On Technical Writing: From the Desk of the Bureau #1
Hard to fathom that it’s been over 20 months of work on The Bureau of Fantastical and Arcane Affairs for me. So it feels about high time to do some personal reflection on game writing, game design, and creative direction.
That being said, I’m going to start a series of posts lovingly named: From the Desk of the Bureau: Lessons in Helming My First Game. Expect releases of this, however often I am inclined to write them, or, if people don’t find it insightful, then possibly this is the only one I’ll write. Who knows. Also, as a quick sidenote, this is meant to be more a log of my own experiences. This is not me telling you how to do things, only my experience and what I’ve found insightful.
I’ve learned such a large amount in this time that it’s hard to know where to begin. But this is a blog post and therefore, I am legally obligated to provide some sort of insights, so let's start with Technical Writing.
Art from the game!
WIP of the games enviorment
How important is Tech Writing?
I learned the hard way (pretty quickly) how important technical writing is. A writer’s job, especially on an indie project, is to write dialogue and quests and flavor text and quest logs etc. That, I already knew. But it is also to create Art prompts, technical and design documentation, and more. And that isn’t exclusively to writers but also applies to leads, programmers, directors, artists, basically everyone. It’s a huge time suck when you’re doing it, but doing this correctly up front is going to save you hours of time down the road.
Technical writing is often also thought to be exclusively used in GDDs or other bibles/documentation pieces, but I think it’s a skill you have to use every day (especially when you work remotely). In one-off messages, small notes to team members, scheduling meetings, etc. The better you get at this skill, the more effective your collaboration is going to be.
Things I practice to be good at Tech Writing:
More art from the game!
A few things that I’ve been doing my best to adopt, and I think they’re working:
- Keeping it short, but not too short. Just enough tone so the reader knows I’m not mad, sad, or whatever.
- For feedback, I’ve found the “I like / I wish / What if” framework to be my favorite.
- If the conversation is dragging on or someone keeps DMing me with confusion (almost always confusion I created) I just bite the bullet and schedule a call. (Yeah, I also hate a bunch of calls, but sometimes you gotta pick the lesser evil)
- I always assume people need more info than I think they need in GDDs. Thoroughness goes a long way. Even with that, there is always stuff that slips through the cracks. It's just how it goes.
- Weirdly, I’ve found that sometimes good tech writing isn’t actually writing but drawing. My drawing resembles that of a 4th grader, but often they communicate what three paragraphs couldn’t. Yada yada picture 1000 words etc, and so on.
- Bonus: I try to shorten my meetings by making a quick agenda before them if I remember to. It takes like 15 minutes and almost always saves more than that.
