Developers Must Communicate with Their Writers, Says Rhianna Pratchett

Game development is, despite popular belief, a very tough job filled with difficult challenges and tough periods. This is especially true when the team is a big one, made up of various people, all working without a concrete goal in mind, which is reflected more severely on those responsible for the game story, the writers, who see their role drastically diminished by other members of the team.

But it seems that experienced game writer Rhianna Pratchett wants to change some of these things and she recently talked about it with Develop magazine. The writer, who worked on popular games such as Overlord or Mirror's Edge, said that development teams needed to learn how to integrate the writers of the story in order for them to really understand the game and customize their writing according to it. This would all lead up to a solid game, in which the story intertwined seamlessly with the actual gameplay and levels found in it.

“There’s a tendency to put writers in boxes – I think far more developers are aware of the need for writers but they don’t really know how to integrate them into the team,” said Pratchett. “It’s like, ‘Orders go in the box, and words come out of it. The writer will not be integrated into the team for fear of affecting their work.’ That’s really how it happens – I’ve been on projects where I haven’t seen the game! So it’s a good thing that they’re realizing that you need professionals to do it – but they don’t really know how to use them, how to integrate them with a team.”

The Writers Guild of Great Britain Award-winning writer then said that communication between all the members of the development team was the key to a successful game, as both level designers as well as writers and producers needed to have the same goal in order to deliver a solid experience and to really make players love their end product. 

Codemasters recently announced that Rhianna Pratchett would continue her collaboration with their Triumph Studio, for the future Overlord titles developed by the team. Let's hope that more and more game developers will use their writers accordingly and that titles with a great story will be released in the future.