Here is how i worked on my story (now im not saying it is the best story ever).
I had the basic idea of the story in my mind for years, the main characters the main events & the cycle the events will appear in. When i started making a first draft of my game while learning rpg maker i was really able to work on and think of ways to make the characters more interesting & have their own personalities and actions.
I started with the main story and then developed the characters personalities during my first draft, now as i am slowly working on creating the alpha of the actual game i have been creating microsoft word documents that outline what will be in each map, the main storylines along with spare content and character developing conversations.
Some of my most best content ideas have come while driving home from work actually.
I've said it before and I'll keep saying it: Three-act structure is your friend.
Show the main characters stuck until a crisis spurs them to action - that's act one.
Have them reacting to the crisis until they reach a turning point - where they take charge of the problem and set out to resolve it. That's act two.
Have them directly face their problems, then try to use what they've learned to improve their lives - that's act three.
I've obviously oversimplified this, of course. I recommend and will always recommend Syd Field's Screenplay and The Screenwriters Workshop - they're phenomenal resources for any storyteller, not just screenwriters for movies.
I'm not sure if you are doing it, but make sure you are getting comments from people before you think it is finished. It is very hard to be the judge of something you have created. You may find that some of the things you find flat other think are engaging, while there may also be problems that your mind is glossing over.
"how do you create a good story that would be remembered"
With good writing. [if you're a tl;dr person, stop. Like, now.
{rant = begin}]
"how do you write well"
Hmm...that's up to you. But here's a suggestion: Make good characters.
"how do you make good characters"
With creativity, of course!
"how do you be creative"
I can see this is going nowhere. If you want a long answer to the creativity question, read this. It's a great place to start. Now, Imma do the rest with my own words, if you don't mind.
How do we create good characters, indeed. Well, here's an idea: who is your best friend in the world? What's s/he like to hang around? Do you see that person as husband/wife material? Is s/he just a drinking buddy? Does s/he have a different personality than you? Write a character who is an exact clone of your friend--flaws and all. Now take all of those traits and reverse them--flaws and all. Would you still be friends with this person? Would you consider them a better person or a worse person? Now, imagine a situation where the two of them begin interacting. What would that be like? Write dialogue based on their traits--a funny person wouldn't reply in a completely serious way all the time. Also, you should find a "voice" for your character (I wrote about that in my blog, over here! Moar links, yahoo!). Basically, all you have to do is take a real person and shake 'em up a bit, throw 'em into a different setting, and voila--character. Good character? Depends on the person you chose--but more importantly, it depends on your perception of that person.
Now that we have the characters, we basically just have to write their dialogue and the story is done, right? Bzzzt! Wrong! While good characters are a step in the right direction, no one is going to play your game if the bad grammar turns 'em off. "hey come play my gam i made it all by myself its gota great story trust me it looks like i cant type but please just try my game cuz im desprate here" is NOT appealing to customers. One word the 99.9 percent of the internet could benefit from hearing: PROOFREAD! Seriously, LOOK at something before you show it to someone else. It may have plot holes and writing mistakes, but that's better than those in addition to bad spelling, no caps and no grammar.
Okay, we're almost done. Now, the remembering part. This one's pretty tough to get past. A lot of this is going to have to do with the music you've chosen. If a good song is playing in the background of a good scene, then the player will not only read the emotion going on in the story, s/he will hear it as well. Most of all, make your scenes count. You don't need a fancy speech--a good backstory will provide a driving force to the way a character is affected in the present.
And most importantly, do your best. Don't do it halfway, get dat crap DONE, man! Then you can move on and make some more awesome stories.
{rant = end}
:end
also, I didn't read any of the other comments on this thread, so I probably repeated some information, but you should listen to other people before you listen to me. Because other people actually CAN write well, unlike me (see above).
Inevitably the answer begins with "it depends". The main thing is depends on is the nature and format of the text. For example, proofreading a text full of technical and/or scientific terms will be more expensive than proofreading a short essay on character development. That's the 'nature' part. What will cause the difficulty is the 'format' part.
You could give the proofreader a document with all the text that you intend to use, in the order that you intend to use it, so that it is a bit like a play/film script. That is fairly straightforward. However, to a dev it might not actually be of much use beyond the (already substantial in some cases) correction of grammar, punctuation and spelling. A good proofreader will go beyond that and say "this is grammatically correct, but its meaning is not clear." But that is still not enough for a game.
Reason? Because you then have to type in all that text and there will inevitably be typos of every description. Even a good, careful person is going to make typos. To proofread what's actually in the game would need using something like Shaz's Event Extract script. The document that produces is not at all straightforward to read. It takes a long time to proofread from it if you want to do a thorough job. It's slightly easier if you are using XP as there is a program which will extract the dialogue in a clearer format.
Paying someone to proofread the actual text in your game is going to be expensive.
Work out gameplay mechanics FIRST. Only once you've done that should you write the story - with the mechanics firmly in mind. This will avoid such unfortunate things as, say, that awkward moment when no one thinks to revive the beloved party healer who just got sworded to death with one of your 99 Seraph Pinions or whatever. (Or, better, they try it and it doesn't work, which was one of the more powerful moments in FF V...)
Work out gameplay mechanics FIRST. Only once you've done that should you write the story - with the mechanics firmly in mind. This will avoid such unfortunate things as, say, that awkward moment when no one thinks to revive the beloved party healer who just got sworded to death with one of your 99 Seraph Pinions or whatever. (Or, better, they try it and it doesn't work, which was one of the more powerful moments in FF V...)
In most RPGs I am pretty sure the battle sequences are supposed to taken as symbolic, not that people literally line up, hit eachother in turns, numbers float over their heads, and then they die.
Besides, most "revival" items, aren't actually meant to bring dead people back, they're meant to heal a character that has been knocked out.
Phoenix down, for instance, is not a resurrection of the dead item.
Besides, as I said, in most games gameplay mechanics are not reflections of the game's lore. The reason they are there in the way they are, is because the game would be broken otherwise.
Usually, the player will play with that in mind.
Case in point, if a character gets killed with a single attack in a cut scene, despite being able to withstand thousands of cuts in gameplay, most people don't react to this because we know that the reason the gameplay is set up this way, is the avoid all the gameplay complications you would have if you were to have a realistic, one or two hit to kill combat system.
In RPGs that often rely on character progression, and making the player feel strong, this becomes nearly an essential issue.
I do agree in part though. I like to see references to, or scenes of, characters using combat magic in events.
I also like for games to have there be consistency of power between battles, and regular gameplay.
If the hero can clean out groups of 10 soldiers in a couple of minutes in battle, it seems strange that he or she should lose a fight against one or two soldiers in an evented scene.
In most RPGs I am pretty sure the battle sequences are supposed to taken as symbolic, not that people literally line up, hit eachother in turns, numbers float over their heads, and then they die.
Besides, most "revival" items, aren't actually meant to bring dead people back, they're meant to heal a character that has been knocked out.
Phoenix down, for instance, is not a resurrection of the dead item.
Besides, as I said, in most games gameplay mechanics are not reflections of the game's lore. The reason they are there in the way they are, is because the game would be broken otherwise.
Usually, the player will play with that in mind.
Case in point, if a character gets killed with a single attack in a cut scene, despite being able to withstand thousands of cuts in gameplay, most people don't react to this because we know that the reason the gameplay is set up this way, is the avoid all the gameplay complications you would have if you were to have a realistic, one or two hit to kill combat system.
In RPGs that often rely on character progression, and making the player feel strong, this becomes nearly an essential issue.
I do agree in part though. I like to see references to, or scenes of, characters using combat magic in events.
I also like for games to have there be consistency of power between battles, and regular gameplay.
If the hero can clean out groups of 10 soldiers in a couple of minutes in battle, it seems strange that he or she should lose a fight against one or two soldiers in an evented scene.
The fact that "in most games the battles don't reflect the game's lore" is a problem. A problem that can be solved with things as simple as the example you mentioned - by saying that Phoenix Downs revive the mortally "wounded" instead of the dead.
I don't expect turns to literally represent what's happening: I do expect that it's a simplification of something going on, and that a faster character should get more turns than a slower one. I do expect a character in the back row to do less damage unless they're armed with ranged weapons. I do expect enemy formations to be exploitable by spells that affect entire rows and columns, or other shaped areas of effect.
And you're half-right: most of the final fantasy games had "will revive a (mortally) wounded character" as the lore for Phoenix Downs.
Guess which FF game was the first one that didn't make this distinction explicit? Final Fantasy VII.
Guess which game got roundly and rightly mocked for making a character death a plot point when the lore explicitly stated that Phoenix Downs revive 'dead' characters?
The fact that "in most games the battles don't reflect the game's lore" is a problem. A problem that can be solved with things as simple as the example you mentioned - by saying that Phoenix Downs revive the mortally "wounded" instead of the dead.
I don't expect turns to literally represent what's happening: I do expect that it's a simplification of something going on, and that a faster character should get more turns than a slower one. I do expect a character in the back row to do less damage unless they're armed with ranged weapons. I do expect enemy formations to be exploitable by spells that affect entire rows and columns, or other shaped areas of effect.
And you're half-right: most of the final fantasy games had "will revive a (mortally) wounded character" as the lore for Phoenix Downs.
Guess which FF game was the first one that didn't make this distinction explicit? Final Fantasy VII.
Guess which game got roundly and rightly mocked for making a character death a plot point when the lore explicitly stated that Phoenix Downs revive 'dead' characters?
Would you say that wargames like chess or shougi suffer from the same issue?It's only an issue if you expect games to reflect reality - to most people though, that the "laws" of gameplay supersedes the lore physics is commonly accepted because it's done to make the game more fun to play, and to a lot of gamers that is the most important.
Granted, I play RPGs for the story, I have had plenty of debates with people who state that story is almost as good as irrelevant when compared to gameplay.
As for FF7, you're factually wrong. People got angry because they're stupid.
FF7 was ridiculously poorly translated, and secondly the world itself pretty much acts as a definite proof of the opposite on a regular basis.
People die in FF7 on a regular basis, and they are never revived with phoenix downs, nor is the item ever referenced outside of combat.
Nobody went, "wait, why aren't the enemy soldiers using pheonix down", or "why didn't anyone cast life on president shinra".
That death cannot be cured is an unspoken truth that is taken for granted because it's pervasive throughout the entire gameworld, for the entire game, except for the battles.
The only reason people got pissed off about Aerith, is because of how emotionally invested they were in her.
The "oh, but why didn't they use pheonix down"-argument is so blatantly vapid it can't even be expressed in a nice way.
Why doesn't Sephiroth suprernova technique destroy the entire world?
Because the battles aren't actually what's going on - they're an abstraction for the sake of the player's enjoyment, when the devs didn't have access to better hardware so they could make more advanced gameplay mechanics.
If you're going to have non-real mechanics, and always make sure they don't conflict with the lore, you're going to have a problem. Similarly, if you're going to apply that standard as a gamer, you're going to have a problem.
Name me a game, and I'll give you an inconsistency. There won't be any games left for you to play.
For fantasy-type stories, take a gander at "The Hero's Journey" by Joseph Campbell. It gives an in-depth look at some key aspects of good story-telling. As far as writing goes, I generally like to keep a few points in mind:
-Poorly written characters can still make well-written (thought out, fleshed out, researched, spent-a-long-time-on) stories work, but the story will suffer (probably greatly) because of them.
-Well-written characters cannot save a poorly written story. They can make going through the story easier for readers/viewers, but in the end, readers/viewers will remember the characters more than the story (or even worse, think back to the story and point out what didn't make sense/what was bad/etc.), which isn't what you're going for. Movies suffer (more often) from this quite a bit when they hire big-name actors but fail to write (or really think out everything involved in) a good story. Movie-goers will still watch the movie because of Brad Pitt/Johnny Depp/etc. but will poke fun at the movie's story if it's bad.
-Characters are the tools of writers. They can be used to shape, mold, and otherwise change the outcome of any particular story, based solely on their actions. That being said, there's no such thing as a "bad character," regardless of how cliché or otherwise he or she may be, and there are plenty of writers who can skillfully place such characters into their stories without taking away from the feel or experience of that story; however, DO NOT ASSUME YOU ARE ONE OF THEM. Remember, there are no "bad characters"...only bad writers.
Sorry if any of this makes me sound like an elitist of any sort. I'm really not! ^__^;;; Hope this helps you out!
Would you say that wargames like chess or shougi suffer from the same issue?
It's only an issue if you expect games to reflect reality - to most people though, that the "laws" of gameplay supersedes the lore physics is commonly accepted because it's done to make the game more fun to play, and to a lot of gamers that is the most important.
Granted, I play RPGs for the story, I have had plenty of debates with people who state that story is almost as good as irrelevant when compared to gameplay.
As for FF7, you're factually wrong. People got angry because they're stupid.
FF7 was ridiculously poorly translated, and secondly the world itself pretty much acts as a definite proof of the opposite on a regular basis.
People die in FF7 on a regular basis, and they are never revived with phoenix downs, nor is the item ever referenced outside of combat.
Nobody went, "wait, why aren't the enemy soldiers using pheonix down", or "why didn't anyone cast life on president shinra".
That death cannot be cured is an unspoken truth that is taken for granted because it's pervasive throughout the entire gameworld, for the entire game, except for the battles.
The only reason people got pissed off about Aerith, is because of how emotionally invested they were in her.
The "oh, but why didn't they use pheonix down"-argument is so blatantly vapid it can't even be expressed in a nice way.
Why doesn't Sephiroth suprernova technique destroy the entire world?
Because the battles aren't actually what's going on - they're an abstraction for the sake of the player's enjoyment, when the devs didn't have access to better hardware so they could make more advanced gameplay mechanics.
If you're going to have non-real mechanics, and always make sure they don't conflict with the lore, you're going to have a problem. Similarly, if you're going to apply that standard as a gamer, you're going to have a problem.
Name me a game, and I'll give you an inconsistency. There won't be any games left for you to play.
The short version is "no." Even Chess is based on the capabilities of Iron Age warfare: the diagonal movement of Bishops represents influence that's both limited and powerful, knights are dangerous because they can bypass the front lines, and so on. (Queens also used to be "Generals" in the first iteration of the game...)
The more a game resembles, or at least represents, the real world the easier it is to play. Sure, you could just have A-class troops beat B-class troops, B-class troops beat C-class, and C-class beat A-class... but it's a lot more intuitive to name them Swordsmen, Spearmen and Cavalry.
"People got angry because they're stupid" is not really a good argument. Neither is insulting me and my position because I'm pointing out that FF7 has problems. Just saying.
It didn't make me angry: it made me laugh and broke me out of the story. Now, I like FF7! It's a great game with great gameplay, and Materia were an excellent mechanic that were also integrated with the story in interesting ways. But I'm not going to ignore the problems with it and give it a pass in the context of telling people how to make better games.
Let's turn that question about Meteo® on it's head. Why DOESN'T Sephiroth's super-attack have an animation that makes sense for it's effect? Is there any reason why they couldn't have had a less elaborate animation that calls a meteor on his enemies without having it crash through 9 planets on the way? Of course not, and that was another gratouitously silly thing that brought me out of the story. Don't do that in your game.
PS: Just because every game will make a mistake doesn't mean you shouldn't avoid making them.
As a writer, some of the best advice I was given was give your characters a full history before their first scene. What drives them? What happened in their past, and how did it affect them?
Also, make the rules of your world logical and consistent. As tempting as it is to make the rules around the story, you really should work the other way, work the story around the rules. A lot of writers study science so they can better understand the effects of situations their characters wind up in.
But most of all, torture your characters. A character who goes from scene, to scene, to scene, just mechanically solving the problem and moving on is not a fun character. Have them fail to protect an artifact, give them a beatdown, have one plan fail so they have to try something else. It's a fine line between making things too easy and too hard, and treading that line is half the fun of writing.
Something I specialize in, and it's fun to play with, is don't make morality clean-cut. No one wakes up, in a good game, and says "You know, I'm going to be a bad person today". Give them motivations, strongly held beliefs. Make the "villain" the hero of his own story.
The important thing is to make it organic. You wouldn't make a map filled with perfect squares, because it ruins the immersion. Don't make a story where it's obvious the plot is points on a line.
@BlissAuthority @hian: To be honest, I dislike FF7 on the basis that it's existence is only due to the fact that Square wanted to show off their SHINY SHINY graphics to anyone and everyone. The story was just there to shovel the player along from one "fantastic" set-piece to another. Granted, it was awe-inspiring back in the day, and a real technical achievement; nowadays, though, after taking a step (or hundred) back, it just looks like gross over-pandering.
WARNING! RANT + some half-hearted swearing AHEAD.
Okay, even if it were perfectly translated, I doubt that would hide the fact that it existed to "appeal" to a wider audience. And while that's fine and all, the problems from before then - continuity breaking, character inconsistencies, plot holes one could drive a truck through, etc. - affected the game then, and continue to affect the industry to this day. And don't try to pass off the "Well they aren't exactly human" argument; even if the main character of the game is a super-soldier of some sort and can take bullets to the face without squinting, having them fall hundreds of feet without so much as spraining their ankle or complaining about a headache is still BS of the highest order.
There are so many factors that can cause injury while falling from a great height, not just the landing either - the very fall itself should cause some damage as well, especially if they hit something on the way down to their final destination (like, say, a roof). Even the wind, once you hit terminal velocity while free-falling hundreds of feet, is harsh enough to suck the air from your lungs and cause asphyxiation.And the impact is often harsh enough to liquefy organs and smash bones to splinters. Now explain to me how these non-humans/super-humans survive THAT.
Oh, and let's not forget how guns have next to NO effect in most games!
Because yeah, apparently in Japan "guns are wussy weapons!"
How many times has a minigun, or an assault rifle, or some other high-powered weapon been fired at someone in a game and it just plinks off a few points of health? That makes about as much sense as someone taking a warhammer to the face and surviving perfectly well. Okay, I get that it would suck to have it do real-world amounts of damage, and you want your characters to look all "badass" and stuff. But at least have it do SOME frakkin' damage, even if it won't tear their faces off. By the way, even a cheeky hand-cranked Gatling gun - considerably weaker than today's predecessors - could and would take down a fully-armored man in a few seconds. Just saying!
And since when did rockets, missiles, and such do less than a child punching my arm? Has anyone on these development teams ever even seen what an RPG (rocket-propelled grenade) will do to a hardened target, let alone a fleshy, squishy human body? There is no surviving a direct hit, barring some miracle of science or Act of God, but jump in a Final Fantasy or COD game, and a frickin' knifeis more deadly than a copper-headed rocket-propelled orb of death, pain, and destruction. Just... how the... why... WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAT!?!
*brain explodes*
OT: A lot of my story ideas get mulled over for days, weeks, or even before I consider them useful in any manner.
As for actually plotting a story out... Most of it should come down to closing the story. Give it an end; "spoiler bait" or "cliffhangers" ( except when you're either already working on the next part/game/episode and know that you'll get it out in due time ) are the worst, because they're just a lazy way of saying "Hey, I might be doing more, but don't hold your breath!"
As was mentioned earlier on ( too lazy to look back and find who typed it, sry <3" ), start from the end and make it awesome. But also don't forget to start at the beginning as well, and develop that as best you can. Once you have your bookends (beginning and end, alpha & omega) set up, the middle should be how to get from start to finish. Think of it as a suspension bridge: the two ends are the main pillars that hold the bridge above the water/chasm below, but the threads and wires that actually hold the bridge up are the parts in-between those two pillars. Individually, all three are important, but would not help in the least; combined, they support each other and such.
For characters, believable "human" characters are best remembered. One-note characters are boring as s#@$ and no one wants to deal with them. I know that term gets thrown around a lot, but it basically means "a character that has one defining trait that they beat to death". Examples would include: Lloyd from Tales of Symphonia and his "Dwarvan vows"; Squall from Final Fantasy VIII and his angsty "bad boy" persona; or Either the audience will dismiss them as worthless, or they'll latch onto that one trait and never let it go, ignoring anything else that character might've done to make themselves stand above that trait.
Also, for the love of all that is holy, give your character a voice! Unless they're supposed to be mute ( such as Crono ), the "mute hero" trope has been beaten to death. Please, please, please give them a voice - preferably one that is at least a little sarcastic. Because sarcasm makes everything better.
Finally, when you need to make exposition, do so in a way that weaves it into the game world. Don't make the player sit through a ten-minute explanation for a plot point that could be hammered out in a couple of minutes tops; likewise, have them explore the town/city/settlement, poke through books, talk to other characters, and so on to get additional information. Of course, don't drag that out too long either; the player probably doesn't want to read through twenty pages in a "book" just to get a little bit of explanation for some completely unrelated topic to what they're looking for (* stares at The Elder Scrolls series >-> *).
And if you absolutely must have someone tell the character something, make it quick. Get them to the point and have it done and over with, in as few words as would conceivably be possible. It takes time to balance out what must be given to the player and what they should be hunting for, but is completely doable.
Well, to be honest, Caustic, a main selling point of fantasy-based RPGs (and all other games/stories in between) is to defy reality. It's unrestrained, wondrous imagination at its best (or in some cases, not so much its best), and as such, some leeway needs to be highly considered and/or given. Would any of the barely-armored characters in Final Fantasy VI be able to survive a direct attack from one of the game's Magitek infantry units? Realistically, no. But it's fantasy. The same could be said of the many blade-wielding men and women in these types of games. They're swinging at enemies, many times, other men and women, with two-handed broadswords, gigantic battleaxes, and swift ranged weapons like bows/crossbows/etc. It's either a hit or miss with some of those weapons, because quite honestly, if a regular man/woman is struck by one of these things, more than likely they're gonna die. =P
I do agree with you on the point that guns are severely gimped in many games *coughcoughROcoughcough* and that their introduction into such games should come dead last as some of the most powerful weapons obtainable. Anywho, just giving my two cents on such opinions. Tee hee!
Picking up an earlier point about developing the story from your game mechanics, what I did for my game is a slight variation on that.
I began by asking myself what would be a plausible reason for the protagonist(s) having only rubbish gear and no experience that hadn't been done to death?
How do I get a number of highly diverse people in the same place at the same time?
What would be a plausible reason for these individual people to join together to form one party?
That was how I came up with the idea of army conscripts.
I kept asking myself questions like that throughout the game and believe that the story was better for it. I think one of the best friends of any game dev is "Why?"
Yay, now back in action Happy Christmas time, coming back!
Back in action to develop the indie game that has been long overdue... Final Fallacy. A game that keeps on giving! The development never ends as the developer thinks to be the smart cookie by coming back and beginning by saying... "Oh bother, this indie game has been long overdue..." How could one resist such? No-one c
To whom ever person or persons who re-did the DS/DS+ asset packs for MV (as in, they are all 48x48, and not just x2 the pixel scale) .... THANK-YOU!!!!!!!!! XwwwwX
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