My favorite way to edit a game around 30k words
Over the last 5 years I've worked on around 9 different games with 30-50k words. These were all "funded indie" or "AA" games with linear plots - or plots that are lightly nonlinear, but constrained in a predictable way by player upgrades and ability unlocks.
These are my favorite games to work on. They are long enough that they can have meaty plots, and short enough that a narrative team of around two people can write and polish the whole thing up without too much suffering. Often, the "critical path" of a game like this is even shorter, perhaps as short as 15k words - so the linear throughline of the story is a very manageable chunk of text for a single person to edit.
My favorite way to polish games like these is to do a series of end-end-to-end revisions with a two person team - ideally a team of writers who are capable of both writing and providing editorial feedback on each others' work. Sometimes this means one writer and one editor who likes writing. I've done some version of this on 4 games in the last 5 years, each time with different collaborators, and it's a pretty reliable way to approach polish during the final third or so of script development.
This edit pass should take place only when the story's major topics, beats, locations, set pieces, etc. are all pretty much locked. However, this process does not require you to have a shippable, fit-to-purpose story to lay on top of all that art and engineering labor. By the end of development, the average game has been through so many trials - content cuts in particular - that its design has probably diverged from the story-as-originally-planned.
You may enter this period with the following problems:
- Character relationships that don't yet work
- Protagonists that playtesters don't even like
- Many sentences that aren't anywhere close to good enough to ship
- Serious disjoint of some kind between the story you planned and the game you developed
- Key textual moments in the plot - like the moments within conversations where facts are revealed, or relationships are advanced - which are in the wrong place either physically within the game world, or within the timeline of the player's experience
- Plot holes
- Regions of the game which are fatally overcrowded with conversation and text, to the point where it diminishes the player experience
Almost every single team is going to have one or even many of these problems within the last third of their development. Your narrative polish process is almost always going to involve the kind of thing which your boss might characterize as a "serious problem!!!" or even "something that could ruin the game."
The type of script revision I'm about to describe demonstrates rapid progress to those same bosses - and to collaborators, like art and design teams. It also helps narrative communicate their strategy, priorities, and triage process, and can help kick off major conversations with other departments.
You may read this document and say: yes, obviously! This is how I edit a game, too! I agree: nothing here is smart or revolutionary in any way whatsoever. But a lot of people straight up haven't yet learned how to do stuff like this. The things I prefer to do are not obvious to all narrative workers and especially not obvious to all gamedev leaders. So I figured it's worth writing out!
The plan: revise your entire game in 2 -3 week timeboxes
Basically: I like to pick a time window - usually either 2 or 3 weeks - and commit to editing every single part of the game's critical path during that period. I do this so that I have an opportunity to treat the whole critical path as a single deliverable.
I do NOT rewrite every sentence in the game, and I do NOT lift the whole thing to final, shippable quality all at once. Instead I apply very focused sets of changes to the game in sets over multiple passes.
If you do something like this, your collaborators are going to see that you fix some, but not all, of the story's problems every time you do an edit pass. And they will know ahead of time exactly which problems you're fixing during each pass, and why - because you provided them with a plan ahead of time.
You don't have to write 15-30k words in two weeks - you just have to read 15-30k words, and edit much fewer of them, with the labor shared across two or more people. That's very, very achievable, if you prep well. Usually, I only do this 2 or 3 times in the entire development of the game, with long breaks between. It's a great way to get a lot done very quickly and to defend your time to focus on story.
It's also amazing at getting you a time block where you can keep the entire story in your head. I love being able to focus so closely that I can keep a deep working memory of everything in the story, and can think of it as a whole work rather than a series of level by level deliverables.
Step 1: Structure and track your game content for editorial
This might be obvious to you, but I've seen some crazy stuff, so I can't assume: you need a game script which is structured into digestible sections and tracked in a big spreadsheet publicly accessible to the rest of the dev team.
This spreadsheet should include every single scene or dialogue exchange in the entire game - every single independent nugget of narrative content. These need to be bucketed into sections - chapters, levels, zones, whatever works for you - which are short enough to be individually owned by a single person during a revision pass. (I like to make the buckets short enough that an efficient writer could revise the whole thing's critical path in a single day.)
For a mid-sized narrative game, I find that it's better to track this stuff in spreadsheets than in task management software like Jira. Spreadsheets allow you to navigate the data more quickly, and to transform the data effortlessly - using formulas, conditional formatting, and adding or removing columns to track additional information.
I find that I spend a lot of time before and during an edit pass manipulating data in a spreadsheet. I CONSTANTLY learn about new things I want to track. Who is assigned to edit this scene? What are they planning to do when they edit it? Which characters are present? Which of them are speaking? What art or audio needs does this scene have? Is a specific plot point or thematic element referenced here? What triggers this scene, and what causes it to expire from availability?
You can add and delete columns forever. You can navigate between rows as fast as you can think. You do not need a license to access a Google Sheets spreadsheet; everyone on the team can see it; nontechnical people like marketers and PR vendors and members of your legal team can see it and know how to use it. I always use a spreadsheet until I absolutely cannot.
Step 2: Timebox the revisions
Timebox each full script pass very rigidly. You are doing this for two reasons: to make sure you complete your goals, and to make sure you can defend your time from other asks.
Tell everyone in the studio: "For the next two weeks, we're rewriting the script!! That's our main focus, and we don't want to do other work." You will need to cancel meetings and clear time to schedule daily meetings with other writers, as well as other collaborators, like designers. Depending on your studio culture, this doesn't always work, but it's always worth trying to clear your schedule.
My other big recommendation is to refuse to actively align these revision passes to the sprint schedule. Your revisions may be one or three weeks long, rather than two. Start your timebox whenever it's convenient for you and make sure it is long enough for your team to touch every single scene in the game's critical path without crunching. The sprint doesn't rule your work here - the script does.
I do not recommend doing multiple of these revisions back to back, or even standardizing the time between each script lift. Rewriting a game in a single push is demanding, even when you do it in regular 8-hour days. You should not be doing this all the time.
Instead, do one of these revisions in time for text to make it into a new build, then spend a bunch of time playing the build, or doing formal playtests, and interpreting feedback so that you can plan the next revision pass. I do not set the date for script revision 2 until script revision 1 is complete, new feedback is in, and we know what we want to do next.
Step 3: Pick your focus
Each revision pass should focus on a smallish number of very focused, script-wide changes. I like to make systematic, whole-plot revisions to the script. Here are some examples of edit passes identical or similar to ones that I've done in the past:
The playtesters all hate the protagonist and think their personality isn't accurate to the established character. We need to establish sympathy for them, fix how they talk about themselves and their goals, and revise much of their dialogue throughout the game. We may even need to change their actual personal plot in a way that doesn't affect art or game sequencing - dialogue only.
The playtesters all hate the supporting cast and think they're stupid and boring. We need to add them to more scenes, give them more interesting and rewarding conversations, and complicate their arcs. This will create major changes to most levels in the game.
The game's conversations are all too long and need to be pared down. Most conversations need to become 20-50% shorter. We aren't changing any plot points. We will be removing some characters from certain scenes and may need to create new scenes to highlight their experiences elsewhere.
For Reasons, all the scenes related to player objectives need to be completely rewritten. Characters need new conclusions to their arcs... without asking for any new art or level design changes.
We are moving the middle of the game forward a few hours. The major reveal moments that occurred in the middle now need to occur in earlier levels. We need to hint at these reveals in new places, make the reveals in new places, and then include followup and recap conversations in new places. Everything needs to flow well and a sense of momentum needs to be established throughout the middle of the game.
These are really big changes, but they are focused enough to put a boundary around the work you will do. Each one could be an entire revision pass that could take you two weeks.
Generally, you need to both identify the problem and choose a strategy for solving it... but the examples above contain those solutions already. So: assume that hidden somewhere here in step 3 is the process of, say, convincing your creative director that you have picked a good problem and a good solution for it. Or perhaps there is a hidden step somewhere in here where you identify the problem, then work actively with other leaders to find a solution. There is no good way to templatize a problem like THAT... but you must do it before the next step:
Step 4: Plan literally everything you are doing ahead of time :) before writing anything :)
After choosing a theme like this, I like to go to my big fucking spreadsheet, look at every single scene, and figure out whether it will be impacted by the edit pass. Basically: plan out every single thing you are going to do in the revision before you do it.
I like to do this with the entire narrative team present. No rewriting happens in the room. Don't do a full line-by-line script read. Expect everyone to attend this meeting with a general understanding of the whole plot, and make sure your spreadsheet contains notes clear enough that you can tell what each scene is supposed to be doing. Then, keep the spreadsheet on one monitor, the script on another, and just scan every scene to predict whether it will need work or not.
Take notes about your work in whatever way your team prefers. Putting the notes directly on scenes in your spreadsheet may be good enough, but this is also a great time to create a list of edit tasks in whatever task tracking software your company uses.
You should also prepare more detailed notes in the form of a document you can present to the rest of your team. You can then tell them, "Here's the major theme of our edit pass; these are the biggest moments in the game which will be affected."
You should also use this time to mark down which changes which will affect art, engineering, and design. If scenes may need labor to be re-scripted, make sure to collect that data. Before you actually start editing, you gotta then validate whether, when, and how the implementation work could occur after your revision is complete. The same goes for art. Does your planned pass create or remove assets? Once you have this info, you can meet immediately with the art department to discuss, even if you haven't actually started the edit pass yet.
Ideally, you want to come out of this planning process with all of the details you might have to report to, say, an art or engineering producer, and a text document which summarizes the major themes and most-noticeable impacts of your upcoming review.
For some scripts, this prep time can take multiple hours over multiple days... but this setup work is ALWAYS worth it. It builds a foundation of data you can use to not only structure your edit, but to plan implementation, QA testing, and future editorial passes.
If you are a narrative lead or an editor, you should take on the vast majority of the labor involved in creating these notes and summary documents. If you feel like you are becoming your team's producer: good! You should. This is the goal. The more data you have, the more agency you will have to perform an edit pass which suits the needs of your game, rather than the needs of the sprint cadence. You should not allow production to make choices on your behalf about what work you will actually do during a revision. You are the subject matter experts, so you need to own the decisionmaking process about which tasks you will tackle. You have the skills and context to make these choices yourself and should be prepared to defend your decisionmaking to other people. If this requires you to perform tasks you consider to be production tasks - so be it.
Step 5: Assign everyone their work
Now that you know exactly what work has to be done, you can assign it.
I find that pushes like this are most sustainable if you go abruptly pens-down when you hit your deadline. Then: take a fucking break! Try to make everyone understand that you will actually stop on the final day and start sticking all the new text in the videogame. People should not be taking on work they don't think they can actually complete during the timebox.
If you believe that you have really accurate velocity data about your team, you can plan the whole thing waterfall-style ahead of time... but you can also be very effective if you only plan it a week at a time. Schedule the first week of work, then meet on the first Thursday of the edit pass and figure out whether it's going well or not, and adjust your plans for the second week.
I also like to formally schedule time for people to review one another's work. When I do these kinds of edit passes, I like to go back and forth between actually writing, and then reviewing the assets that my writing partner has recently completed working on. It helps to keep "the whole plot" in my head and allows me to vary the kind of work I'm doing throughout the day or the week.
Step 6: Revise/rewrite the entire game
Make the words good :)
The involved writers should have a broad authority to rewrite and change their assigned sections to hit your goals and follow your style guide.
This may require you to formally sever individual writers' sense of ownership over various assets they previously created for the game. You are going to lose a lot of time if your writers are reaching out to one another and asking, "are you okay with me changing this thing?" You already agreed on your goals, and you are now going to agree to trust one another to pursue those goals.
It may be the case that some of your writers feel like they cannot write or revise certain characters in your game. I am really profoundly against "voice ownership" in an indie or AA game of this size. It creates a pretty big bus problem - and, in my experience, a lot of games of this size do not retain their whole narrative staff for the entire development process. It's important to document your characters and their voices well enough that your team can at least attempt to share them. It's important to grow your team into people who feel comfortable mimicking one another and sharing characters.
When it comes to the day-to-day writing effort, it's best to slice up the assignments, zones, chapters, etc. so that one person can knock out a noticeable chunk of the game in one full day's sit-down. This provides writers with obvious, measurable progress which can help to keep up morale, too.
Step 7: Actually stop when you run out of time
Going pens-down at the end of this process is always an enormous relief for me. Sometimes I even take a day off afterward. You gotta get some distance from the text - and you gotta make time for implementation.
You can't fully evaluate the success of a games script just by reading the script. You can only really evaluate it by playing it in the game! So implement your changes, then play it a bunch.
If your studio's work is scheduled in such a way that you cannot actually implement it, or cannot assign your team to review their work in the build, that's a process issue worth fixing. Actually seeing this stuff in the build helps a ton.
What games have I done this on?
I have done this with different collaborators on Ruined King and Mageseeker. I also did a very limited version of this on Skin Deep two years ago - but I didn't get to do most of the process correctly that time, and I didn't have a "subject matter expert" writing partner to work with. Since then, I've also been able to carry out the process closer to how I prefer it on a videogame that is currently unreleased.
I think all these games fucking rule and part of the reason they rule is that we gave ourselves an opportunity to treat the critical path plot as a single long deliverable. It's so much easier to tackle themes, character growth, and other overarching measures of "quality" when you treat the WHOLE plot as one thing which can be revised together as a single asset.
In the past I have had to negotiate pretty hard for the opportunity to do this, since a lot of teams like to lock the plot progressively in order to reduce the thrash to other departments, particularly art and animation. It's important to learn how to revise plot without changing anything "expensive," or anything that requires work from anyone but narrative. The more senior you are as a writer, the more your job involves figuring out how to contort your story around the bits that are too expensive to change.
I quite like this challenge. Fundamentally, there are a thousand good stories contained within any story pitch. There are an infinite number of ways to tell your story well, once you start talking about the smaller details of implementation. You just gotta find one of those thousand ways to do it.
I love working on games of this size and I've been extraordinarily lucky to work on so many in such a short time. The first time I did an edit process like this, I felt like I'd been hit by a truck. The stress was intense... but largely self-inflicted. Now, I've done it enough times that a full script edit pass on a tight deadline feels normal to me. I can't say that any story problem is solvable, but a lot of them are. More of them are solvable than you would think. I tell myself: all you need is playtesting, planning, discipline, and reps. It might not be true... but I've done it enough now that I fully, fully believe the lie.