skinny jeans had yet to crush their first American reproductive capabilities, I started my very first professional game writing job (the criminally cult Defender's Quest: Valley of the Forgotten ). I was working at a very small studio (the incredibly plucky Level Up Labs). Everyone was wearing a lot of hats. One of the hats that I ended up with (mostly because I grabbed it and ran away before anyone could take it back) was "Just Passable Enough Character Artist." This is actually not a terrible thing for a writer to do. Seriously, I would recommend giving it a shot, if you have even an ounce of artistic talent. Our "narrative-driven tower defense RPG hybrid" (like many games in its budget bracket) ...