Incline Chris Avellone Appreciation Station

[Jazz_]

Avellone? More like Vitellone as of lately, amirite?

 

[Alienman]

All aboard the friend ship!

 

[Fairfax]

MCA just had a panel at PAX:




Unlikely that we'll see it on YouTube (he does panels at PAX all the time, and the most recent I could find on YT is from 2012), so this is probably all we get:





I'll update the post if someone shares more.

 

[Drax]

We need HD video of that. Toots.

 

[agris]

Excel and word as advanced tools of the profession? christ, is the bar that low?

 

[Fairfax]

Excel and word as advanced tools of the profession? christ, is the bar that low?

I don't think he meant Word and Excel in particular, just design docs and spreadsheets in general, as he's constantly talking about the importance of design documents and style guides.
He's also praised Google Docs/Spreadsheets, and IIRC he said Larian is using them a lot for D:OS2.

 

[Infinitron]

I think game development has such an ingrained culture of winging it that the benefits of using spreadsheets are something that people feel that they have to constantly and repeatedly praise. Other people from Obsidian do it too.

 

[Spectacle]

Excel can be a useful tool in many situations, but anyone who suggests using a VBA macro to solve a problem should be shot on sight.

 

[Lhynn]

Excel can be a useful tool in many situations, but anyone who suggests using a VBA macro to solve a problem should be shot on sight.

Then shot again.

 

[dukeofwhales]

I have bad news for you guys about the entire (non-software) engineering profession

 

[Fairfax]

 

[Chris Avellone]

The Excel answer from the panel (if I recall correctly) was largely b/c Excel as a mechanism for organizing game design dialogue (esp. localization and - unfortunately - often studio scripts), no public tool does it better.

There are studio proprietary tools that do an amazing job (and I wish I'd known about them sooner and/or I wish they'd lease them out, they trumped anything I've worked with before), but the question at the panel was what the public has access to or can purchase.

My feeling is that Excel ultimately trumps everything. Not the most elegant format to write in, but game writing logistics are demanding beyond the actual writing. I've found the best editors still have a way to export to Excel/XML, so it's always the dank basement no one wants to talk about but a good chunk of folks need (me included).

Word is a different issue. When appropriate, I use Word for 2 reasons. (1) Because it fixes all my dumb mistakes on the fly ("hey, here's a bug QA never has to know about b/c they have enough to do as is"), and (2) when working with other devs who want to review story before implementation, a Word doc of the dialogue, prose, or, well, whatever, works b/c Word has pretty good commenting features before it goes into an editor (although I think Google docs commenting features are better for the notification aspects, but Word's pretty good if you don't use Google docs).

Blah blah blah words words Excel Word blah blah blah

 

[Trip]

How should such a tool be able to function, for game writing? What should it offer, in your opinion?

 

[Tom Selleck]

Maybe I have a stunted idiot lizard brain, but I cannot for the life of me imagine how you would organize, like, game design dialogue in Excel. I am not very familiar with how like, Twine, would organize it and wouldn't a flowchart make more sense than a table?

The only thing I ever used Excel for was a Star Trek ship list when I was in Grade 8, though.
USS THUNDERCHILD NCC-63549 AKIRA CLASS

 

[Chris Avellone]

That is a good question (*from Trip). So for a studio? Ultimately, you want to make the in-house tool as easy for a writer to write as possible. It sounds so obvious, but showing them the dank basement and asking them to go down there to get their roots and grubs may not be the best way. Most studios cloak the basement with a beautiful summer home (the editor).

Of course, that means you're tailoring a tool for certain writers. In the absence of that, a few major/minor things an editor should have, off the top of my head:

- Some sense of approximating the dialogue window in the game (and suggesting the writer keep things to 75% of that for either German or Russian localization). Without this, I often have to type out a string of characters to get a sense for how much can fit in the dialogue window: "ttttttttttttt, etc."

- I found the Bethesda's "limitation" on character count/node to be a positive, not a negative. It taught me and other writers how to be more economical in speech.

- Also, some means of including a description node of the context of each dlg file is also welcome, especially if you have a voice-acted game. ("This conversation between the coffee cup and the other coffee cup regards the fact that coffee cup #1 is jealous of the fact coffee cup #2 is filled with hot, smoldering coffee. Scene is resolved when cup #2 pours half of itself into cup #1, mirroring the theme of communal sharing in the game... and also as a sexual metaphor.")

- A good import/export function. This might be a tired refrain, but I often found "locking" the dialogue a few days before it goes to translation or gets the eye of QA to be valuable if you can isolate all the text in the game and run through it and fix all the common errors all at once ("Whoops. Guess not everyone knows how to spell stimpak" - including me). There's rarely a stage for that that works until near the end of the production cycle, though, and it does depend on the robustness of the editor's ability to import dialogue as well as export.

- I've liked Beamdog's tools. You can edit either in XML export (which is great for huge global errors) or through a web-based app, which is pretty simple - whichever you prefer, and you can also grant access to multiple folks (like, oh, say, really good fan translators). Thumbs up.

 

[Infinitron]

- Also, some means of including a description node of the context of each dlg file is also welcome, especially if you have a voice-acted game. ("This conversation between the coffee cup and the other coffee cup regards the fact that coffee cup #1 is jealous of the fact coffee cup #2 is filled with hot, smoldering coffee. Scene is resolved when cup #2 pours half of itself into cup #1, mirroring the theme of communal sharing in the game... and also as a sexual metaphor.")

I think he's been reading our Prey thread.

 

[Darth Roxor]

Maybe I have a stunted idiot lizard brain, but I cannot for the life of me imagine how you would organize, like, game design dialogue in Excel. I am not very familiar with how like, Twine, would organize it and wouldn't a flowchart make more sense than a table?

Well, you can make roughly flowchart-like constructions in Excel, so I could see it working. In many ways it could be more readable and convenient than in Word when it comes to dialogues and their splitting.

It probably needs a lot of getting used to, though, given how cumbersome Excel is and that it's not exactly an orthodox application for it.

 

[Trip]

I don't know how this would go over with game studios, but this is the scripting language of the guys making the Sorcery! and 80 Days games. It says there it can be used as middleware and added to a Unity engine. It's not flowcharty, but it's supposedly very easy to work with, both in writing and in orientation.

 

[DosBuster]

Another benefit of using a tool such as excel is that when it comes to recording vo lines you can build a script from the spreadsheet quite easily.

Of course, that is only really a use case in indie scenarios, I'd imagine most AAA devs would have a tool that just sorts and turns dialogue trees into vo scripts.

 

[DosBuster]

Another example of Excel use in game design is that during pre-production when you're waiting on components such as the engine, tools etc. to come about you can prototype gameplay systems and start iterating as soon as possible.

http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1015489/Reimagining-a-Classic-The-Design

You'll want to go down to slide 85 to see this in action, it's very impressive how many of the game systems they got working purely in excel; this method also allows easy playtesting with different people as compared to the pen-and-paper method.

 

[Neanderthal]

Sisyphean Solution Studios.
Transcendant Tech.
Artists and Autists.
Dungeon Masters and Drag Queens.
Bastards, broadswords and bare breasts.

 

[Stainless Veteran]

Incline Emporium.
Plane Tickets Incorporated.
Prestigious Fabulae.

 

[vonAchdorf]

Is there a market for tools like articy:draft or is this kind of tools caught between a rock (Excel) and a hard place (custom in-house tool)?

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

Yeah, Word's commenting and change tracking are invaluable features when doing any sort of collaborative work.

Human StretchGoal Studios.

 

[Drax]

"Fucking MCA Writes Here Studios"