Writing Team - November 15th Update
Hello and welcome to the Writing Team Developer Blog. My name is Andrew Dean and I am the Lead Writer for Eden Falling...
Unfortunately, I do not have a lot of visual aids for this blog as the majority of our work is text based.
To start it's best to explain how we plan our work.
Everything we do is broken into 3 categories:
- Concept:
With this category we cover everything from lore, society, and character development to simple product naming, such as beer and item names.
We use a multi-phase system to develop our lore, we break it into Pre-Fall and AfterFall. The pre-fall being before the impact of the asteroid, and AfterFall being after the impact. We make our in-game history as detailed as possible and as expansive as possible, this is then used to help develop the game world and to answer the questions of why things are the way that they are.
The idea that we've used is to build a world from the bottom up until the impact. Then we destroy that world and tear it down. This gives us continuity and allows us to create realistic and scientific reasoning behind everything that occurs in the game. One of the most important aspects to us is immersion, and in order to fully immerse a player in our game world the lore and life within the world has to be flawless. We work to achieve this by thoroughly studying science, culture, and history to understand and theorize the direction that our world might take.
- Content:
Content is the simplest of our work. It's the design of Contracts (quests), voice over scripts, in-game descriptions, help tips, etc... all the straight forward items that can be written by utilizing what we created in concept. This is the category that you as a player will see the most, this is what is presented in the game, the meat and bones of it, if you will.
- Marketing:
This category is based around all the Marketing material that we are asked to develop, from items such as this Developer Journal to website content, and the Survivors Journals. Most of this work is drawn from the previous two categories. What is designed in concept and content can then be used for marketing purposes.
What's New?:
Currently we've been finalizing any remaining voice over scripts that need to be written for our sound team. We've also been expanding our questing system with faction based quests. The Survivors Journal is a weekly project that we write and is posted on the website that contains tidbits of lore and information from the game but from an individual point of view.
Some of the previous work that the team has finished was the conception of the lore for the major cities around the USA. What happened to New York? What is it like now? We expanded this to several major cities and came up with a detailed history for each.
The most difficult part of what we do is keeping that balance of realism and creativity. It's very easy to just write something that is either extremely bland or so fantastic that it is difficult to believe. A trick we use to solve this problem is to write "seeds".
"Seeds" are tidbits of concept that we write with just enough information that when it is experienced by the player it allows you to imagine your own ending to it. It gives enough information for you to fill in the gaps yourself. An example of this would be describing a creature in the Survivor Journals. From the character point of view of Colonel Reid you get information based on his contact and experience with this creature. It gives you his perception of its appearance, and behavior. In some cases he even theorizes how it came to be. But none of that information is fact based, it is the experience of one man. So when you, the player, comes across a similar creature in the game, you can see similarities between your experience and the many differences, but it gives you the freedom to make your own decision on what it actually is and perhaps where it came from.
Hopefully this wasn't all too boring! Thank you for taking the time to read this, and we will get back to our regularly scheduled programming.
If you ever have any questions about how we do things, why we do things, or just want to talk about certain lore aspects of the game, please visit us on our forums at: https://forums.razoredgegames.com/
About Razor Edge Games
Razor Edge Games is an independent gaming studio. We are a diverse collective of more than 140 passionate artists and gamers from around the globe with diverse backgrounds and experience levels, based in Gilbert, Arizona. With a passion for tabletop gaming and traditional RPGs in its DNA, our studio is hard at work on its debut game, Eden Falling, with several more exciting projects planned for future.
Our mission is to create replayable, content-driven experiences fueled by innovation. REG independence means not having to adhere to flashy trends, stuffy board members, and corporate Yes-Men who rehash the same tiring games over and over. We are risk-takers with the vision to take the gaming experience far beyond traditional industry norms. We aim to give the gamer full control of their own experience.
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