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Bodkin (03.08.2018 12:04): In case of big games like The Witcher, work on the script took several years. The first stage (let’s say: the first year) is dedicated to preparing all the materials, including designing the plot, writing it all down, and preparing documentation for use by other teams working on the game. This is the stage when we look for inspiration, describe the world’s elements, try to imagine how it’ll look, what motives we’ll employ, what characters will appear. At that stage, we do a lot of brainstorming with one another, we close ourselves in a dark place for hours or go for a long walk to discuss themes and ideas. All of this is necessary to balance out our levels of knowledge and to fix detailed sets and to have a uniform view of the story we’re working on.
When everything is agreed, when we know the whole story from A to Z, we have to fill blank spots in the script in literary ways. Then we divide our tasks – each of us takes a piece of the script we like best. And then we work individually – although we do still brainstorm, exchange ideas, or ask one another for support in more difficult parts. We often ask each other: ‘Hey, and what does Geralt do in your part when this and that happens? Because I have to refer to it’. So, some sort of common awareness is formed through the very individual contributions by each scriptwriter.
During the actual production of the game – when we start to implement gathering together all the graphic elements and the code from the programmers – we still work on the plot, but we have less time for looking for inspiration. It’s more methodical – from 9 till 5 indeed, we write dialogues, play the game, modify it. Sometimes the modifications are quite dramatic – it can be a bit like putting out a fire. Suppose we delete some quest and there’s a gap – if the script has a tree structure, it can turn out we’ve removed a major branch from which smaller branches grow. Then one has to think how to handle it and make it all fine.
So you not only write but actually play working versions of the script?
Oh, yes – we play them all the time. When the game’s still full of grey cuboids representing particular structures, and characters are just schematic grey silhouettes, we play those versions all the time to see whether our ideas really work in practice. That stage is like a game sketch, where dialogues aren’t recorded yet, only written down as a working version because we’re continuously introducing changes.
https://culture.pl/en/article/creating-t ... ha-of-cd-projekt-red