Hello, I'm a new member and I'm interested in producing and designing video games, especially adventure games. Since I'm not even a native english speaker, I know I have much to learn from these forums. As a first time visitor, I have two suggestions. So here it goes. 1. I was wondering if a "Games Writing" forum would be suitable for writingforums.org. As I heard, game writing is a little different from novels writing, and games do need good writers these days. Since this looks like a really nice writing community, I think game writers could find a lot of useful help in here. Here is the IGDA writers site and forum, if anywone is interested: <links removed> 2. The second suggestion is a "Help" forum. I've seen your forums have a reviews section for short stories and that looks very helpful. But I was thinking about something like "Help me write my story!" or "Help with exprimation and grammar in my story!". Including both payed and free services. For example, I need some to help me with the dialogs in a free adventure game, I'm preparing to release. The dialog texts need to be checked by one with experience in writing, who would do some rephrasing and other literar corrections. Here is my post at IGDA writing forums, but not much success in finding help so far. <link removed> Do you have a thread here where I can ask for such help? Would be anyone here willing to help me with it? Thanks! Alex
I personally don't think that having "Games Writing" would be all that suited to this particular forum, to be honest. There are plenty of "Gaming" forums out there with that exact thing, all you have to do is a bit of searching around the internet to find them. As for help...there are plenty of areas in the forum where posts like this can be places. Like the "general writing" forum. I am fairly certain that is the name for it... I don't think adding more forums to this forum would benefit the rest of the forum at all. There are already quite a large number of forums and I think that it is best we concentrate on those areas, rather than adding new ones. If you require help with grammar, etc. all you have to do is post up a small excerpt (500 words max I would suggest) and ask someone if they would mind helping you out with it, or explaining the correct grammar usage to you. Also we have a forum for SPAG issues already. It's a good place to start. THe review rooms are there for people to offer you feedback on your writing and generally, they offer as much as they possibly can. As for offerring a fee for services, I'm not sure that is allowed here actually, you would have to read the rules of the forum or speak with the Admin about it at least. I don't think we need such an area on the forum though.
It's not terribly different from writing either a screenplay or fiction, depending on how you go about the planning. It'd probably be a good idea to post in either one depending on how your work is arranged. If you're looking for help, post it in one of the Review Room forums, and someone should eventually help you out.
There are quite a few forums dedicated to game development as it is. I would say that scene scripting in game scenario transitions best fall under Short Story fiction in the appropriate genre. Why not under Screenplays? Because Screenplays lean heavily on dialogue rather than on exposition, and game vignettes tend to rely more on filling in the story background leading into the next play segment. The character dialogue within play segments is pretty unique to gaming, but is also very specialized. Good general writing skills do apply, but trying to review that scripting outside of a game context seems somewhat futile to me. I agree with Torana, that it's probably not a very useful focus for this site. I do believe that game writers will benefit from exercising general writing skills, though, and I would encourage them to write short stories and short story scenes if they wish to build upon the writing skills they would employ in game creation. Moderation note: I am removing the links to the external site from the initial post, lest the post be treated as advertising spam.
