How to write in video game script format
"What does a video game script even look like?", "Should I use Final Draft?", "What do you mean, there's no such thing as 'a' video game script format?', and more...
The questions we ask reveal a lot about the questioner.
If a question is incredibly general, “How do I write games?” Well, unless the questioner had time for a days-long conversation, follow-up counter-questions would be needed to narrow down what’s been asked here. For example - I’d want to know whether you’ve written before in other storytelling mediums; I’d want to know how many and what kind of games you’ve played before; I’d want to know what you already know, so that we can refine your question into something more useful for us both. If the question is just left at ‘How do I write games?’, I’ll give the benefit of the doubt but I’d be on the look out for any signs that the person speaking to me hasn’t put much time in to the process of researching all this and may want the work done for them. Again, a quick potentially incorrect assumption on my part - hence why I try and narrow things down first before giving up, if vagueness continues.
If a question is incredibly specific? Well, this often shows that people are somewhere along their path already, though whether they’ve taken a peculiar direction or are making great progress? You can often find hints fairly quickly.
One of these is a surprisingly common and urgent question among many people who want to get into game writing, and the subject of today’s article:
“What does a game script look like?”
I find this question fascinating for a lot of reasons. It implies things to me immediately about the questioner, which - again! - may not be fair and which I may quickly disprove / move on from, but which are not entirely unreasonable:
They may have a homogenous, uniform idea of what games are like
The question implies that there is a certain agreed-upon form for what game narratives look like prior to implementation in a game — which, how could there be, if we consider the sheer diversity and complexity of what games are as a medium, one that can somehow contain both Tetris and The Last of Us and all those genres in-between?
They may be giving the games industry greater credit in its treatment and professionalisation of writing
Agreed-upon conventions emerge in film and TV for scripts in part because the script is the blueprint for all else and all other disciplines need to understand it.
Tell that to a game writer and wait for a while until they stop laughing and/or crying. In games, the industry engages in a practically conspiratorial effort to hide credit from individuals unless they are senior in a company, something which meant many studios used to be credited in an entirely pseudonymous fashion, and survives these days with the figure of the superstar dev.
And the idea of them being shared widely beyond that specific studio? Only a few developers have published scripts, let alone distributed them.
They may not have comprehended the complexity of games writing
The vast and unwieldy form of many game narratives often makes conversion into a standardised linear script similarly unwieldy and impractical. How to represent the complexity of choices and variables spanning across hours of gameplay in a flowing document, and where do you draw the line?
Cutscenes, lore documents, ambient dialogue, barks, items, UI text, and so on - there are many, many types at play here and where would you even start putting that in some kind of sequence?
They may believe that games are something you write and pitch like a movie
This one has some basis in my empirical experiences - I’ve been contacted multiple times by screenwriters and random business people who have ‘an idea for a game’ or a ‘script they want to pitch to X company’ to get made.
That is not how any of this works. You do not generally pitch to the kind of huge games companies you’re thinking of unless you’re Steven Spielberg or JJ Abrams, wielding vast resources of your own.
You get a job or you go through mysterious contract application processes until they tell you the shape of their own idea under NDA, and you decide if you want to work on that idea, adding your own but otherwise existing in their work-for-hire sphere.
The only time you’d pitch a game ‘script’ to someone else is for something like a mostly text-based interactive fiction publisher, where you’re more sort of co-developing and releasing your game as partners. It is impossible to command the kind of production values a Rockstar Games joint might involve in such a project. But creative freedom and some nice art/UI/a distribution channel for your trouble? Potentially.
This all being said, as it is one of the most common questions out there, many will be asking out of a genuine curiosity and not-knowing-where-to-start. So, rather than show you ‘how games are written’ in a script format, I’ll show you multiple script formats. Even these are not uniform and not one-size-fits-all, but approximations of some of the types of things you might see behind-the-scenes for a video game story’s appearance.
The Excel Spreadsheet
Ah, the Excel Spreadsheet. Likely the complete opposite of the wondrous dreams those asking this question of ‘what a game script looks like’ might have. Indeed, this might seem like the least creative, least romantic way to write a story imaginable and while you would of course be right, it offers certain advantages both in terms of implementation (your cells can be nice and labeled, linked to the game’s actual code setup, so that when you update your text, the actual text in the game gets updated at the same time) + in translating to other languages (by having vertical columns allow for the variant in each language, also known as a ‘loc’ or ‘localisation’ sheet). So although it’s got a kind of brutality to it, the form grows on you, and is indeed quite useful for the actual development process (with something like ‘Final Draft’, a traditional film script tool, on the total other end of this spectrum of utility).
Examples of games written in this fashion? More than half of the contract projects I’ve worked on, including NO MAN’S SKY. I would often prototype things in other tools for certain points in my work, but often these games come with a degree of restriction in what the flow allows behind the scenes, so the loc sheet is a good way to keep yourself honest/game-appropriate in what you try and create as part of the writing process.
I’d also say that even if you are using other tools below for the main paths or branching of your interactive game, spreadsheets are superior writing tools for things like item descriptions, barks, anything where you want a lot of variation and categorisation, as the actual table format allows you to see that spread of tone and phrasing in an easy visual manner. And - well - if you get rid of all the ‘tools that are terrible at this kind of thing’, spreadsheets de facto win as the only real remaining choice.
Node formats
(aka horizontal node formats, in-house tools, Twine, and more)
One of the most popular formats on my own Writing Interactive Narratives workshop, alongside the Ink format described in the next section below. Probably closest to what many might imagine for game scripts, these are a loose grouping of tools that arrange game narrative in a flow-chart format across a screen.
The actual text may be written in the box in front of you and the chart may indicate choices or a kind of ‘if this happens, then that’ logic — more likely, the chart will show a label, and if you click on the box in question, you’ll then be given the further ability to enter text and various conditions for when text might appear.
The above free-to-use tool Twine allows people to create their own interactive fiction text games in this format and export them easily for web-uploading and distribution. Many will often use this for prototyping even if the final project is not written in this way - Charlie Brooker’s Bandersnatch, for example.
Twine’s appeal is fairly obvious for the way in which it allows you to visualise the flow of a complex, interweaving narrative.
However, it is also important to note that visual representations of projects can quickly become overwhelming and overly noisy in their own appearance, rendering the advantage moot in many circumstances. And unlike the Excel Spreadsheet, it is difficult to convert to a linear form (note: Twine does have an ‘export proofing copy’ format that many do not seem aware of, though the resulting file is quite hard to interpret and often bears little relation to the sequence of the actual game. It’s more useful as a backup / perhaps as a way of annotating actual writing style issues as opposed to getting a good sense of a play experience).
The Inkle Ink Script
Inkle’s ‘Ink’ format has quickly become a standard across many games companies, not only for interactive fiction (for which it works straight out of the box) but in-complex 3D projects in Unity and Epic for indies and AAA alike (with such games as Sea of Thieves being revealed to use it behind the scenes).
I’m a huge fan of this format as a writer, and interestingly enough it’s the closest to a ‘linear script that makes sense for games’ format that so many seem to be seeking. It uses markup like *, +, =, and so on to give special status to certain lines and phrases, meaning Inky will automatically interpret them as a choice or new segment and so on. The logic is quite easy to learn - although it lacks the visual clarity of a storylet, Twine type system, it feels very natural to write in for those used to other media.
In my own experience, I find I’m more likely to reach the long-hoped for creative flow state using this tool, enabling me to improvise and follow my instincts more. I think this is partly due to not needing to switch contexts — I don’t need to switch from actual typing of story content to scroll through menus and UI features to create new nodes or aspects of my projects. I can just very quickly express such with minimal typing (stuff like a * for a choice or a → for a redirect to a new section). Doing that, I can then move on in most cases, which helps a lot with maintaining my sense of immersion in the imaginary world of the story.
The below is an example of my AMERICAN ELECTION script, and shows also some custom integrations the programmer created for me — the “choice intensity” variable being something we came up with to allow for text choices to shake on screen to replicate a sense of stress. To make it easier to manage, we control these in the actual Inky flow itself using these variables (the higher the number, the more intense it gets) which allows me to tweak and edit easily + not get too distracted in the actual writing.
It’s difficult to advise beginners on the eternal Twine vs Ink debate, as the storylet nature of Twine is in some ways perfect for early career game writers to use and understand the visual flow — but tools useful for some things can often become a hindrance for learning other elements.
Once new writers understand the nature of choice in games, in my experience one of the most useful skills to learn is how to be improvisational with those choices and develop them as part of the actual writing flow just like you would a particular inspired turn of phrase in dialogue or any other writing element.
But for too many, choice becomes this concept reserved only for pre-planners and outliners, not for something that could be improvised in the course of actual drafting like any other writing element. And as with much writing advice, for most, I think the sweet spot here is in an overlap and synthesis of both methods — pre-planning, sure, but knowing how to just jam in the moment. And, in my opinion, Ink is far better for fast jamming and getting out of your own head VS tools with cleaner visual structures.
If you’re interested in getting started with these tools, I’d recommend completely ignoring all the more complex features and just getting down to the basic choice → multiple outcomes flow. That’s all any project really needs, anything else is a nice bonus, and trying to master these tools ‘before beginning’ is a great procrastination strategy that prevents many from ever really getting started. I created a short guide here as to how to learn the minimum skills for both in less than 10 minutes.
(Microsoft Word / Google Docs) + Tables
This is less common, but I’ve often prototyped short sections in this format to demonstrate prototype material; I’ve encouraged others to use this if they’re having difficulty with tools and need to just focus on writing; and I’ve converted some scripts into this format for expression to those outside of the medium. You could view it as a kind of ‘Trophy Case Display’ version of all those different tools above — far easier for others to parse a visual branching flow than, say, an Ink document, but more unnaturally and awkwardly than an actual horizontal storylet flow.
As you’ll have realised by now, there’s no natural way to display a lot of these formats in linear documents, so there will always need to be tradeoffs.
The below represents the above INK script converted into a word document type format. I have a little ‘key’ at the start of the whole file explaining the meaning of * and my multi-coloured text.
I would generally only write a first draft in such a format if it was in aid of a prototype or if toolsets had not yet been determined; it’s great as a way of breaking writer’s block also, just switching to a different type of representation (the same goes for all these formats, no-one is going to force you to stick to one, as ever the king = whatever helps you write better and more effectively).
Final Draft
…and the twist reveal of this article about what game scripts look like? Exactly like film scripts in more than a few cases…
Some studios use Final Draft for their game scripts, which further unhelpfully perpetuates the notion of there being some screenplay-like standard format for games. This suits linear cinematic cutscene narrative well as… well, there’s often little to distinguish linear cutscenes from films in the first place, so there’s no problem putting into that format.
The problem DOES emerge when you start trying to express conditional logic and branching in such a format, or, god forbid, start trying to force non-cutscene content like ambient dialogue and barks into the same file.
(The above is not from a real game script, as, as I’ve insulted the form so much, I can hardly now put a specific example on blast. That’s just a rough ‘final draft’ preview image I found on their blog relating to films.)
I’ve heard of multiple studios across AAA inventing all kinds of conversion tools and internal practices to cope with this, and, just, well… It sometimes emerges when you have screenwriters hired from outside of games who insist upon using a cinematic format, and AAA studios themselves often having cinematic ambitions (and an internalised self-hatred of gaming norms)… you can see how this can lead to weird, weird contortions of a tool never designed for this purpose being forced in strange and expensive directions.
Again, if this style was just left for linear cinematics or minimal minimal branching, I can’t see an issue, but I cannot see an argument for an expensive cinematic proprietary writing tool being used in this medium unless the point is just to make it ‘look’ like a film script. Which - considering scripts have never had the same kind of value or distribution in games vs those other media - makes sense, but feels like it emerges from a lack of creative and formal confidence.
And that’s a wrap
There are probably other format ‘types’ out there that I’ve left out of this article and indeed others that I may not even know about yet - though I’d wager the majority are either horizontal/vertical storylets; Ink-style script meant for parsing; database-like spreadsheets; or abstractions in documents from MS Word all the way to Final Draft.
Until next time! (And if you are interested in making your own interactive fiction prototype and developing all these skills, I am currently recruiting for the final few places for my November workshop - suitable for talented beginners + experienced pros alike)