Beta 2 Game Dev Saga - Processes and Challenges of a Brazilian Indie Studio

Part 1) The arrogant writer and the teamwork-spreadsheet

What if I told you I write on Google sheets?

If your reaction was some sort of scream or, maybe, breathing out through your nose while raising an eyebrow, you don’t probably know a screenwriter, or more specifically, a video game screenwriter.

Writing for games can be somewhat challenging, especially if you are not familiar with the audiovisual industry.

I know the feeling, because I was the breathing-eyebrow one when my boss offered me this job at Beta 2 Games.

He showed me a summary of what he had already written—a mystery in Lovecraft’s mythos universe.

I promptly opened a text editor, fixed some plot holes, filtered some characters, gave a background to one of the protagonists and sent it to the boss in the form of a literary book.

He’s answers was “Great, but how do we turn this into a game? How do you imagine I can put this sentence, for instance, which the character is giving his impressions to the reader about the landscape, like, comparing it to his childhood, into the game without breaking the dynamic?”

I clearly didn’t have an answer.

Then he sent me a link, which showed me this:

After blinking at it for the infinite amount of time between 0 and 1 second, I replied “what is that?”

Now bear with me. We are used with no lines when writing, I mean, not them creating rectangles. The most acceptable are the lines on notebooks, where we used to write with pens centuries ago.

Spreadsheets are for boring numbers and meaningless words, like, “total.”

The boss and the team of programmers started explaining me that column A was for a keycode I had to invent so that the program could find it and paste the dialogue line on the players’ screen.

B calls for the next dialogue line—if it exists.

C stands for magical I.T. guys/girls stuff. Just kidding. It is an area which I don’t use, and they mark some triggers for events, such as a character who enters the room, a door that falls, a window that crashes, etc.

D is where I should make comments, suggestions, reminders, so the I.T. team can code properly, like, camera moves to area Z. Also, notes to translators, like, if I want to refer to a wrong character on purpose, thus, making their lives much easier.

E shows which character is speaking the line written in F.

Finally, G, which, this time, really means magical I.T. guys/girls stuff. I’ve seen it filled with # and other symbols. I don’t ever write anything in that column.

(Future me here. I wanted to tell you the boss explained it again and I didn’t understand again. So, I’ll talk to the I.T. guy who made this sheet and bring the details to you).

They baptized that spreadsheet as a Localization Document, which was part of a Dialogue System, coded by one of our I.T. guys.

So, I L1+L2+R1+R2+SELECT+START’ed (got the reference? google it) my game dev screenwriting saga.

And was failing again.

Text is not fluid on spreadsheets. The interface is for those boring numbers. The words people use to write there are filled with the emptiness of data. They stare at you as binary code. They scream in arrogance, “information only!”

After months of writing into a text editor and ctrl+c-ctrl+ving them into the spreadsheets, one of the I.T. guys told me “Wow, I didn’t expect something so touching! Congrats!”

I realized, then, those words that seemed arrogant to me, were like that introvert friend who would come up as arrogant at first, but as you get to know them, you see they’re just hiding inside that lone wolf shell.

Words in a spreadsheet have meaning, express feelings, and can engage in a relationship with both writer and readers, or, in this case, developers and players.

That comment from my workmate made me realize that, in fact, the arrogant was me, after all.

Besides being a compliment, the comment fueled me to keep going and breaking the appearances barriers.

Thus, full of myself, the arrogant me engaged in writing, editing, rewriting, and reediting until the boss hired a new artist to help us fulfill a contract goal.

The backgrounds were falling behind schedule. And the new guy in one weekend did this amazing cabin based on my descriptions.

He felt the atmosphere and brought us this result, which was even better than what I had imagined.

That’s when I understood that, although I was the one behind the story of a game, I was not in charge of all of it. It became as solid as a brick hitting my face that I was not alone in this process.

That spreadsheet was the job of a programmer, who, by his own, created a dialogue system, which, by the pressing of a button, will show the conversations on the players’ screen.

And guess who put all that together in one place? Who made the song play at the exact time? The lights go on, off, shine, glow? The windows break? The characters move? The programmers, of course.

Not the same one who made the magical spreadsheet, but two other ones.

Besides the graphic artists, there is another artist, the “sound guy”, who creates the atmosphere of each level. I am unable to put a song in my words.

And nothing would’ve come together if it weren’t for our director.

All those different characters, who, in fact, are real people, with different talents were brought together by that spreadsheet.

And that specific one, after a big load of workhours and different difficulties, barriers; individual, internal, and external problems and accomplishments came into this:

video description: a short video that presents three characters interacting and speaking the lines presented early on the spreadsheet on the previous depicted background.

The video is sped up, but I think you got the gist of it.

What about you? What were your first impressions working in the game industry?

Tell us about yourself, we’d be glad to hear.

Pedro Porciúncula - Narrative Designer and Head of Marketing at Beta 2 Games