TECHNES Encyclopedia Database

Adventure Game Studio is suitable for graphic adventure projects in which a character is guided through environments to be examined, with objects to be gathered, characters to interrogate and puzzles to solve. Authors publish games (often short and closer to an interactive story than to a pure game) made entirely with this software, but their ease of use also makes it possible to use them to make prototypes and to come up with ideas as part of a larger project.

In the case of production that goes beyond “author games,” scripting video games involves two distinct processes (often assumed by separate parties): narrative design and writing. Narrative designers are tasked with imagining events, providing details about characters, linking scenes and planning permutations in the plot so that they harmonize with the ergodic structure of the game. Writers, who are often closer to being editors, produce the textual elements the player will encounter in the game (these are assets, just like the graphic or sound elements), because unlike scriptwriting for cinema, the text is not designed to disappear once the images are produced: in many video games, the aesthetic experience includes reading numerous elements, written and delivered as is. Given the need for the script to become part of the ergodic structure, and given the variability of video games and their configurations, there is no defined format for the script of a video game. The term script itself is not universal, nor is the term scénario in French.

For the narrative design, scriptwriters can use any ordinary word processing software. Film script formatting is not required, because there is no attempt to match the length on the page and the length on screen. Similarly, because there is no film shoot to plan, titling the scenes has no use. The only exception is the non-interactive visual sequences called cut-scenes. For these the Hollywood script format (and software such as Final Draft) is used to guide the crew – which will essentially make a short film – and furnish a document familiar to the actors who will come and record their dialogue. For the rest of the narrative design documents (character profiles, maps of the world, working documents for the crew or for an internal or external pitch, etc.), scriptwriters will employ several kinds of regular word processing software (PowerPoint, Photoshop or an equivalent, etc.) to carry out simple editing. On larger-scale projects, a wiki is used to store information in an encyclopedic database, ensuring the synchronization of documentation and its dissemination to every member of the crew.

Video games with conditional narratives benefit from being scripted in software which provides visual representation of arborescences, such as Twine or CeltX in Game & VR mode. articy:draft is currently used for storing a project’s assets (reference drawings, character models, animated sequences, character profiles, texts, sounds and music, etc.) in a visual database, because in addition to showing arborescences and graphs of connections between elements (which facilitates the narrative design work), it offers direct incorporation in popular game engines (Unity and Unreal). This enables the artisans making the video game to draw pre-constructed assets directly from the articy database, which the scriptwriters can continue to add to and rework at the same time.