LOCKEZ'S PROFILE

author=Addit
Thank god that Star Wars is nothing but fiction, right? (Or did all of that stuff ACTUALLY happen a long time ago and George Lucas was secretly Jar Jar Binks but in disguise? Oh boy.)

Well, the story of how Julius Caesar overthrew the Roman senate isn't quite the same as Palpatine overthrew the Republic senate, but they're both about equally analogous to the current situation with the coronavirus. The government gave Julius Caesar a bunch of power because he was the best at what they needed to get done, and then afterwards they asked him to give it up, and he didn't.

In this analogy, the twitter fuckheads demanding that people be locked in their houses by the government are the senate, and the various world governments are all Julius Palpatine.

I didn't think this would be how society ended, but here we are, one week after all unnecessary human contact was permanently banned, and governments worldwide made public assembly illegal forever.

Take scriptwriting classes at a university, or find scriptwriting advice online on places like Youtube. There are plenty of web-based classes and seminars you can take, and of course an endless number of textbooks about scriptwriting you can read. Overly Sarcastic Productions is a popular giver of writing advice on Youtube. A game script is much closer to a movie/TV script than it is to a book.

There are still a lot of differences, especially with regards to how information is presented, because the audience is the player and you need to make sure they focus on what to do next. As an obvious example, if you have a scene talking about a location, the player is pretty likely to misunderstand the scene as the game directing them to go to that location. Or if you spend too much time telling the player about information that isn't relevant to the gameplay, they'll get frustrated and bored. So, in video games, you have to be more careful about what kind of information you give and especially about when you give it, and time your story beats based on gameplay relevance rather than just aiming for good pacing.

But still, it's closer than books. You don't narrate actions and scenery and thoughts in a video game. It's just a script, there's nothing but dialogue.

Game companies hire scriptwriters from TV shows and movies. They don't typically hire scriptwriters who only do video games. I've been told by professional game writers that lot of game producers have this mentality, when hiring a writer, of, "Well, he seems fine, but if he were really good, he would be working in Hollywood."

Oh, is that what you were asking? The game is completed. Any future updates will just be bug fixes.

I don't know if I really have general tricks, so much as I try to base my recurring boss mechanics off of things that players can do. If there are multiple player builds that have a 2-round-long invincibility or near-invincibility buff, then I'll make bosses that telegraph that they're about to use a giant deadly attack. If there are multiple player builds that can drain an enemy's MP, I'll make sure that's useful in a variety of circumstances, such as having a boss summon adds that can be made harmless by draining their MP. If there are several builds that have ways to ignore an enemy's defense, I'll have some bosses which temporarily give themselves very high defense.

Though, unless the boss is supposed to be a nearly impossible superboss, I always make sure these mechanics can be handled multiple ways. The giant deadly attack can might happen on round 30 of the fight, so you can also win by doing very high damage per round. The adds can probably also be neutralized with status ailments, or with regular area attacks if the player is strong enough. Players that rely on buffs and using MP-heavy spells can use the very high defense phase to rebuff themselves and refill their own MP instead of attacking, or can inflict debuffs on the boss.

I tend to design player abilities with these kinds of boss mechanics in mind, too. I try to make abilities in different builds fill the same role in boss fights without actually working exactly the same way. A buff that grants yourself immunity to a single status ailment, a tank ability that absorbs and inverts status ailments cast on allies, and a buff that automatically heals all status ailments on you every three rounds, all solve the same problem in different ways. That problem being that you can't cast Esuna if your healer is paralyzed. Some boss fights will benefit more from one of those abilities than the others, but they all work.

In longer games, I try to make each mechanic like that appear in enough boss fights that all of the different options the player can pick from will have situations where they're optimal. In shorter games, I try not to have 60 different builds, and also try to make even normal battles feel like bosses.