Some thoughts on the writing process for Skin Deep
Writing for Skin Deep felt extremely easy to me, because I had access to the design/art/creative director at all times.
Brendon and I are married and we work at desks that are 2 feet away from one another. While I was writing the script, I could turn over at any moment and ask The Guy who was responsible for actually solving the game's design problems whether my ideas would create additional problems for him. Similarly, Brendon could ask me any question about anything I'd done at any time.
When the friction involved in speaking to your collaborator is absolutely zero, it makes it a lot easier to solve problems. This was honestly less about our physical proximity and more about our comfort in throwing suggestions at one another. We were both eager to get one another's feedback, and fully comfortable either adopting or disregarding any part of that feedback. When you're not scared about how someone will react to your ideas, it's a lot easier to share them.
I frequently involved Brendon in questions about how a scene might be realized, and Brendon often involved me in questions about how we could narratively justify limitations or requirements in the game space - in particular in the narrative vignettes which advance the plot between major gameplay-focused levels.
Process-wise, this is how we wrote the game:
- I would start by pitching something. We would discuss the idea for the scene or the feature in a very explicit "how would we implement this" way.
- I would write an outline for the scene which included text descriptions of player actions or mini-challenges, to make sure we were on the same page about the gameplay.
- I would write the script for the scene.
- Brendon would storyboard the scene.
- The scene would then be built and scripted by a level designer who was not Brendon - Suzanne or Tynan. I think in most cases the "source of truth" for them for what was supposed to happen in the scene was the storyboard.
- At this time the level designer would add a ton of visual gags and additional jokes to the scene which worked on an interaction/level design/gameplay level. Suzanne an Tynan were incredible at this.
- The scene would then return to me. Brendon and I would play it together a bunch and I would rewrite the dialogue of the scene to accommodate the new jokes. We might at this time also brainstorm additional changes which could be funny.
So we had a process which began with narrative, but would move over entirely to design partway through the process and get an additional layer of comedy added by designers specifically. Then, when the level was partially finished, I would get a chance to go in and re-align the dialogue to the scene. I was never put into a position where nothing was flexible, and an unconnected level and unconnected dialogue had to be locked and finished without a chance to reconverge.
This was possible because this was a small, cheap game to make. We had a small cast of characters and recorded VO extremely late in the process. In fact, it was so late in the process that it felt kind of risky to me! The game script is also pretty short - I think Samia Mounts slammed out all of Nina's non-combat VO in a single recording session. We were not dealing with the costs, risks, production stresses and inflexibilities, or departmental politics that sometimes get in the way of providing design and narrative with the flexibility they need to meet in the middle and collaborate.
People sometimes ask me why I think "games narrative sucks" and I basically just have to explain to them what it's like working in the most "political" department in a studio of like, 3000 people. Narrative forces collaboration between design, art, audio, and engineering. Narrative is often forced to be the vision-holder for painful and difficult tasks which require a lot of alignment and cooperation between people from different disciplines. Often this work is in pursuit of something that the game would be "technically playable" without, so the work can feel like a burden to people involved in it. Getting all these people enthusiastic about hard interdisciplinary work that is technically "not necessary" is a difficult skill to be good at, and it's hard to come out of that kind of work leaving everyone who participated in it completely happy. Narrative is a pain point because collaboration in games is a pain point.
One way to avoid a lot of this pain is to make a small game with a lot of multidisciplinary workers! Brendon understands art and engineering needs because he is an artist and has done engineering work. He understands narrative needs because he has done a ton of games storytelling in his career already. I understand how to keep narrative asks achievable because I have worked in production, sometimes did production tasks on this game, and generally know enough about our tools and engine and development resources to know what is difficult to implement. Suzanne and Tynan similarly have broad skillsets which allowed them to synthesize many needs which, on a bigger dev team, would be spread across many people with many relationships and needs and beefs.
Small indie teams are not the solution to all of game dev's troubles, but being small and multidisciplinary does get you certain extremely luxurious advantages.
Something else: a lot of people I know have ended up working with their spouse on an indie project. I have joked in the past that this is because one of the main ways you can find respect as a narrative worker is to work with your actual partner. Hopefully, the person you are actually married to and living with might find it easier to trust and respect you than your average coworker would.
I certainly experienced this on Skin Deep! It was great to work with someone who does not automatically assume that my ideas are crazy and dangerous. Narrative often experiences a very intense baseline level of distrust... you end up having to baby your collaborators a bit to earn the trust that they automatically give everyone else. There's no easy excuse for it; it's usually not because a narrative worker in the past "traumatized" them. It's because narrative needs force extremely intense interdisciplinary collaboration, and that kind of collaboration can be extremely painful in games for reasons unrelated to the quality of narrative's asks.
When there's fewer people and everyone has a deeper understanding of one another's skills, there are simply fewer opportunities for collaboration to fail.