Author Archive

Bruno Dumont’s Top Musical Numbers

  1. The funeral song in Li’l Quinquin. Impossible to ever imagine anything shaking it from the top spot.
  2. I probably shouldn’t number these because they’re all so great. And also I’m undoubtedly forgetting some. So let’s not say this is a comprehensive list, but maybe just a reason to watch some Bruno Dumont movies.
  3. The young Jeanne’s songs in Jeannette: The Childhood of Joanne of Arc
  4. The reprise of the funeral song in Li’l Quinquin, at the actual concert.
  5. Is there a musical number in Coincoin and the Extra Humans?
  6. The whole reason I’m writing this thing: Just watched Hadewijch, after years of having it my queue, and there are two fantastic musical numbers in it: An outdoor show with accordion, sax, electric bass and guitar, that just builds and builds, and reminded me how these are some of my favorite things in Dumont’s movies; and a performance in a church that is beautiful and charming.
  7. I haven’t seen all Bruno Dumont’s films yet, so there might be other musical numbers that I haven’t encountered. Doesn’t seem likely there’d be one in Hors Satan. I own Joan of Arc but haven’t watched it yet…have seen no indication that there’s any musical spectacle in there.
  8. Does Slack Bay end with a big musical number? That final scene on the beach…maybe?
  9. I’m glad I didn’t make this a Top Ten.

A Christmas Beat-Em-Up

I am unseriously looking for partners to help create my A Christmas Carol meets Dark Souls beat-em-up. It’s pretty simple:

Jacob Marley’s ghost shows up and gives Scrooge his challenge. Jacob then stands aside, but remains to sell potions and items throughout the night.

As the three ghosts appear, Scrooge fights his way through each set of memories, gaining precious stats along the way. At the end of each memory, must beat the spirit who presides over that stage—past, present, and future. (In the simplest version, he just fights the three spirits, ignoring the memories.)

The final boss is Tiny Tim, who can summon such minions as Bob Cratchit and Jesus.

There’s a secret level boss after you successfully beat Tim: Goose Boy. If you defeat him, you get his Christmas goose.

Or maybe I’ll just use this in a story, making games is a pain in the ass.

Twitter’s Loss Is My Blog’s Gain

Just now I was wondering, what if there was an episode of Spongebob where it turned out that Patrick’s full name was Patrick “Starfish” O’Brian, and it turns out he had written all the Aubrey/Maturin novels. I was also thinking about a movie called A MAN CALLED SCROOGE, where the ghosts appear to Scrooge like a series of escalating boss fights and he beats the shit out them one at a time and finally goes toe to toe with Tiny Tim.
He beats the crap out of the post bossfight Goose Boy for good measure.
Bad Robot is right down the street, I should drop in. For them, I think I would package it as A VERY CLOVERFIELD CHRISTMAS.

On Games: Yakuza!

Yakuza!

 

While videogames are capable of great subtlety and originality, there is no question that the popular face of the industry looks extremely familiar: science fiction games tend to rely on Star Wars, Bladerunner, and Aliens; fantasy titles owe much to the elf-and-orc-heavy lore of Tolkien and even more to Dungeons & Dragons; and horror tends to channel Night of the Living Dead or 28 Days Later. While games with subtle themes are a worthy subject, I’m going to shelve that topic in favor of one more crazy action genre, albeit one not nearly as popular in the West: the Yakuza.

Specifically, I’m going to rush not long- but whirl-windedly through the Yakuza series created in 2005 by Ryu Ga Gotoko Studio, a Sega division whose catalog is currently represented in North America by seven key Yakuza titles and several spin-offs. Many of the entries in this series have never been translated or released outside Japan, although the truly dedicated Yakuza fans will have found ways to play them regardless.

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On Games: Sekiro and A Plague Tale

Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, FromSoftware, 2019

A Plague Tale: Innocence, Asobo Studio, 2019

 

I’m getting old, so I should probably go to bed at a reasonable hour, but I know I will be up late tonight (and tomorrow night, and the night after that, most likely) trying to kill an enormous poo-flinging ape that guards a cave in a beautiful mountain pool overshadowed by a hundred-foot-long reclining Bodhisattva. Eventually, I promise myself, I will kill the ape. But even then, I will not sleep. Other and worse things await me beyond this lovely pool. I may never get to bed on time again.

The source of my sleeplessness, this seemingly endless series of almost unbeatable beings, is the game Sekiro: Shadows Die TwiceSekiro’s designers, FromSoftware, have already robbed me of thousands of hours of sleep by way of their previous famously difficult games, Demons SoulsDark Souls (One through Three), and Bloodborne. The major difference between Sekiro and the earlier titles is that in this one I am (much to my dismay) alone. FromSoftware’s previous games all made grudging acknowledgment of their difficulty and allowed strangers to assist one another, anonymously, through online play. But Sekiro’s lead character is named Wolf…and he is a lone Wolf. A stealthy shinobi, an assassin caught up in a blur of shifting allegiances, divine heirs, baffling bloodlines…none of which even remotely matter.

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On Games: Nioh

Nioh, Team Ninja, 2017

Nioh 2, Team Ninja, 2020

 

I am no Elizabethan scholar, nor trained in any form of combat, but I’ve always felt certain I could beat a seventy-year-old royal astrologer in a fight.

John Dee, Queen Elizabeth’s advisor, the original 007, mathematician and cartographer, author of many occult volumes and investigations, has somehow managed to get himself blown up twenty feet tall, all of it covered with eyeballs. He’s powerful. He’s fast. And I, supposedly a trained samurai (although Irish born and raised), am really no match for him.

Dee, instead of frittering away his remaining years in a library like any respectable philosopher, has instead filled the Tower of London with alchemical devices powered by a rare “spirit stone” found only in Japan. Dee’s assistant, the diabolical Edward Kelley, spent his last few years in Japan, subverting shoguns and samurai in order to…to do what exactly? Create a brisk trade in these stones, delivering them to England? Import the monsters out of Japanese folklore known as yokai?

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Game Writing FAQ

The following is a letter I prepared at Valve after years of getting requests for the same advice and information. I have not updated it much since leaving the company, but I still get these questions and I still send this out. I’m posting it here so that I can now just reply with a link instead of having to dig up the old document. It is now mainly of historical interest.

Thanks for writing to ask me for career or college advice.   Sorry for the boilerplate response, but I now receive these requests so frequently that I thought I’d try to put the answers in one place.  Forgive me if I don’t have time to answer your questions individually.

Q: What type of education did you receive before breaking into the industry?

A: I have “several years” of college education, mainly focused on English literature.  The only work-related skill I specifically gained in school was a typing class I took in junior high.  I don’t have a programming background but I occasionally try to educate myself in that regard.  When I was in college, programming meant typing your code into punch-cards and giving them to someone in the university computer center to go off and compile, only to discover that your second card had a bug in it.  I didn’t see a PC until I was out of college.  I used a typewriter, not a word processor.  None of the games in the arcades resembled anything I thought I could contribute to.  This should give you hope, however:  Continue to develop your skills in areas you love, and opportunities to put your talents to work will emerge. The thing you’re meant to do might not exist yet.  I am not a good source for educational advice.  We always advise that people who want to work in the industry are better served by creating games in a practical setting:  Work with a team to create a mod, and you will see if you have what it takes to actually see a project through from vision to completion.  We often hire mod creators who are brought to our attention by our fans, when they tell us:  “This mod is great, you should hire these people!”  It can be harder to find a way to contribute as a writer, but not impossible; and the fact that there are fewer positions for writers in the mod community is unfortunately a reflection of how few jobs there are for writers in the industry in general.  There are far more positions for programmers, artists and animators than there are positions for writers.

Q: How did you get into the industry?

A: I developed my writing independent of the game industry–I wrote short stories and novels from childhood on, and finally began to have some professional success late in my teens.  I was not really aware of the industry until I played Myst, which is also when I realized that I wanted to make games.  At that point I began playing, analyzing, and reviewing games, which led to an assignment for Wired Magazine:  Write an article about id Software, which was then making Quake.  This led to a variety of personal and professional contacts.  At around the same time, I was given the opportunity to meet and work with Haruhiko Shono and his colleagues at Synergy studios in Tokyo, to develop a novel based on the game Gadget.  I began putting out the word that I was interested in working with game developers to use games for storytelling, and this led to a few doors opening.  One of those doors opened into Valve.

Q: Was this your first career choice?

A: Games did not exist when I was considering careers.  I wanted to be a fulltime freelance professional writer, and that was what I pursued.  However, I discovered that I personally could not make a living at this, let alone support a family, so I worked a number of other jobs from bookstore clerk to legal secretary.  I did not get into the game industry until 1997, when I was 37.  That was when games had finally reached a point where I felt I had something to offer.  They were sufficiently mature as a medium to seem interesting to me.

Q: How does writing games differ from writing novels?

A: Working on games is a team activity.  Very few games are made by a solitary individual.  Yet most novels are written this way.  To be a successful game writer, you have to enjoy working with a team, just wanting to create the best possible game, recognizing the good ideas no matter who might have suggested them in the first place.  If you like being the sole creator, then stick with prose, where you can have complete control over your vision.

Q: How often do you work?

A: I work a regular week, Monday through Friday, and when we’re close to shipping, the days get longer and bleed over into the weekends.   My schedule is very reasonable at this point, but early on it was quite intense.  Seven day work weeks were not unusual.  I often went home to see my family in the evenings, then went back to work till late at night.  I was younger then!

Q: What is the salary for an average worker in your field?

A: I’m not able to comment on the field in general, or on specifics regarding Valve.  The International Game Developers Association has done regular surveys on this topic, which you might find through their publication, Gamasutra.

Q: What specifically do you do?

A: My job varies from frequent brainstorming sessions about things like overall world creation, character histories, engineering a plot that meshes neatly with gameplay, writing dialog, and helping direct voice recording sessions.  Some of our other writers have taken an active role in creating entertaining marketing and website material, or they have gotten into more direct roles in managing and promoting our games.  At times I have done level design to demonstrate story ideas, but with so many excellent visual designers here, I don’t do as much of that these days.  On an average day, I talk to a lot of people about what we’re working on, figure out if there are any tasks that need my immediate support, attend meetings that sometimes involve long-term planning, sometimes short-term goals, and I write a lot of emails.

Q: Do you work among many other people?

A: I typically work closely with a handful of people who are part of a larger team, but I do move around from project to project as needed.

Q: What types of equipment do you utilize?

A: Writing is technology-agnostic.  You can write in a Moleskine if you like.  At some point you need to make sure your work can be emailed and printed, given to designers and actors to read.  But it’s the least equipment-intensive job in the game industry.

Q: What does a script for a game look like?

A: Script format varies not only from company to company but from project to project and from writer to writer.  Some writers use off-the-shelf screenplay software to create something that looks like a standard screenplay; this is helpful to actors when they are reading lines in a studio, as the scripts are free of confusing game-specific text. However, internally, scripts must typically be marked up with a great deal of information, indicating the names of sound files, providing instructions to programmers and level designers. At this point, a lot of writers end up working in something like a spreadsheet or creating a custom database that lets them output the script in a variety of different ways for different users. Actors get something that looks like a screenplay; level designers get something more detailed. In every case, the writer needs to accompany the script and be there to make sure it is implemented correctly in the game, and to take advantage of unexpected opportunities for storytelling that might arise when the game is under construction.

Q: What is your least favorite part of your job?

A: Spending a lot of time and energy developing characters and story ideas, only to learn that the game has changed so drastically (sometimes overnight) that none of it is useful.

Q: What is your favorite part of your job?

A: The frequent sense of discovery, of pioneering, and the fact that creativity and innovation are highly valued here.  Working with smart creative surprising people is the thing that makes it fun to come into the office every day.  For me it is a dream job.

Q: Who are three people that you respect in this field that I could also get advice from?

A: I can’t give out names or contact information.

Q: Can you give me some advice about getting a creative writing job for video games?

A: Develop your writing for its own sake.  Even if the game industry were to dry up and disappear next year, following your passion for writing and telling a story will help you find a way forward.

I hope this is helpful to you.

Marc Laidlaw

Underneath the Oversea: Now on Kindle

I don’t have much to add to that title. Underneath the Oversea, the Gorlen Vizenfirthe novel I wrote in 2018, is now in print as a Kindle ebook. You can see the cover and other details right here on the home page of my website.

Regular publishers wouldn’t nibble, let alone bite, so I hired a wonderful artist, Sylvia Ritter, to create a cover for me and I’m publishing it myself. I’m not a book designer so I’m not going to throw together a shoddy print-on-demand edition at this point. Perhaps there will be a high quality physical edition at some point. An audiobook, based on the freely available YouTube files, is in the works but there’s a lot more engineering to do and I’m not able to get to it just yet.

I wrote this under strange circumstances, after the floods of April 2018 destroyed the roads into our neighborhood on the north shore of Kauai and made it very difficult to go in or out for 14 months. I had started the novel just before the so-called “rain bomb” that sealed us in, and I was grateful to have it as a project to keep me going in those months of isolation. I thought of it as a life-line I’d thrown to myself, although I’m still not sure where I ended up once I’d climbed to the top of the rope. I am very happy with the book, but after a lifetime as a reader and writer of fantasy old and new, I feel very out of sync with the market. This one comes from a childhood love of Jack Vance and The Wizard of Oz, along with a much more recent love of Hayao Miyazaki and the films of Ghibli Studios.

If you take a chance on the novel, I hope you enjoy it, and tell your friends and/or leave an Amazon review. And if you have AmazonUnlimited, it’s free to read!