Insomniac Games recently released a 240-page hardcover book that contains a portion of Marvel’s Spider-Man‘s script. The book offers a very rare look into a critical aspect of video game development and it’s unheard of for developers to release scripts to the public.
Speaking to Vice’s Patrick Klepek, Spider-Man lead writer Jon Paquette said that the developer wanted to help educate people on how video game scripts are written.
“I get asked all the time, usually from students, ‘What does a video game script look like? I want to get my hands on one so I can learn what you guys do and how I can maybe become a game writer one day,’” he said.
According to Paquette’s estimates, the Spider-Man team wrote roughly 800,000 words. He added that if all the pages were included in the book, it would be bigger than The Lord of the Rings trilogy.
“We have an online database where we put all the scripts into,” Paquette added. “Some of those scripts are just cinematics that are more linear, like you’re used to in a film or a TV script. Some of the scripts that we put in the database are just thousands of lines of dialogue.”
Paquette also offered a brief explanation of what goes into writing game experiences.
This is the part that not a lot of people really understand. It’s very collaborative. We work for the designers in this capacity, because the designers come up with the gameplay and we help them structure the experience. We actually do a lot of usability testing and we ask them specific questions like, ‘Do you know what your objective is here? Do you understand why you’re doing this one thing?’ and when they say ‘No, I have no idea but it’s super fun.’ Then, I’m the one that failed there. So then I need to go back and say ‘Okay, how can we help the player understand exactly what it is that they need to do?’
Interesting read! You can check out the full interview at the link below.
[Source: Vice]
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