Person wants to tell a story/narrative

???

I'll never understand this shit. If you want to write a story, write a book. Why do people who want to write stories or paint a narrative make video games?

Video gayms is a young medium so the standards are low. Shit that wouldn't get published as a book even for free gets hailed as masterpiece of writing if it's in a video game.

Yeah.

Also, it's a medium that got too big too fast for its own good.

Pic related, no one is going to give you money before you have finished writing your book and unless it's really good it's not going to make you much.
With vidya you can get payed before doing any work and start selling it before it's finished.

Video games are way bigger than books now

Your story has a far bigger chance of getting noticed as a video game

Because they literally think making games is easy and that it's an easier entry to success

It really is just like all those LOL comics
Leftists and sjw who got into art universities and other useless shit, do those because it easier to read, and spread than a blog post
That gives them more attention while also retards praise them for for muh art skills

Excellent question OP. As an indie dev, I have no fucking idea.

Although it might be that the barriers to entry for video game development are actually lower than becoming a professional writer, as amazing as that sounds.

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Any random jackass can get their game on steam with greenlight or just start a parteon, publishers have actual human beings who will tell you your shit is shit and they don't want a part of it.

It's also way cheaper to go to a normal collage than an art collage.

This is true.

Also, I believe there is more to stories than just words words and words on a piece of paper. Vidya in my opinion provides ways to make your stories more engaging

Let's say your story involves fighting and battles, for example. Instead of having to read descriptions of said fights/battles, I think I'd enjoy actually taking part in them much more

And a for indie game you only need to write a few 3deep paragraphs and spread that over the 2 hours gaming "experience", while even short stories need to be of some length if you want to get paid for them.

Because vidya is the new book user.
You know how Walmart is full of poorly written dime a dozen smutty literally who novels? That's vidya now.

It's extremely difficult to make any money at all even if you have a good piece of writing, most journals consider publishing something a no-name author has made and paying them nothing as doing the author a solid. That's how oversaturated the market is at the moment.

Because writing books is hard. So is making games, but half the work is done for you, here is what you see, here is what the character is experiencing, this is what this faggot looks like. Plenty of games have had good stories, but they didn't forget the video game part.

Both of those are literally true though.

Telling a story through a videogame is actually significantly easier than through a book, because you can imply a thousand words with a little bit of animation. People like to shit on simple/stylized graphics because they're low effort, but they actually HELP certain kinds of games because they leave more room for imagination.

The way I see it, games in regards to story are more like "movie lite" than "book deluxe".

Certain kinds of stories benefit from not being told purely by words. Using Shadow of the Colossus as a notable example, part of the game's story is watching Wander slowly lose himself as he keeps taking down one colossus after another for the sake of his dead beloved (something that a first-time player to the game may not even catch until near the end). Put into pure text, the story would give itself away halfway through and it wouldn't be as enjoyable or notable as it is as a video game.

At the risk of being dismissed as a pretentious faggot, Braid also did this sort of "storytelling-via-mechanics" thing decently: the story of a man who wished he could desperately turn back time and undo his most grievous mistakes (chasing away his waifu? building an atomic bomb? both??) is told as a game about time-travel and all the muckery you can pull off with it. Again, trying to translate this game purely into text wouldn't have the same impact.

Shortest path to revenue. Regardless of what you think about Steam, it's a cheap market to enter and if you have a pitch that's even remotely attention-grabbing you will make money. Whether you made a good game or not.

There you go.

not seeing the problem

Honestly speaking if someone has a story-thing and they want to create it in a visual way, I would much rather see them create a movie or a cartoon of sorts. At least there, the creators artistic """"""""Talents""""""" can somehow either help fix the shit wrong there, or just get added to the pile. Rather than being praised by morons for being the cartoon advertised as a game of the month.

This tbh.


I think OP was talking about walking sims and visual novel-likes, you know stuff that wouldn't lose any value if they were books.

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Greenlight is prime for people properly ripping the low standards to shreds on JewTube, but Jim "My Wife Sends Men Hurling" Sterling locked that down and most who attempt anything get accused of living in his shadow by one of the thousands of idiots paying his Patreon

Telling a story in a game is incredibly easy, that's why every indie chucklefuck wants to do it.
Now, telling a GOOD story in an engaging way that treats the player like an intelligent being is much harder. Utilizing gameplay as a story telling tool, landmarks and other visual details, leaving specific things a mystery; all of this takes a lot of effort, which most devs won't bother with. It's easier to pop floating text in telling you what you should feel. Most talentless hacks use this shortcut, I'm sure it happens in other media too.

I want to tell stories and build worlds through vidya as well, but I'd be dumb not to do it through gameplay, or at the very least try to.

The problem with narrative-driven indie games is that they deliberately omit most factors of a story. They try to bypass all of the elements that traditional storytelling usually employs, like characters, setting, and dialogue. They succeed in making their points, but aren't aware that there's no impact because they were being carried by the plot-equivalent of a tupperware container.

If you want the audience to "get it", then sure, go ahead and make a game like OP's pic. But if you want me to genuinely care and fully understand the implications of "it", then you're going to have to put in a little more effort. I actually care about the events and characters in games like DeusEx because there's a buildup of momentum through clever writing and abundance of smaller "unimportant" details.

I can only assume that indie developers aim for the minimalistic way of storytelling because 1) it's less effort and 2) because it tricks the audience into associating it with abstract art. In other words, 2deep4u.

Because it's the new medium of the block, if you look at the Vidya Gayems Awards, you'll see how pathetic the standards are set and how corrupt these hipster faggots are.

A book about a gay asian faggot whenever he lies it rains, won a Hugo award, this isn't about standards being low, this is just us living in an age of mediocrity and low expectations, and you're correct about the medium being young, wouldn't want any competition from better and more competent writers.

The bar is so low for video game writing that shit that would barely fly in a YA novel is called DEEP, THOUGHT-PROVOKING, and HEARTBREAKING

Videogames have become like prog music, even if you are a talentless hack just pretend there's some deep meaning bhind it and you are an instant misunderstood genius

Don't self-publishers like Lulu exist?

You DO realize that we live in a world where Twilight and Fifty Shades of Grey won worldwide accolades and made their authors billionaires, right?

Compared to Twilight, the plot of Undertale is motherfucking Crime and Punishment.

pshht i know better than everybody because im such a literary expert!: the thread.

Faggot,m get over the fact that videogames are perfect story tellers thanks to the interactivity. all them interactive movies if you want, but it's a medium that provides more than any other if done right. Shit like Limbo feels more like a picture book, but you have stuff like Bastion that narrates the story while you play, fitting it with things you do or you don't.


Yeah, you're part of the cancer if you do. Just let it die.


Although, considering that it takes less time to tell a bad video game from a bad book, you might have a point.

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Name a game with a good story better than Tetris and any derivations of Tetris.

Only autists can play tetrris more than a few minutes without losing interest. Same with Pong.

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those two books are literally just the female equivalent of porn, they don't have to have good writing to sell.

Games can get away with being "deep" but short, to make a "deep" book or movie it'd have to be longer than 30 minutes. When hipsters make books, you get shit like some really progressive children's books.

I've noticed that we talk about good writing and bad writing, but nobody ever gives examples. We need a scale from bad to good.

because really shitty writing is accepted in games
and bad writing is considered good especially if it's indie

Please don't invite the unemployed english major /lit/erati to shit up the board

Ignoring all the tabletop RPG vidya from the 90s and RPGs in general where the story is the more important. I would say that an example of good writing in vidya is one that lets the player find it if they're interested enough. Despite the meme that Halo = shit, I think it's a good example of how to write good video games, specially 1-3 and ODST.

Instead of telling the player who they are, what they're doing and where they're going next, the game leaves it up to the player to pay attention or just to follow the game to the next waypoint. I'm not going to break it down further on how Bungie made this work and be an autistic Halo fanboy, but just watch the opening sequence of Halo 1 as if you had no idea what the series was about.

It references enough people, factions, places, and alluded to events in the 1st 2 minutes of the game that could very well be the storyline for another video game which later became true and then they just as suddenly cut away without spoonfeeding the PC every little facet of what's going on. The player knows is that there's some ayys coming and he's got to shoot them, how, why and where are only alluded to later, even then not fully explained in one sitting.

This video is also pretty good at showing how two different companies approached story design, and explaining how Halo became garbage.

Says the autist who likes it when pixels and code are given a personality.

I LOVE UNDERTALE. IT IS THE MOST DEEP GAME EVER. I CRIED DURING ASGORE BEING CUCKED. ASRIEL IS A VERY CUTTING EDGE AND RELATABLE CHARACTER, HE HAS THE SADDEST STORY EVER

Undertale was only ok
I never expected much from the first trailer

???

Fucking kill yourself. We've had this discussion forty-thousand times. Indie devs tend to be fags who suck at writing and are rejected from books and movies, so they make games instead.

Books require a lot of writing, especially if you're going full novel length. And there's a lot of fight with publication and marketing for books if you want to get your stuff to get known.
Indie shit requires less than a third of the writing necessary for novels, it doesn't have to be as solid or complete, and advertising for indie shit is a whole lot easier.

Not gonna lie user, I haven't been rejected from either, but I'm confident I'll be superior at writing books/movies than videogames.

the Holla Forums stereotype at having shit luck with videogames doesn't fuck around.