Decoding the Outsourced Game Writing Process

The creative process is often seen as the sacred domain of those working in artistic or creative fields. It's a process that requires careful attention and nurturing from the author. In the games industry, this feeling also exists. After all, your game is like your child, and you want to provide the best support for it! However, creative support is always available when you need it.

Even today, many game developers believe that working with an "outside team" to create a game's narrative, plot, or dialogue will slow down the creative process or result in the final product not feeling "real." While this may be true for an inexperienced team, bringing in the right external game writing talent can have the opposite effect. It can bring incredible changes to your project, including:

• Breathe new life into the story and provide an objective and experienced perspective
• Scaling up your team, speeding up the writing process, and helping meet tight deadlines
• Addressing scale and budget issues to maintain profitability

To clear up misconceptions about working with a third-party team, let’s dive into how to approach the writing process with an outsourced writing partner.

Pre-production and collaboration

A big hurdle in collaborative projects is “but how can it be my story if I didn’t write it?” This first stage ensures that the story developed is truly yours.

As with any creative process, the collaborative process on an outsourced game writing project begins with an intensive pre-production cycle. The incoming team will go to great lengths to get to know you and your vision for this new masterpiece.

Discussions between developers and new teams usually revolve around a few core topics:

• What should the story be?
• Who is the character?
• Game Vision
• Style and Tone
• The main plot or individual character development arcs
• Style Guide

If some of these have not yet been finalized, the team will work closely with you to perfect everything that is needed.

If this feels a bit intrusive, that's normal. This is how the team gets to know the project. The initial stages of a project are meant to be open and collaborative. Connecting to the core of your creative vision for the game is how the team is integrated so that they no longer feel like an external team, but are closely integrated with you and your creative ideas, moving forward as if they were your in-house writing team.

After an intensive creative information gathering process, the team will work with you to develop a plan, deadlines, and milestones that will set a roadmap for the project’s completion and provide a transparent overview of the team’s operations.

Building a Solid Foundation: Storyboarding and Character Creation

Storyboarding and character creation are critical to setting the creative tone and direction of the project as the team creates the story and characters almost from scratch. Writers work closely with you and the production team to map out the game's plot, themes, recurring motivations, and tone. They then create a comprehensive style guide that serves as an ongoing reference point.

Next up is character creation. Here you'll develop the personalities that will make your story come alive on screen and in the imaginations of your players. Each key and supporting character (depending on the size of your project) will have unique reference material to help the writer track their arc and serve as a guide when introducing them into a scene, explaining how they might react or behave in any given situation.

Once the foundations are established, the team will create storyboards and scenario plans that will ultimately form the core of your game. As the developer and main project leader, you will be invited to be as involved as possible during this phase. Working closely with you and allowing you to fully express your thoughts and ideas is the way to ensure that the world they build is exactly what you had in mind, and that your story is truly yours.

Start creating

A good game writing team always breaks the assumption that an outside writer can't master the craft of writing. Outsourced teams are often made up of industry veterans who have accumulated experience on countless creative projects, sometimes spanning decades. In addition, a partner will pair you with a writing team that has been successful in games with similar genres, themes, or goals to your project.

Many people think of the actual game writing phase as a romanticized process. It conjures up images of a dark room with a bunch of writers furiously pounding away at keyboards, surrounded by balls of paper crumpled with frustration. But in reality, this process is often the most routine or "boring" part of the whole process.

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