Script Lock

@scriptlock.bsky.social

196 Followers 94 Following

A podcast about storytelling in video games, and everything in between. Hosted by @maxfolkman.bsky.social & @nickfolkman.bsky.social https://scriptlock.simplecast.com/

Courtney Woods: If it just feels like, the developer is speaking through the character to the player, that, that is another situation where it’s not landing in a way that you want it to. And I feel like you get one plot and one emotional thing per conversation. More than that, and it starts to weigh things down. It can be done, but hopefully they, like Ari says, come together. Cinematics are generally better for bigger emotional moments and key plot points, but we have some really great tools for exposition on the sticks and we really try to utilize those. Not just our walk and talks and write and talks, but even our mini games are great for these moments because there's some interactivity for the player. But we still have their attention. We’re still guiding them. They're not completely off the rails. But my biggest thing is I just don't want the player to feel like they have to check their phone.

Ari Martinez: (contd) We have a lot of UI stuff that tells us if a section of the script is actually rigged or not. Is it hooked up to something inside of the engine? It allows us to also do a lot of like animation passes on the emotions, like the expressions that our characters have at any given point if they're talking. It allows us to put in what we call “look at” like, where is the character looking at the beginning of the line, halfway through the line, at the end of the line. It's just so well integrated, not just for the writing of it, but everything that goes around it, right? Like putting assigning voices to our characters, keeping track of, you know, pieces of like the list of content that any designer is putting into the game. It kind of works like a mix of a perforce and a final draft and it is connected to perforce. Like you can test your changes live. Like I can make any change in this script. And then build the build, go into the game, and I can test the changes

Yuri Lowenthal and Nhi Do talk on the podcast Script Lock about having a close relationship with a studio, and how those relationships play out when that's not the case

Actors Yuri Lowenthal and Nhi Do discuss imposter syndrome on the podcast Script Lock

Ros Dachtler: I think that when you make a game and you spend a real long time making it, and you put a lot of content into it that needs to be explained, and then you focus test it, and you ask yourself, why do people not know what's going on?

It can be easy to jump to over-tutorializing, I think. I think it can be a little too easy to add in four hours of even if your game is not an extremely linear experience, of extremely linear handholding so that you can explain absolutely everything to the players, including the ones who did not pay attention when they were focused testing and ruin your game. It's really sad, but I think it's easy to do because it's the easy answer to why are people not getting this as opposed to saying, well, is there a way that we could change the information flow in the game?
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Karrie Shao on Script Lock podcast: In an escape room it's great, you build this physical experience and then you get to watch people playtest them and it's like pulling teeth right because you're standing in the room with them, trying not to look pointedly at the thing that they're missing, but wanting them to figure it out. I think it was just this really basic idea of the clues you think you lay in a game are usually not obvious enough. The room I designed was a Harry Potter-themed room, and we'd have all these things scattered around because it was a little non-linear room and you could solve four main puzzles at the same time for a group of up to 10 people.

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Laura: “And then also it's I don't know. It's like you can't have all your hopes riding on the thing you're working on today. You know, you have to you have to like optimistically think of yourself as a person who will have a long artistic career, particularly in games where like nobody can really stop you from making a game.

You can literally make a game and throw it out there into the soup of all those other games because that's what everyone else is doing and that's fine, you know. And you can't think of yourself as like someone who needs to be expressing their soul completely in every product. You have to just like think of yourself as someone who is lucky enough that you'll have many hacks at this, many tries.”

From Script Lock: Brendon Chung & Laura Michet, May 27, 2025

Laura: A lot of our game's whole vibe is just like being situated in a preposterous situation, you know, like having crazy stuff happening around you, or stuff you didn't expect happening around you. So it made it... All these desires kind of like came together at once, that like the game would be funny, the game would have funny interactions.

The genre is a genre that produces interactions. We have examples of other games in the same genre, like Hitman, that produce many funny interactions between things. So they all kind of emerge together as sort of like a whole idea.

And we did benefit narratively from the genre being inherently zany.
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Vincent Perea: “I would say that probably from just a craft standpoint, I would say simplify. I think that developers could really simplify everything from visual design to game design. I think you have to make thousands of decisions to make any game of any length, and a thousand simple decisions, and really elegant choices make a really interesting complex game, but like a thousand complex decisions and clever ideas makes it a huge mess, and I think it's hard because day in, day out, you want to put all your creativity into something, and so you want to make it the most interesting thing possible, but there's a lot of grace in just making something very simple and straightforward, and I think it contributes to the whole.

The number one problem I see in a lot of games that I've worked on is that they're just too big, they're nine course meals when they should be an entree, and a really great entree is incredibly memorable, but a nine course meal sometimes you just get too full.”

Lis Moberly on Script Lock: When it comes to feedback and collaboration, I think a lot about process and how people get so stuck on process or role titles or I own this and you own that. And instead of thinking about what the needs are for the project and what your coworkers actually need out of you.

And so oftentimes in the process, we get so caught up in that, that we don't, we have a hard time reevaluating if that process is actually working for us at the right moments. It can be dangerous to say that because you don't want to just like flip tables at any moment. But there are moments like at certain milestones or critical junctures and within a studio where you can look at something and say, “hey, like, is this serving us? Is this not serving us? Like, how can we amend this?” And I feel like that can happen on a micro level too. I just think sometimes we get so busy, we don't stop and think about that.

Game developer Jolie Menzel discusses the current business reality of investing in games

A conversation between game developers Adam Dolin and Jolie Menzel about how leads balance doing IC work.